Post by rob52 on Jul 12, 2016 23:07:42 GMT -5
A Tale of the South Bulli Mine.....
The Russell Vale Mine Site is bounded by Corrimal to its south, the residential areas of Russell Vale to its north and the Princess Highway to its east, since 1887 many different mining techniques have used. It has access to the Bulli, Wongawilli and Balgownie seams.
NRE No.1 UG Expansion Plan
The NRE No.1 underground mining expansion involved longwall mining
- the Wonga East coal seam nine (9) longwall blocks
- the Wonga West coal seam with seven (7) longwall blocks.
Interesting to consider Cataract Dam on elgoog spaM
elgoog spaM of Cataract Dam
Then
Russelvale March 2016 PAC 2nd Review Report
In particular Pg 2 (.pdf Pg10) + Pg17 (.pdf Pg25) + Pg40 (.pdf Pg48)
V’s
South32 Appin Mine
Pg52 of South32 Appin Mine (was BHP Billiton)
***************
***************
BHPB became South32 gets out of South Bulli (Russelvale U/G Mine)
Russelvale Mine Closure
Mine closure to cost jobs
Posted 26 Aug 2004, 10:23am
***************
***************
Recent Employment at Russelvale Mine….the good, the bad and the ugly….
Risks and riches - Russelvale U/G
Author: Greg Bearup
Published 16/04/2011
Publication: Sydney Morning Herald
Section: Good Weekend
Page: 14
Gujarat NRE Russell Vale 150-metre face, 260 employed
It's dark, dirty and dangerous work, but there are plenty of people willing to do it, attracted by the cash and the camaraderie. Greg Bearup explores the men-only world of underground coalmining.
From high on the illawarra escarpment we look down to a dozen hungry coal ships, lurking in wait off the coast in the calm before dawn. A big man in shorts and thongs steps from a new four-wheel-drive in the colliery car park, carrying a battered steel lunch box and sucking deeply on a cigarette as he trudges up the stairs to the demountable change sheds. Must taste good, someone says. "Yeah," he replies, glancing neither here nor there, "but not half as f...in' good as the one this arvo."
They've been mining coal in these pits on this hill above Russell Vale, a northern Wollongong suburb, since the 1860s, yet the mine buildings have an air of impermanence, as though it could all end tomorrow. The office block that houses the "shiny arses" - the managers, the engineers, the geologists and accountants - looks as though it was designed by the company draftsman in 1968 and hasn't had a cent spent on it since. The lino luckily has lasted well, unlike the venetian blinds. The owners, Indian steel makers, have spent $400 million developing the mine since they bought it in late 2004 and have plans to spend another $300 million, but you see none of this on the surface. The view, however, is spectacular - north up the coast to the rugged rises behind the now-boutique suburbs of Thirroul and Austinmer, out over the Pacific and south to the lights of the 'Gong. "It's all views and barbecues for us," jokes one of the shiny arses.
Our smoking friend won't see much of this today. He and his mates disappear into a donga, where their filthy fluoro overalls are hanging - they take their work gear home for washing "sometimes once a week". The room is heated to 30 degrees to dry out yesterday's sweat. The men emerge in their overalls already perspiring and make their way across to the muster room in their steel-capped gumboots, collecting their self-rescuers and miner's lamps along the way. A man with a clipboard "How-ya-goin'?"s each of them, as he ticks a list of names for the 6.30am start.
The briefing is military-like and taken seriously as a manager stands at a lectern outlining the mining plans and safety incidents that have occurred on previous shifts. The miners, big, gruff-looking men, sit with their arms folded as they are drilled about safety: "Mr Fitzpatrick, no-go zones, what are they?" The mine operates three shifts, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and outside the workers from the night shift have emerged with blackened faces in specialised mine vehicles, SMVs, that look like long-caged Hummers. After washing their boots, they head for the showers.
With the briefing over, it's time to go to work. As a dozen men climb into each of the waiting SMVs there's light-hearted banter between them - nuts stirring and taking the piss are part of the job. And then we descend into the earth's crust. Ahead, the lights of the vehicle illuminate signs: "fire hydrant", "pot hole", "air line". Behind us, as the entrance disappears, there's a black nothing.
Down, down, down we go, two kilometres in and 400 metres beneath the Great Dividing Range. It's a subterranean city and along side roads we see the ghostly glow of men in reflective overalls drifting along in the distance. The vehicle stops and after the men have tumbled out, there is silence except for the squelching of rubber boots in mud. Water drips from the ceiling, and underfoot it's like walking along a muddy creek bed. Light comes only from the narrow beams dancing about on the miners' heads.
The crib room, where the miners eat their lunch and take their half-hour break, is simply an area of the mine where there are a couple of long, well-worn wooden tables. There are no overhead lights, and the men eat and read by the light of their lamps. "If you want a slash, just walk over there," one of the men tells me. "If you want the other, I'd suggest holding on - the bog's not a pretty sight." It's a hard-man's world. Of the 260 people who work underground at this mine, only one is a woman, an electrician. "There's a big push to get sheilas underground," one of the old-time miners tells me. He claims that women aren't physically up to the work and their presence erodes the bonds between men. "It's been a disaster wherever it's been tried," he insists. "I mean, for starters, they'd stop ya bringin' ya c... mags down."
We walk down a tunnel to where a giant 70-tonne machine, a continuous miner, is gouging a five-metre-wide by three-metre-high road into a coal seam that has lain undisturbed for hundreds of millions of years - the miners are developing a system of tunnels so that, later in the year, an even larger machine, a $90-million longwall miner, will be brought in to shave coal across a massive 150-metre face. The longwall will start at the end of these tunnels and, as it works its way back, there will be a controlled collapse of the roof behind it. By then, the miners will be extracting three million tonnes a year, more than $600 million worth of coal at current prices. Now the mine produces about 800,000 tonnes.
