Shovel

Below is a photo sequence of a shovel loading a haulage truck. Various safety precautions are enacted to assure the safety of workers in the mine. The haulage truck honks it's horn twice before it goes forward and three times before it backs up. The shovel honks it's horn before it dumps a load. According to the tour guide the loose crude ore was from the largest blast ever set at IOCC (on 2 June 2005).
1. The haulage truck backs into the proper position.		2. The shovel loads the bucket.
3. The shovel lifts the bucket.		4. The bucket is almost in position.
5. The bucket is in position.		6. The load is dumped from the bottom of the bucket.


A relief worker arrives for noon break. To the left of the shovel is a street-legal, half-ton, Chevy pick-up truck. The photo to the right is a close up of the workers from the photo to the left. Within the next few years, all lunch shacks for haulage truck operators will be made on platforms so drivers can pull up to the lunch shack, walk across a cat walk, eat their lunch and return to the truck without having to climb up and down stairs or ladders. That sounds like a good safety measure when steps are ice and snow covered in winter.

		When a shovel gets stuck - it has to try to dig its own way out. To get an idea of the size of this shovel, note how many stairs are necessary to get to the cab. The orange shovel is an older model; it takes six bucket loads to fill a 240 tonne haulage truck; the newer yellow shovel only requires four bucket loads. All shovels used at IOCC are ran by cable; none are operated by hydraulics.
Click on Photos for larger view.
		Ever wonder what size extension cord will run a big, electric shovel? Here's a photo. Can you imagine two times a week winding the cable while the shovel slowly moves out of the mine pit into a safe area while a blast is detonated?
		Here's the cable that moves the bucket on the shovel.
		A view from inside the cab of a shovel.


Two more views depicting the mammoth size of these machines.

Unseasonably warm weather caused a collapse of the overhang above this shovel. The resulting rockslide hit back end of the shovel causing approximately $2,500,000 damage. Luckily nobody was hurt (unless you count the shovel). The photos show both the outside and inside damage.