I don't know much about this incident, other than that it happened at the Yallourn coal mine about four years ago. Looking at the photos, it looks like water from the creek piped through behind the wall, causing it to fail.
Sunday, March 3, 2013
Yallourn Wall Collapse
I don't know much about this incident, other than that it happened at the Yallourn coal mine about four years ago. Looking at the photos, it looks like water from the creek piped through behind the wall, causing it to fail.
3 comments:
Google the incident and you will find a report on it.
Basically all the mines in that area rely on the dewatering of the ground water in order to provide stability to the batters. The mass of the water in the batter is what is trying to be avoided. Left unchecked the weight of everything wants to fill the void removed by the mining. Even to the point the floor can heave up.
In this case respomsibilities to managing the stability lapsed an naure caught up with them. Its classic faults all round and warning signes were ignored and the pictures would benefit from a bit of scale to give perspective to the scale of the slip.
A similar incident happened at nearby Morwell last year that closed the freeway for six months or so. Same thing in that the reponsibility for managing the ground water lapsed and the batters between the Morwell town and Morwell Mine became unstable. Things started to move (cracks in the road etc) but it was caught in time before something spectacular happened. The drainaged and ground water extraction was reinstated and all is well there again.
Yallourne have had a better incident than the one pictured last year when the river broke through a man-made causway and flooded the mine and severely disrupted coal supply. Anyone got pictures of that? Have not seen any investigation material for that one yet.
Plenty of photos and vision around. Google Yallourn river diversion failure.
This was caused by the mine coming too close to the Latrobe River. Water from the river flowed into cracks/joints in the coal and the result is what you see. Nothing to do with groundwater.
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