It's loud and sweaty. While some men operate the miner, another drives a loader that shuttles the coal to a conveyor belt. Others stand around in the mud, moving cables and lifting the water lines that cool the miner and mist the coal dust. The deputies carry devices to monitor the air for explosive gases. As each section is mined, steel cables are drilled into the sandstone layer above and chemically cemented to secure the ceiling, like a suspension bridge. There are no props any more. Steel mesh is bolted to the walls and ceilings to prevent large rock falls, and the exposed coal is sprayed with a chalky substance called stone dust that, in the event of a cave-in or an explosion, will hopefully neutralise the coal dust in the air and prevent an even greater explosion. This is a gaseous mine, just like the seam at Pike River, in New Zealand's South Island, that exploded last November and killed 29 men.
It seems odd in the internet age that this is how men would earn a living, ankle-deep in mud and in darkness almost half a kilometre beneath the surface in a dangerous environment. To some, this is a picture of hell, but not the men I talk to. "Mate, it's the best job I've ever had," says 41-year-old Dave Rosta above the sound of the machinery. He's been underground for seven years after working as a barman at Wollongong University. "There's a line a coupla miles long to get a job down here. I love it. The camaraderie. The pay. The challenge. You're doin' somethin' different every day. I'll retire here if I can." It is, according to Rosta and many of his colleagues, a working man's paradise. In the two-speed economy, these guys are hurtling down the freeway in a V8, pedal to the metal - Acca Dacca pumping - without a radar in sight.
Miner matt wagenvoord is a beefy man with tattoos "that don't mean nothin'" rambling down his arms and legs and a couple of plaited rat tails dangling from the back of his head. Despite his appearance, he's a shy, gentle man who doesn't drink much and spends his weekends with his girlfriend, Kristy, walking their Staffordshire terriers, which they breed, or going for long drives in one or other of his Holdens. He lives with Kristy, a debt collector, and keeps a couple of pythons and lizards as pets in glass cabinets in a spare room. Wagenvoord is living the dream. In his carport he carefully folds back a cloth cover and proudly shows me his $30,000 VZ SS Holden ute - black as coal, of course - which he's almost paid off. He owns the black $50,000 HSV Clubsport sedan parked out the front. Within two years, he tells me, he will completely own his four-bedroom brick house, on a hill behind Shellharbour, and will soon be looking around for investment properties. Wagenvoord is 23. As we sit down to talk in his living room, dominated by a wall-sized flat-screen TV, he tells me he realises how fortunate he's been to be presented with this opportunity. His first job, at 16, was as an apprentice tiler on $25,000, so he's not going to waste these years. "I don't want to be sloggin' me guts out when I'm 50 or 60," he says. "That's why I'm doin' plenty of overtime and settin' meself up." With overtime and some weekend work, Wagenvoord earns $125,000 a year - about the same as a state school principal with 30 years' experience in charge of 700 students. Wagenvoord hopes to top $130,000 this year. It's enormous money for a labouring job that requires no qualifications to get a start.
And he enjoys the work. The other blokes, he says, have been supportive and he's learning to drive the mining machine. "It's like a family, all the guys look out for each other," he says. "Every day I look forward to goin' to work. Every day is different. It's the best place I've ever worked in." The coal he mines is premium-quality coking coal, an essential ingredient in the steel-making process, but also a major cause of greenhouse gases when it is burnt. I ask if this is some- thing that worries him. "I don't think about it," he says. "It is not that I don't care, it is just that I don't believe we are doing any damage. You know what the Greens are like, always tryin' to blame someone ..." And, despite the deaths at Pike River last year, he also doesn't consider what he does particularly dangerous. "We get safety drummed into us daily - everything has a procedure," he says. "It's pretty safe, if you follow the procedures."
His boss, Jimmy Cram, the day-shift undermanager, is not so sanguine. The safety of his men occupies much of his waking life and sometimes jolts him from his sleep at night. A detailed map of the Pike River mine is pinned to a wall of his renovated beach-side house - 1700 metres from the pit head and 500 metres from the water - and he followed the drama "religiously" as it unfolded, even though he knew the men were probably all dead after the initial explosion. While the men drive into the mine, he walks the two kilometres down the road and along all the various side alleys, checking everything on the way, always wondering what could go wrong. "I am responsible for everyone who goes underground on that shift," he says. "It weighs on ya." Cram, 45, was the undermanager in charge of a shift when there was a serious accident just a couple of years ago. The 70-tonne mining machine was being moved and one of the miners, for some reason, walked between it and the mine wall. The machine shifted direction slightly and crushed him against the wall, "like a little twig". "It was f...in' horrible," Cram tells me, fighting back his emotions. "I thought he was dead. He had blood coming out of every orifice in his head - his eyes, his nose, his mouth, his ears. His head had swelled to twice the size it normally was. He had an open-book fracture of the pelvis. We cut his clothes off him and he was just black, black like you wouldn't believe. He was driftin' in and out of consciousness. As we were loading him onto the SMV, he had a moment of clarity and he grabbed me by the shirt and said, 'Tell me kids I love 'em.'" The man somehow survived. After months of rehabilitation he came back to work for a time on light duties, but has since taken a job elsewhere. Cram says it deeply affected everyone who was working that day, him included. "It f...ed me over for a while," he says. "Talking about it now is a kind of therapy."
There have been no deaths in this mine since the current owners, Gujarat NRE, took over in late 2004 but, like every coalmine as old as this, it has a grim history.
