Dangers With Old Workings From Lifes "Experiences"

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I see quite a few posts where people make light of the dangers of entering old mine workings, and I know a lot of you are newbies to mining.
  • most people think the main danger is a rock falling on your head - I've known people killed that way - in working mines one person "bars down" each shift to check for loose "hanging" - in an old mine that may not have been done in a hundred years and there will be lumps weighing tons everywhere just waiting for a bump or vibration[/*]
  • it is far from the only one danger- gas is a major issue[/*]
  • carbon dioxide is heavy so displaces air from workings by collecting at the bottom of shafts and decline tunnels - and it doesn't sustain life (it is very common) - a mate in a Victorian shaft just survived but had stopped breathing when they got to him[/*]
  • carbon dioxide is also toxic at high concentration, so can poison as well as suffocate you - killed two boys in an Eildon tunnel[/*]
  • equipment like pumps can emit carbon monoxide, which is as much fun as cyanide (same effect, attaches to the red blood cells) - killed another mate in Laverton - I have been told breathing into a paper or plastic bag can help an affected person because you breathe out carbon dioxide and breathe it in again, and the carbon dioxide helps get the carbon monoxide out of your blood, and then breathing air outside the bag helps displace the carbon dioxide[/*]
  • methane is explosive (and not good for you) and forms from rotting vegetation, so is very common in old alluvial workings - it regularly kills people in coal-mine explosions eg 12 in one recent fire in Queensland, 29 in New Zealand, up to 450 people at a time historically[/*]
  • there are other gases - nitrous oxide from old explosives that burnt instead of exploding can be fatal - and some gases don't accumulate at depth but instead in high points (I think methane is light enough to do that) - people throw rubbish and dead carcasses into old workings and they make nasty gases[/*]
  • inadequate lighting can cause you to fall down an internal shaft in a mine[/*]
  • the floor may not be the floor - branches fall into a shaft and block it near surface, dirt falls on top of the branches, you jump into an apparently shallow shaft and keep going -sayonara [/*]
  • an unsupported trench less than 2 m deep can be fatal, especially after rain (hard to beathe under soil, hard to breathe even if it is only up to your chest) [/*]
  • equipment used by novices is often unsuitable and scaling ropes, using old or left-behind ladders etc is ridiculous - even just bumping your head on a low roof without a hard hat can give severe concussion, foot damage is inevitable without steel-capped boots[/*]
  • standing close to the edge of a shaft can be fatal, especially after rain - often the first few metres from surface can be soil, and your weight can cause a conical failure (with its point downwards, widening upwards to where you are) with soil around and even behind you further from there shaft sliding into the shaft (when you see that circular crack appearing behind you it is too late)[/*]
  • often timber was used in old mines and will now be rotten - often broken rock was then spread onto the timber platforms which could support them when hew - the tunnel floor you think you are walking on may actually be a 20 cm broken rock layer on termite-ridden timber above a 100 m deep open cavity[/*]
  • running out of lighting can be fatal when underground[/*]
  • mad people enter mines alone - a foot in a crevasse, a rock that pins your legs, a hole that opens up between you and the entrance - oops, who knows I am here - starvation and thirst are nasty deaths, and causing searches inconvenience won't make you popular and could cost you a lot of money[/*]
  • walking in a mine floor with water above your ankles is suicide, you will drown when you reach an internal shaft, also mines can flood during rain storms (a bunch of students died that way in a Tasmanian cave a few years ago)[/*]

Because of your interests, a lot of you may consider a mine job in the next boom (I have seen four booms come and go now, the "old industry" crap of politicians is nonsense, at least for many decades more). Consumption of minerals has been increasing without break, as has population and standard of living (except for a few years in the doldrums at a time) since Adam and Eve, and virtually everything you use comes out of the ground (the sole exceptions being some things that are grown such as food, timber and natural fibers like cotton and wool). If you have had one of the above accidents and anyone knows about it, don't even consider applying for a job with a mine, they will not even consider you (and don't ask me either - mining is dangerous like high-rise construction, I don't want any cowboys working with me)

The best rule is don't go into an old working of any type. I guess I make odd exceptions - lay on my stomach with feet pointing outwards to look down the first couple of metres in the collar of a shallow shaft to see what rock type is there, perhaps tying a rope to a tree before I approach closely if in doubt (but I NEVER to try to see the bottom of a deep one and ABSOLUTELY never go down one), I might also poke a shallow trench with branches to check it really is as shallow as it looks. That's it though - I do go into them because it is part of my full-time work, but in the company of an experienced practicing miner who leads the way.
 
