Underground and Radioactive by R. D. Saunders

Author:R. D. Saunders
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2017-05-04T04:00:00+00:00

The Sandman

Shortly after my prank, I was assigned a new shift boss, Bill Clark.  Another transplant from Butte, he was an affable, low-key man and generally a matter-of-fact kind of guy. I liked Bill right away.

He was a neighbor too. Shortly after finally making my home in San Rafael, Bill moved his family into a large mobile home about a hundred yards away from mine, so I spoke to him from time to time.

My first day under Bill, I was assigned what turned out to be my final job as a laborer, that of sand-fill operator. When a stope has been worked out of all its ore, what’s left is one big hole in the ground, and no matter how much ground support is installed, the ground above is going to cave in eventually. It’s one of those cases of when, not if. Were the ground to cave in all the way to the surface, that would be a lot of sinkholes around the Ambrosia Lake mining district.

What mining engineers came up with was a system of filling old stope cavities with sand. It would have been next to impossible to fill an empty stope with sand by shoveling it in, so a mixture of sand and water was pumped from the surface and into the stope. There was a massive pile of sand on the surface that was combined with water in a plant nearby, then pumped underground through a network of eight-inch pipes running throughout the mine. The sand would sink right away, and the water above would drain out. In this way it was possible to fill a stope to within an inch or two of the back, greatly reducing or eliminating the likelihood of a sinkhole developing.

From firsthand experience, I learned that sand-fill was a good system that worked well. As I was to find out later, though, before a stope was filled with sand, somebody had better be certain all the ore was out of there, because having to go back in is very difficult and dangerous.

On my first day, Bill told me and another laborer, Daniel Ortiz, to start hanging sand-fill pipe from a junction close to the station on back to the 502 stope. There was usually a large stack of the twelve-foot-long sections of pipe close to the station along with hundreds of rubber-lined pipe clamps. Having worked unloading and stacking sand-fill pipe from my time at the station, I knew how heavy the pipe was but had never hung any before.

It wasn’t difficult to figure out how to hang and fasten the pipe, but lifting those sections into place, sometimes eight feet above the floor of the track drift, was difficult, requiring a great deal of strength. I’m tall, but my partner, Daniel, was considerably shorter, adding to the difficulty. In addition, we couldn’t very well block the main drift with lengths of sand-fill pipe, so each time we hung a section, we had to walk back to the station, pick up a section of pipe, and carry it back by hand.

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