In July 1991, three men were working at the coalface when their continuous miner sliced into a small geological fault line that, for millions of years, had contained a pocket of gas under enormous pressure. When punctured, it expelled gas and debris into the mine shaft at a tremendous velocity in what is known as an outburst. The driver, Craig Broughton, 28, was killed instantly by flying rocks and gas. Leigh Pearce, 24, who was working further back, may have survived but looked around to see his mate Bobby Coltman, 43, struggling to get out. He ran back to help, and while he managed to drag him around a corner, both men then collapsed and died of carbon dioxide poisoning. Pearce was awarded a post-humous medal for his bravery. Then, in December 2000, a group of six men were installing roof props near some broken machinery when the mine roof collapsed. Greg Aspinall, 42, was crushed to death by an 800- kilogram rock; another miner was in a coma for a month. "In the old days," one of the managers told me, "it was just accepted that it was a dangerous job and people would die." But not now. Jimmy Cram says that each of these incidents led to greater and improved safety procedures. They now drill advance core holes through the coal to look for the gas pockets like those that caused the 1991 outburst. They have a new system to secure the ceiling following the collapse in 2000. They strictly enforce no-go zones around moving machinery to stop men being crushed. "The potential is still the same," Cram says. "But we try to minimise the risk." Like many of the nsw south coast miners, Jimmy Cram has coal in his blood. His great-great-grandfather James Cram began working in the pits of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the UK at the age of 10, and migrated to the Illawarra in the 1850s to work as a miner here. His grandfather Henry Cram worked in the same mine as Jimmy from the age of 14 until he retired at 60. Jimmy is the fifth generation of his family to work the seams of the Illawarra.
Cram won't reveal what he's paid, but others say it would be in the vicinity of $180,000, plus share options. The deputies below him get $150,000, while the miners and tradesmen are paid about $90,000 annually for a basic day shift and $125,000 for night shift; they can earn more with overtime. These rates are $30,000 to $40,000 less than miners working in remote locations. According to the employment agency Hays, iron-ore miners and tradesmen in Western Australia's Pilbara region earn between $110,000 and $150,000. The equi-valent of a deputy would earn $165,000 to $180,000, and someone with Cram's qualifications and experience could earn up to $230,000. "I've thought about chasin' the big dollars," Cram tells me as we sit drinking coffee from his fancy coffee machine. "But why would ya? There's more to life than money. I can come home and take me kids down to the beach each afternoon for a swim." He is aware that he is already very well paid. His wife is a university lecturer with a PhD in science, and she earns "almost half what I do". One of his old mates from school is a postie. "I never mention money; it would only embarrass him." The fact that the men all live in the area and go home each day means they don't face the same hazards of serious alcoholism, drugs and isolation from their families that fly-in, fly-out miners in remote areas encounter. The drinking culture, of everyone going to the pub each afternoon, died out long ago - a victim of the roadside breathalyser.
There is a technical aspect to mining coal underground that Cram enjoys - he dismisses open-cut coal operations and iron-ore miners as "just quarriers". "Underground mining is different. It's like a big Meccano set down there with real machines. Every day we are building somethin', tryin' to solve a problem. It's never dull. Every day presents a new challenge." Cram is fascinated, too, by the geology, by the fact that the coal has been brewing underground for millions of years. "It makes me feel insignificant," he explains. "It probably makes me believe in a creator. "Does it blow me out that we are rippin' the guts out of the planet? It does a bit. I am a little bit of a greenie at heart. "The wants of the people on earth are exponential and we are feeding that and we need steel for just about everything. I used to think coal mining would die, but coal will be here for another 100 years because it is cheap and easy to get." He's a thoughtful man who has sometimes wrestled with what he does. "But things are out of my control, and if I was to think about it too much I would turn into a protester and tie meself to ships and nuts, and it would ruin me life. So I am a bit of a pawn in the system of the world, I suppose. I just need to do the best for me and me family.” He reckons if all goes well, he'll be retired by the time he's 53 - in less than 10 years.
Coal was first discovered in australia by a rabble of escaped convicts who stumbled upon it at Coal River (now Newcastle) in 1791. The seams of the Illawarra were found just a few years later. A ship, the Sydney Cove, was wrecked on an island off Tasmania, and a small crew was dispatched in a longboat to sail to Port Jackson. The longboat was also wrecked, on the coast of Victoria, and most of the crew perished on the walk north. On May 14, 1797, the five men still alive found coal near a beach and made a large fire to keep warm. It is believed the men were on a beach just north of Russell Vale. For 200 years, the pits of the Hunter and Illawarra provided Australia with most of its coal, but the giant open-cut mines of Queensland have since overtaken them. According to Peter Colley, an economist with the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, the number of people employed by the coal industry is in the "mid-30,000s". Just prior to the global financial crisis, it provided Australia with $55 billion in export earnings - an astronomical figure considering it hovered around $13 billion for most of the 1990s. Mining and energy commodities now account for "between five and 10 per cent" of the entire economy, but represent more than half our export earnings. They help to balance out all those imports we consume.
The profits being reaped by the coal companies are so vast that it concerns even the union that represents the workers who benefit from it. "The profits are just phenomenal," says Colley. "If you look at all the big companies, it is quite common for them to have half their revenue as gross profit. That's why the mining tax was a good idea." He says that on average the mining companies earn $1 million for each person they employ each year. Unlike the minerals sector of the west, which is now largely non-union and based on individual contracts, coal is still heavily unionised, and nowhere more so than in the Illawarra mines. It was here that some of the great industrial battles of the last century were fought. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of men died early due to black lung disease - "getting dusted", they called it - and they struggled for safer conditions and better pay. It was also the scene of Australia's worst industrial accident, when 96 men and boys were killed in an explosion at Mount Kembla in 1902. It was also here, in 1944, that the federal Labor government took over a coalmine to end a strike and sent the young miners off to war.