Goldierocks that is a very valuable write up and I for one think it should be included in a read first section or rules.
Good work !

Edit:
Maybe there should be a section of do's and dont's, Like the above info, snake bites, outback preparation, survival skills etc ????
 
Brilliant idea Wishfull, and thank you Goldierocks for taking the time to post valuable information.
 
You are welcome (some things I have read people doing have made my hair stand on end, and I don't want people dying when they should be enjoying their prospecting). And I have had friends die, and friends and associates nearly die (and yes, in the early days I came close myself when I thought I was bulletproof).

If you like going underground, join a caving club (caves are much more stable and you will be among people with good equipment and experience - I have tried it). If you want to see a mine, go on an organised trip - even some tourist mines can be good (eg the longer tour at Central Deborah, Bendigo, is quite good although very expensive). Operatong mines often have annual open days for the public.

Wishfull, a series of checklists on different topics sounds useful (I have known people die winching vehicles, had a couple of people bitten by snakes while with me, known chainsaw accidents). I'm not jinxed, just worked around 50 years in the bush on many continents.
 
Now a sticky. :)
Many Thanks for that.
I hope you don't mind but I will change the Header to
make it stand out.
 
Great post! But its worth adding fungal spores to the list.
Had work mates back in the 80's get extremely nasty lung infections from entering the wrong old workings without PPE. Apparently its not that uncommon especially in the tropics.
 
iana said:
Great post! But its worth adding fungal spores to the list.
Had work mates back in the 80's get extremely nasty lung infections from entering the wrong old workings without PPE. Apparently its not that uncommon especially in the tropics.

Interesting can you tell us more about that ?
 
It been a while ;) and I was on a diferent project but I think the workings where somewhere near pajingo mine, south of Charters towers and if I rember right one of the guys spent a week or so in hospital and took quite a while to fully recover.

No idea what type of fungus but they reckon the Curse of the Pharos that kiled the first people entering the egyptian tombs back in the day was most likely caused by fungal spores so I guess old workings are esentially much the same.

Also Hydrogen sulphide gas that can collect in the lower areas of sulphide rich workings is another unplesant way to die if you happen to get unlucky.

Persionally I wouldnt go near old workings without a cartrige mask and a propper gas monitor at the very least.
 
Lung diseases (not sure if spores or viral) are such a problem in many caves that they have to be closed off. Apparently related to bat droppings (and when you stur up their guano on the floor).
 
I see under "small scale mining" that some people here actually consider exploring old workings to be a sport, and make the totally insupportable nonsense claim that it is no different to caving, sky-diving or scuba. Nother could be further from the truth. One of the most basic differences is that caves are produced over tens of thousands of years by very slow dissolving of (usually) carbonate rock, which is commonly massive and homogeneous with few fractures, and the rock continuously reaches equilibrium with its surroundings and gravity because it has time to do so a little bit at a time. They can contain carbon dioxide gas, which we check for, but usually do NOT contain all the other dangerous gases common to mines. Caving is a valid sport, if taken as part of an experienced group activity. Sky-diving and scuba are also valid - my family including wife and daughter do all three - the death and injury statistics are much better than driving to work each day.

