Post by smshogun on Nov 6, 2016 21:50:59 GMT -5
It was pit closure time and being an old pit we all had our little scams, this was suddenly quashed by the manager of all people when he said "no scams, if we are going to scam we will all do it" and we did, as parts of the pit were closed anything of value was dragged out and bought out of the pit, and the manager even had the accountant run a second set of accounts for the scam.
Cables were a prime target and every cable was coiled up by the electricians and bound ready for lifting into a tub by the gangers and it was these cables which caused the problem, the problem being how do we strip them quickly and easily, the pummels were gunmetal and easily removed and into the blacksmiths shop for smelting into ingots ready for sale, but stripping large cables by hand proved more tricky as it was labour intensive and very slow, so somebody suggested cutting them into lengths and burning them and extracting their cores. They were fed into the outdoor blacksmiths shears which had new curved blades fitted, the pummel was cut off and the cable fed through the machine and cut into lengths and it was these which caused the problems.
Being wintertime meant it got dark early so these lengths of cable were taken to a remote part of the colliery site and stacked into a wigwam, pallets were chain sawed into chunks and placed in the middle of the wigwam and the afternoon shift set fire to them, nothing happened to the cables and the fire simply burned out and someone suggested more heat was needed so time for plan B, plan B was to put more wood under the pile and soak it with diesel to get the fire burning quicker and hotter and it worked, it did burn the cables and we were on nights and as we arrived for our shift we saw a massive fire giving off lots of thick, black smoke which was going into the air as far as we could see. We were at the bottom of a hill and the local town was at the top and less than 2 miles away and a changing wind engulfed it in smoke, but it got worse as we were to find out the next morning when the fire had burned out.
On my way home I had the local news on and it was all over the news about a mysterious black acrid smoke which had engulfed the local town which was bad enough, but it has also risen to such a height due to the heat of the fire that it had affected local planes dropping to a suitable height to land at a nearby airport and they all had to be diverted to a different flight approach as it was so thick that the pilots couldn't see the airport and its landing lights.
Countless to say, it never happened again and I was tasked with building a cable stripping machine to strip the cables to stop any more burning of cables, who would have thought smoke could rise so high so as to affect aircraft descending on a flight approach.