The grandsons of these men are now working the mines. Unionism isn't compulsory "but we've got more than 95 per cent of them", a union representative for Illawarra tells me. The same man says that they've found the owner of Gujarat NRE "reasonably" good to deal with and that they've "gone pretty easy on him" during this initial development phase of the mine. The pay rates at this mine are significantly lower than at other operations in the area. The union will be tightening the screws, he says, when the longwall miner comes into production and the tonnages increase. The owner of Gujarat NRE is a flamboyant Indian industrialist, Arun Jagatramka. Early last decade, he began searching the world for a reliable source of coking coal to fire his steel mills. He had been sourcing it from China but, with the economic boom gathering pace, supplies from there were becoming erratic and expensive. His search brought him to Wollongong, where he bought the mine at Russell Vale in 2004 "for a song", I was told. The previous owners had retrenched staff and the mine was on a "care and maintenance" basis - the reason given for the retrenchments was that the mine was no longer productive. Previous companies had taken the easy coal, from the seams close to the surface, and getting more required massive investment. Jagatramka also bought another mine at the village of Wongawilli, south of Wollongong. What he was after has been slowly baking since before the time of the dinosaurs. In the Permian Period, between 300 million and 250 million years ago, the area around what is now Sydney, up to Newcastle, down past Wollongong and out through the Blue Mountains to Lithgow, was one vast swamp, says Adrian Hutton, a retired geologist from the University of Wollongong.
The plants in this swamp - sedges, ferns and small scrubby plants - died and were compacted into peat and then buried beneath the earth and the process of coalification began - from peat, to brown coal, steaming coal and eventually coking coal. It was over a relatively short period of time, maybe 10 million years, "20 at a stretch", that the seven coal seams of the Sydney basin were formed, Hutton tells me. Some are only 30 centimetres thick and unmineable, but others, like the Wongawilli seam that Jimmy Cram and Matt Wagenvoord mine at Russell Vale, are 10 metres high in places, with three metres of usable coal. These seven coal seams sit beneath the earth's surface for hundreds of kilometres surrounding Sydney, like stacked plates, with levels of sandstone between them. The reserves of coal still unmined, says Hutton, "are massive".
And the coal in the Wongawilli seam is the most sought-after of all - coking coal. Without it there is no steel. After being mined, coking coal is cooked to remove impurities, such as bitumen and water. What's left is coke, which burns at a very high temperature and is used both as a heating agent and a minor ingredient, to be mixed with molten iron ore to form steel.
Arun Jagatramka's timing was perfect. When his accountants were figuring out if the operation was viable, the contract price for coking coal was less than $100 a tonne. By 2008, the price had spiked to more than $300 a tonne, and while it slipped after the global financial crisis, it has since risen above $200 and is continuing to climb. Despite the massive investment costs needed to develop the two mines, Gujarat NRE recently reported a $29-million half-yearly profit - it has done this shipping only a fraction of the tonnages that are to come.
In 2009, the Illawarra Mercury newspaper named Jagatramka its citizen of the year. He brought 580 jobs to the region, he bought a $5-million mansion in a swank part of the city, and he saved the city's basketball team, the Hawks, from bankruptcy.
The shift is almost over and we are driven to the surface in an SMV by Troy Parsons, a 45-year-old miner who has been in the game for six years. As the vehicle chugs up the hill, Parsons tells me about his life. For 19 years, he worked for Brambles, driving trucks and at a water-treatment plant the company owned. He was earning about $30,000 less than he does now, "working out in the sun". He says he spends just about every weekend on the Shoalhaven River, with his wife and three girls - twins aged 11 and a 10-year-old - and a bunch of mates, skiing and fishing. "We lead pretty much a water-based lifestyle," he says as the lights of the opening come into view.
After going down to pick up another load of men, Parsons emerges again and climbs from the vehicle, washes his boots and heads off to the showers. His mates rib him because his face is not as black as usual because he's been showing us around. "I'll be gettin' all the dirty jobs tomorrow," he jokes. Later, I meet him at his home, a large four-bedroom house (where his speedboat is parked in the garage) not far from the pit. We sit beside his lap pool. "The future's looking good," he says. "They seem to be putting a lot of money in and it seems it'll keep us all in jobs for a long time." He, too, sees himself as a bit of a greenie, "to a certain point". "I love me fishin' and I love the ocean and I don't like to see pollution. But we haven't got any options out there at the moment. At the end of the day, you need us for everything, from the cables in your television to your car body to just about every piece of equipment that you use. "We do all right, us miners," he adds. "We do all right. It's an honest way to make a living." He's another willing pawn in a game that's making Australia immensely rich. There's a line a coupla miles long to get a job down here. I love it. The camaraderie. the pay. The challenge. You're doin' somethin' different every day. I'll retire here if I can.it's like a big Meccano set down there with real machines. every day we are building somethin', tryin' to solve a problem. it's never dull. Every day presents a new challenge.The future's looking good. They seem to be putting a lot of money in and it seems it'll keep us all in jobs for a long time.
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Fast forward a bit.....
Locals were vocal
152 Gone…
30 Gone
…Wollongong Coal's workforce has more than halved in the past two years.
Posted 20 May 2015, 7:41am
NSW water supplier warned about coal mine near catchment
Monday, February 15, 2016 18:45:00
80 Gone
Updated 1 Sep 2015, 12:53pm
Wollongong Coal, formerly Gujarat NRE Coking Coal, - 80 mining jobs lost as Wollongong's Russell Vale coal mine goes into care and maintenance
“The company's other mine at Wongawilli south west of Wollongong remains in care and maintenance after longwall mining equipment became buried during a roof collapse in March 2014.”
Wollongong Coal expansion 'totally stranded' by planning report
Posted 7 Apr 2016, 7:42am
"It's not a mine. There is no coal coming out of this mine," he said.
"The mine was closed six months ago,”
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Pit Mouse says….
