This is a peek of what I do for a living,
Not a very good blog person or writer so please be nice! Haha
I'm an equipment operator at a coal mine. We deal in Metallurgical Coal used in the steel making process. It's so awesome working with some of the biggest machines in the world!
-This is a picture of one of our old pits that was mined out approx 15 years ago. As you can maybe tell, the environment is a huge part of what we do.
-This is what makes us money, dark shiny metallurgical coal, used in the coking process of making steel. We do dig up some lower quality Thermal Coal, used for power generation or other processes. Thermal coal is still black, but its really dull and earthy looking.
- And this is how we dig it up! Coal is buried under the rock layers. So in order to get to it, we need to move all that rock thats on top. The shovel in this picture can load 240 tons of rock onto a haul truck in just over a minute. Thats a lot of rock in a 12 hour work shift. Its a non stop operation, I'm not even sure I blink my eyes when I'm running one of these shovels. 300 truck loads in a day is an average day for us.
-And this is the truck that moves the rock from the shovel to the dumping area. Hauls about 240 tonnes of rock, can travel up to about 70km/h! A person is just about half the height of the tire!
- This is one of the types of shovels we have, it runs on electricity. There's a thick electric cable that is plugged into the back of it. This is my favourite piece of equipment that I run.
I'm also apart of the rescue team where I work, usually includes Fire fighting, medical work, High angle Rescues, vehicle incidents, Hazmat. So proud to be apart of this and proud to work along side some awesome rescuers, our team won 2nd place in alberta this year in a competition. An took home 5th in western canada!
Hope you all learnt something and hope you enjoyed this, I love what I do and its supported me and my family for years and Im hoping many years more!