”All right who stole the n……F Shearer and me AFC”
*************
Full History
Rob
The Russell Vale Mine Site is bounded by Corrimal to its south, the residential areas of Russell Vale to its north and the Princess Highway to its east, since 1887 many different mining techniques have used. It has access to the Bulli, Wongawilli and Balgownie seams.
NRE No.1 UG Expansion Plan
The NRE No.1 underground mining expansion involved longwall mining
- the Wonga East coal seam nine (9) longwall blocks
- the Wonga West coal seam with seven (7) longwall blocks.
Interesting to consider Cataract Dam on elgoog spaM
elgoog spaM of Cataract Dam
Then
Russelvale March 2016 PAC 2nd Review Report
In particular Pg 2 (.pdf Pg10) + Pg17 (.pdf Pg25) + Pg40 (.pdf Pg48)
V’s
South32 Appin Mine
Pg52 of South32 Appin Mine (was BHP Billiton)
***************
***************
BHPB became South32 gets out of South Bulli (Russelvale U/G Mine)
Russelvale Mine Closure
Mine closure to cost jobs
Posted 26 Aug 2004, 10:23am
***************
***************
Recent Employment at Russelvale Mine….the good, the bad and the ugly….
Risks and riches - Russelvale U/G
Author: Greg Bearup
Published 16/04/2011
Publication: Sydney Morning Herald
Section: Good Weekend
Page: 14
Gujarat NRE Russell Vale 150-metre face, 260 employed
It's dark, dirty and dangerous work, but there are plenty of people willing to do it, attracted by the cash and the camaraderie. Greg Bearup explores the men-only world of underground coalmining.
From high on the illawarra escarpment we look down to a dozen hungry coal ships, lurking in wait off the coast in the calm before dawn. A big man in shorts and thongs steps from a new four-wheel-drive in the colliery car park, carrying a battered steel lunch box and sucking deeply on a cigarette as he trudges up the stairs to the demountable change sheds. Must taste good, someone says. "Yeah," he replies, glancing neither here nor there, "but not half as f...in' good as the one this arvo."
They've been mining coal in these pits on this hill above Russell Vale, a northern Wollongong suburb, since the 1860s, yet the mine buildings have an air of impermanence, as though it could all end tomorrow. The office block that houses the "shiny arses" - the managers, the engineers, the geologists and accountants - looks as though it was designed by the company draftsman in 1968 and hasn't had a cent spent on it since. The lino luckily has lasted well, unlike the venetian blinds. The owners, Indian steel makers, have spent $400 million developing the mine since they bought it in late 2004 and have plans to spend another $300 million, but you see none of this on the surface. The view, however, is spectacular - north up the coast to the rugged rises behind the now-boutique suburbs of Thirroul and Austinmer, out over the Pacific and south to the lights of the 'Gong. "It's all views and barbecues for us," jokes one of the shiny arses.
Our smoking friend won't see much of this today. He and his mates disappear into a donga, where their filthy fluoro overalls are hanging - they take their work gear home for washing "sometimes once a week". The room is heated to 30 degrees to dry out yesterday's sweat. The men emerge in their overalls already perspiring and make their way across to the muster room in their steel-capped gumboots, collecting their self-rescuers and miner's lamps along the way. A man with a clipboard "How-ya-goin'?"s each of them, as he ticks a list of names for the 6.30am start.
The briefing is military-like and taken seriously as a manager stands at a lectern outlining the mining plans and safety incidents that have occurred on previous shifts. The miners, big, gruff-looking men, sit with their arms folded as they are drilled about safety: "Mr Fitzpatrick, no-go zones, what are they?" The mine operates three shifts, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and outside the workers from the night shift have emerged with blackened faces in specialised mine vehicles, SMVs, that look like long-caged Hummers. After washing their boots, they head for the showers.
With the briefing over, it's time to go to work. As a dozen men climb into each of the waiting SMVs there's light-hearted banter between them - nuts stirring and taking the piss are part of the job. And then we descend into the earth's crust. Ahead, the lights of the vehicle illuminate signs: "fire hydrant", "pot hole", "air line". Behind us, as the entrance disappears, there's a black nothing.
Down, down, down we go, two kilometres in and 400 metres beneath the Great Dividing Range. It's a subterranean city and along side roads we see the ghostly glow of men in reflective overalls drifting along in the distance. The vehicle stops and after the men have tumbled out, there is silence except for the squelching of rubber boots in mud. Water drips from the ceiling, and underfoot it's like walking along a muddy creek bed. Light comes only from the narrow beams dancing about on the miners' heads.
The crib room, where the miners eat their lunch and take their half-hour break, is simply an area of the mine where there are a couple of long, well-worn wooden tables. There are no overhead lights, and the men eat and read by the light of their lamps. "If you want a slash, just walk over there," one of the men tells me. "If you want the other, I'd suggest holding on - the bog's not a pretty sight." It's a hard-man's world. Of the 260 people who work underground at this mine, only one is a woman, an electrician. "There's a big push to get sheilas underground," one of the old-time miners tells me. He claims that women aren't physically up to the work and their presence erodes the bonds between men. "It's been a disaster wherever it's been tried," he insists. "I mean, for starters, they'd stop ya bringin' ya c... mags down."
We walk down a tunnel to where a giant 70-tonne machine, a continuous miner, is gouging a five-metre-wide by three-metre-high road into a coal seam that has lain undisturbed for hundreds of millions of years - the miners are developing a system of tunnels so that, later in the year, an even larger machine, a $90-million longwall miner, will be brought in to shave coal across a massive 150-metre face. The longwall will start at the end of these tunnels and, as it works its way back, there will be a controlled collapse of the roof behind it. By then, the miners will be extracting three million tonnes a year, more than $600 million worth of coal at current prices. Now the mine produces about 800,000 tonnes.
It's loud and sweaty. While some men operate the miner, another drives a loader that shuttles the coal to a conveyor belt. Others stand around in the mud, moving cables and lifting the water lines that cool the miner and mist the coal dust. The deputies carry devices to monitor the air for explosive gases. As each section is mined, steel cables are drilled into the sandstone layer above and chemically cemented to secure the ceiling, like a suspension bridge. There are no props any more. Steel mesh is bolted to the walls and ceilings to prevent large rock falls, and the exposed coal is sprayed with a chalky substance called stone dust that, in the event of a cave-in or an explosion, will hopefully neutralise the coal dust in the air and prevent an even greater explosion. This is a gaseous mine, just like the seam at Pike River, in New Zealand's South Island, that exploded last November and killed 29 men.
It seems odd in the internet age that this is how men would earn a living, ankle-deep in mud and in darkness almost half a kilometre beneath the surface in a dangerous environment. To some, this is a picture of hell, but not the men I talk to. "Mate, it's the best job I've ever had," says 41-year-old Dave Rosta above the sound of the machinery. He's been underground for seven years after working as a barman at Wollongong University. "There's a line a coupla miles long to get a job down here. I love it. The camaraderie. The pay. The challenge. You're doin' somethin' different every day. I'll retire here if I can." It is, according to Rosta and many of his colleagues, a working man's paradise. In the two-speed economy, these guys are hurtling down the freeway in a V8, pedal to the metal - Acca Dacca pumping - without a radar in sight.
Miner matt wagenvoord is a beefy man with tattoos "that don't mean nothin'" rambling down his arms and legs and a couple of plaited rat tails dangling from the back of his head. Despite his appearance, he's a shy, gentle man who doesn't drink much and spends his weekends with his girlfriend, Kristy, walking their Staffordshire terriers, which they breed, or going for long drives in one or other of his Holdens. He lives with Kristy, a debt collector, and keeps a couple of pythons and lizards as pets in glass cabinets in a spare room. Wagenvoord is living the dream. In his carport he carefully folds back a cloth cover and proudly shows me his $30,000 VZ SS Holden ute - black as coal, of course - which he's almost paid off. He owns the black $50,000 HSV Clubsport sedan parked out the front. Within two years, he tells me, he will completely own his four-bedroom brick house, on a hill behind Shellharbour, and will soon be looking around for investment properties. Wagenvoord is 23. As we sit down to talk in his living room, dominated by a wall-sized flat-screen TV, he tells me he realises how fortunate he's been to be presented with this opportunity. His first job, at 16, was as an apprentice tiler on $25,000, so he's not going to waste these years. "I don't want to be sloggin' me guts out when I'm 50 or 60," he says. "That's why I'm doin' plenty of overtime and settin' meself up." With overtime and some weekend work, Wagenvoord earns $125,000 a year - about the same as a state school principal with 30 years' experience in charge of 700 students. Wagenvoord hopes to top $130,000 this year. It's enormous money for a labouring job that requires no qualifications to get a start.
And he enjoys the work. The other blokes, he says, have been supportive and he's learning to drive the mining machine. "It's like a family, all the guys look out for each other," he says. "Every day I look forward to goin' to work. Every day is different. It's the best place I've ever worked in." The coal he mines is premium-quality coking coal, an essential ingredient in the steel-making process, but also a major cause of greenhouse gases when it is burnt. I ask if this is some- thing that worries him. "I don't think about it," he says. "It is not that I don't care, it is just that I don't believe we are doing any damage. You know what the Greens are like, always tryin' to blame someone ..." And, despite the deaths at Pike River last year, he also doesn't consider what he does particularly dangerous. "We get safety drummed into us daily - everything has a procedure," he says. "It's pretty safe, if you follow the procedures."
His boss, Jimmy Cram, the day-shift undermanager, is not so sanguine. The safety of his men occupies much of his waking life and sometimes jolts him from his sleep at night. A detailed map of the Pike River mine is pinned to a wall of his renovated beach-side house - 1700 metres from the pit head and 500 metres from the water - and he followed the drama "religiously" as it unfolded, even though he knew the men were probably all dead after the initial explosion. While the men drive into the mine, he walks the two kilometres down the road and along all the various side alleys, checking everything on the way, always wondering what could go wrong. "I am responsible for everyone who goes underground on that shift," he says. "It weighs on ya." Cram, 45, was the undermanager in charge of a shift when there was a serious accident just a couple of years ago. The 70-tonne mining machine was being moved and one of the miners, for some reason, walked between it and the mine wall. The machine shifted direction slightly and crushed him against the wall, "like a little twig". "It was f...in' horrible," Cram tells me, fighting back his emotions. "I thought he was dead. He had blood coming out of every orifice in his head - his eyes, his nose, his mouth, his ears. His head had swelled to twice the size it normally was. He had an open-book fracture of the pelvis. We cut his clothes off him and he was just black, black like you wouldn't believe. He was driftin' in and out of consciousness. As we were loading him onto the SMV, he had a moment of clarity and he grabbed me by the shirt and said, 'Tell me kids I love 'em.'" The man somehow survived. After months of rehabilitation he came back to work for a time on light duties, but has since taken a job elsewhere. Cram says it deeply affected everyone who was working that day, him included. "It f...ed me over for a while," he says. "Talking about it now is a kind of therapy."
There have been no deaths in this mine since the current owners, Gujarat NRE, took over in late 2004 but, like every coalmine as old as this, it has a grim history.
In July 1991, three men were working at the coalface when their continuous miner sliced into a small geological fault line that, for millions of years, had contained a pocket of gas under enormous pressure. When punctured, it expelled gas and debris into the mine shaft at a tremendous velocity in what is known as an outburst. The driver, Craig Broughton, 28, was killed instantly by flying rocks and gas. Leigh Pearce, 24, who was working further back, may have survived but looked around to see his mate Bobby Coltman, 43, struggling to get out. He ran back to help, and while he managed to drag him around a corner, both men then collapsed and died of carbon dioxide poisoning. Pearce was awarded a post-humous medal for his bravery. Then, in December 2000, a group of six men were installing roof props near some broken machinery when the mine roof collapsed. Greg Aspinall, 42, was crushed to death by an 800- kilogram rock; another miner was in a coma for a month. "In the old days," one of the managers told me, "it was just accepted that it was a dangerous job and people would die." But not now. Jimmy Cram says that each of these incidents led to greater and improved safety procedures. They now drill advance core holes through the coal to look for the gas pockets like those that caused the 1991 outburst. They have a new system to secure the ceiling following the collapse in 2000. They strictly enforce no-go zones around moving machinery to stop men being crushed. "The potential is still the same," Cram says. "But we try to minimise the risk." Like many of the nsw south coast miners, Jimmy Cram has coal in his blood. His great-great-grandfather James Cram began working in the pits of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the UK at the age of 10, and migrated to the Illawarra in the 1850s to work as a miner here. His grandfather Henry Cram worked in the same mine as Jimmy from the age of 14 until he retired at 60. Jimmy is the fifth generation of his family to work the seams of the Illawarra.
Cram won't reveal what he's paid, but others say it would be in the vicinity of $180,000, plus share options. The deputies below him get $150,000, while the miners and tradesmen are paid about $90,000 annually for a basic day shift and $125,000 for night shift; they can earn more with overtime. These rates are $30,000 to $40,000 less than miners working in remote locations. According to the employment agency Hays, iron-ore miners and tradesmen in Western Australia's Pilbara region earn between $110,000 and $150,000. The equi-valent of a deputy would earn $165,000 to $180,000, and someone with Cram's qualifications and experience could earn up to $230,000. "I've thought about chasin' the big dollars," Cram tells me as we sit drinking coffee from his fancy coffee machine. "But why would ya? There's more to life than money. I can come home and take me kids down to the beach each afternoon for a swim." He is aware that he is already very well paid. His wife is a university lecturer with a PhD in science, and she earns "almost half what I do". One of his old mates from school is a postie. "I never mention money; it would only embarrass him." The fact that the men all live in the area and go home each day means they don't face the same hazards of serious alcoholism, drugs and isolation from their families that fly-in, fly-out miners in remote areas encounter. The drinking culture, of everyone going to the pub each afternoon, died out long ago - a victim of the roadside breathalyser.
There is a technical aspect to mining coal underground that Cram enjoys - he dismisses open-cut coal operations and iron-ore miners as "just quarriers". "Underground mining is different. It's like a big Meccano set down there with real machines. Every day we are building somethin', tryin' to solve a problem. It's never dull. Every day presents a new challenge." Cram is fascinated, too, by the geology, by the fact that the coal has been brewing underground for millions of years. "It makes me feel insignificant," he explains. "It probably makes me believe in a creator. "Does it blow me out that we are rippin' the guts out of the planet? It does a bit. I am a little bit of a greenie at heart. "The wants of the people on earth are exponential and we are feeding that and we need steel for just about everything. I used to think coal mining would die, but coal will be here for another 100 years because it is cheap and easy to get." He's a thoughtful man who has sometimes wrestled with what he does. "But things are out of my control, and if I was to think about it too much I would turn into a protester and tie meself to ships and nuts, and it would ruin me life. So I am a bit of a pawn in the system of the world, I suppose. I just need to do the best for me and me family.” He reckons if all goes well, he'll be retired by the time he's 53 - in less than 10 years.
Coal was first discovered in australia by a rabble of escaped convicts who stumbled upon it at Coal River (now Newcastle) in 1791. The seams of the Illawarra were found just a few years later. A ship, the Sydney Cove, was wrecked on an island off Tasmania, and a small crew was dispatched in a longboat to sail to Port Jackson. The longboat was also wrecked, on the coast of Victoria, and most of the crew perished on the walk north. On May 14, 1797, the five men still alive found coal near a beach and made a large fire to keep warm. It is believed the men were on a beach just north of Russell Vale. For 200 years, the pits of the Hunter and Illawarra provided Australia with most of its coal, but the giant open-cut mines of Queensland have since overtaken them. According to Peter Colley, an economist with the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, the number of people employed by the coal industry is in the "mid-30,000s". Just prior to the global financial crisis, it provided Australia with $55 billion in export earnings - an astronomical figure considering it hovered around $13 billion for most of the 1990s. Mining and energy commodities now account for "between five and 10 per cent" of the entire economy, but represent more than half our export earnings. They help to balance out all those imports we consume.
The profits being reaped by the coal companies are so vast that it concerns even the union that represents the workers who benefit from it. "The profits are just phenomenal," says Colley. "If you look at all the big companies, it is quite common for them to have half their revenue as gross profit. That's why the mining tax was a good idea." He says that on average the mining companies earn $1 million for each person they employ each year. Unlike the minerals sector of the west, which is now largely non-union and based on individual contracts, coal is still heavily unionised, and nowhere more so than in the Illawarra mines. It was here that some of the great industrial battles of the last century were fought. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of men died early due to black lung disease - "getting dusted", they called it - and they struggled for safer conditions and better pay. It was also the scene of Australia's worst industrial accident, when 96 men and boys were killed in an explosion at Mount Kembla in 1902. It was also here, in 1944, that the federal Labor government took over a coalmine to end a strike and sent the young miners off to war.
The grandsons of these men are now working the mines. Unionism isn't compulsory "but we've got more than 95 per cent of them", a union representative for Illawarra tells me. The same man says that they've found the owner of Gujarat NRE "reasonably" good to deal with and that they've "gone pretty easy on him" during this initial development phase of the mine. The pay rates at this mine are significantly lower than at other operations in the area. The union will be tightening the screws, he says, when the longwall miner comes into production and the tonnages increase. The owner of Gujarat NRE is a flamboyant Indian industrialist, Arun Jagatramka. Early last decade, he began searching the world for a reliable source of coking coal to fire his steel mills. He had been sourcing it from China but, with the economic boom gathering pace, supplies from there were becoming erratic and expensive. His search brought him to Wollongong, where he bought the mine at Russell Vale in 2004 "for a song", I was told. The previous owners had retrenched staff and the mine was on a "care and maintenance" basis - the reason given for the retrenchments was that the mine was no longer productive. Previous companies had taken the easy coal, from the seams close to the surface, and getting more required massive investment. Jagatramka also bought another mine at the village of Wongawilli, south of Wollongong. What he was after has been slowly baking since before the time of the dinosaurs. In the Permian Period, between 300 million and 250 million years ago, the area around what is now Sydney, up to Newcastle, down past Wollongong and out through the Blue Mountains to Lithgow, was one vast swamp, says Adrian Hutton, a retired geologist from the University of Wollongong.
The plants in this swamp - sedges, ferns and small scrubby plants - died and were compacted into peat and then buried beneath the earth and the process of coalification began - from peat, to brown coal, steaming coal and eventually coking coal. It was over a relatively short period of time, maybe 10 million years, "20 at a stretch", that the seven coal seams of the Sydney basin were formed, Hutton tells me. Some are only 30 centimetres thick and unmineable, but others, like the Wongawilli seam that Jimmy Cram and Matt Wagenvoord mine at Russell Vale, are 10 metres high in places, with three metres of usable coal. These seven coal seams sit beneath the earth's surface for hundreds of kilometres surrounding Sydney, like stacked plates, with levels of sandstone between them. The reserves of coal still unmined, says Hutton, "are massive".
And the coal in the Wongawilli seam is the most sought-after of all - coking coal. Without it there is no steel. After being mined, coking coal is cooked to remove impurities, such as bitumen and water. What's left is coke, which burns at a very high temperature and is used both as a heating agent and a minor ingredient, to be mixed with molten iron ore to form steel.
Arun Jagatramka's timing was perfect. When his accountants were figuring out if the operation was viable, the contract price for coking coal was less than $100 a tonne. By 2008, the price had spiked to more than $300 a tonne, and while it slipped after the global financial crisis, it has since risen above $200 and is continuing to climb. Despite the massive investment costs needed to develop the two mines, Gujarat NRE recently reported a $29-million half-yearly profit - it has done this shipping only a fraction of the tonnages that are to come.
In 2009, the Illawarra Mercury newspaper named Jagatramka its citizen of the year. He brought 580 jobs to the region, he bought a $5-million mansion in a swank part of the city, and he saved the city's basketball team, the Hawks, from bankruptcy.
The shift is almost over and we are driven to the surface in an SMV by Troy Parsons, a 45-year-old miner who has been in the game for six years. As the vehicle chugs up the hill, Parsons tells me about his life. For 19 years, he worked for Brambles, driving trucks and at a water-treatment plant the company owned. He was earning about $30,000 less than he does now, "working out in the sun". He says he spends just about every weekend on the Shoalhaven River, with his wife and three girls - twins aged 11 and a 10-year-old - and a bunch of mates, skiing and fishing. "We lead pretty much a water-based lifestyle," he says as the lights of the opening come into view.
After going down to pick up another load of men, Parsons emerges again and climbs from the vehicle, washes his boots and heads off to the showers. His mates rib him because his face is not as black as usual because he's been showing us around. "I'll be gettin' all the dirty jobs tomorrow," he jokes. Later, I meet him at his home, a large four-bedroom house (where his speedboat is parked in the garage) not far from the pit. We sit beside his lap pool. "The future's looking good," he says. "They seem to be putting a lot of money in and it seems it'll keep us all in jobs for a long time." He, too, sees himself as a bit of a greenie, "to a certain point". "I love me fishin' and I love the ocean and I don't like to see pollution. But we haven't got any options out there at the moment. At the end of the day, you need us for everything, from the cables in your television to your car body to just about every piece of equipment that you use. "We do all right, us miners," he adds. "We do all right. It's an honest way to make a living." He's another willing pawn in a game that's making Australia immensely rich. There's a line a coupla miles long to get a job down here. I love it. The camaraderie. the pay. The challenge. You're doin' somethin' different every day. I'll retire here if I can.it's like a big Meccano set down there with real machines. every day we are building somethin', tryin' to solve a problem. it's never dull. Every day presents a new challenge.The future's looking good. They seem to be putting a lot of money in and it seems it'll keep us all in jobs for a long time.
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Fast forward a bit.....
Locals were vocal
152 Gone…
30 Gone
…Wollongong Coal's workforce has more than halved in the past two years.
Posted 20 May 2015, 7:41am
NSW water supplier warned about coal mine near catchment
Monday, February 15, 2016 18:45:00
80 Gone
Updated 1 Sep 2015, 12:53pm
Wollongong Coal, formerly Gujarat NRE Coking Coal, - 80 mining jobs lost as Wollongong's Russell Vale coal mine goes into care and maintenance
“The company's other mine at Wongawilli south west of Wollongong remains in care and maintenance after longwall mining equipment became buried during a roof collapse in March 2014.”
Wollongong Coal expansion 'totally stranded' by planning report
Posted 7 Apr 2016, 7:42am
"It's not a mine. There is no coal coming out of this mine," he said.
"The mine was closed six months ago,”
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Pit Mouse says….
”All right who stole the n……F Shearer and me AFC”
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Full History
Rob