I have to enter old mines for my work, and I do it with mining engineers and miners and often take a week just to make a single drive safe for entry. Mines are very different to caves. They are produced by blasting the rock and producing huge numbers of fractures in the surrounding rock, which is almost never massive carbonate rock in Victoria but instead is in 95% of cases sedimentary rocks full of fault and bedding planes that form weaknesses that extend for great distances. Mine workings are primarily designed to stay open only for sufficient years to extract the ore, and are checked on each shift by the miners using them (usually a mine captain or shift boss enters and checks before other miners are allowed to enter, and miners carry re-breathers and proto teams have oxygen etc). The old timers used timber to a large degree to support roofs and walls, and timbers have a limited life span - they rot, collapse and give off gas (today we use steel rock bolts, wire mesh and spray walls and roofs with concrete, as even small rocks can do you in falling from the height of many stopes). Few people are allowed to approach the active mining face, just miners and scoop-tram drivers in protected jumbos and scoop trams. Major parts of working mines are already unsafe for entry at a time where other parts of the same mines are in operation (mines I worked on already had 80% of their workings in which noone was permitted to enter). The air is only fit for breathing because fresh air is commonly forced into workings by fans (blowers) and dust content is kept low and constantly monitored. I had a miner friend entered an area in an operating large central Victorian mine three years ago unsupervised, in an area that was normally safe and in use, and because he was alone he nearly died - someone heard his cry before he passed out (the penalty was instant dismissal - no three strikes you're out as with minor alcohol in the blood above 0.00%). Commonly waste rock is emptied back into mined-out areas to save taking it to surface, and that often piles up on what are only temporary supports, which can be the roofs of drives that you can still walk into if you are silly enough, including adits that go straight into hillsides horizontally in eastern Victoria, and which can look benign (you can't see how many hundreds of thousands of tons of broken rock lie above your head, you see what you think (probably quite incorrectly) to be still firm timber). Despite the fact that back then the timber was fresh, deaths on for example the Ballarat field were running at 30 per month at one time, in the same types of mines that you consider entering 150 years later after no ongoing checking or ventillation. In modern Australian mines we have got that down to only tens of deaths per year for the country (but many injuries), although occassionally we have that many in a single accident - historically deaths in Australian mine accidents have reached up to more than 400 on a single occassion, and I have worked on mines where that occurred overseas while I was there (450, 300, 80 per event). I have been inside a collapsing pillar alone - the others had already run out and forgot to put up a no-entry chain in their haste (I got out when they called to me from a distance, and 100,000 tons of solid rock dropped and cracked, and dropped 40 m hours later. I have had an entire mine level complete with mine locos and rolling stock drop a similar distance overnight, burying everything (an area 100 m in diameter with a 300 m oval drive around it dropped 40 m). I have been knocked down by running miners as the roof of the stope we were in collapsed (Tsumeb), and on another occassion (Mt Isa) we heard the rock squeaking after we sprayed it with hoses and got out before the wall came down. Single water inflows such as the New Australiasia at Creswick killed 22, and similar occurred at McEvoy mine in Eldorado - death tolls were huge and miners commonly had a 40 year life span in those days. Mining deaths around the world each year number tens of thousands today, working under mostly much better conditions than those of the Victorian gold rushes. Lastly, alluvial mines were even more deadly because of even less stable ground (eg gravel that could be shovelled), sudden water influx, and perhaps most of all, deadly gas formed by oxidation of vegetation in the old "wash" - time without active ventillation hugely increases gas buildup. There is a huge gold resource unmined in Victoria's deep leads (perhaps a thousand tons plus of gold), but no company even considers working it using people underground, as the risk was shown to be too great in the past. I have had water flow into drill-holes under such force that the drill-rods were shot out, and on one occassion I was able to give prior warning before an accident could occur in a mine that could have drowned hundreds of miners at a minimum (they were about to blast a face not knowing that there was a huge amount of water-filled rock behind it). One mine I was on had 12 workers killed in a similar way as the thin rock wall between the pillar they were in and an old stope next to it collapsed, filled with liquid cement slurry that had (unknowingly) never set. A WA mine had many miners drown a couple of decades ago becuase a rainstorm sent ewater puring down the decline from surface. Small mines when I started work considered one or two deaths per year quite acceptable. And I have known many recreational deaths of people exploring old workings in my lifetime, in Victoria alone.

There is huge pressure from environmental groups on any activity related to prospecting or small-scale mining. One serious recreational accident will be sufficient to cause further restrictions or close such activity permanently. We don't want you to die, and you probably don't want to do so either, but what a legacy to leave your mates!
 
iana said:
It been a while ;) and I was on a diferent project but I think the workings where somewhere near pajingo mine, south of Charters towers and if I rember right one of the guys spent a week or so in hospital and took quite a while to fully recover.

No idea what type of fungus but they reckon the Curse of the Pharos that kiled the first people entering the egyptian tombs back in the day was most likely caused by fungal spores so I guess old workings are esentially much the same.

Also Hydrogen sulphide gas that can collect in the lower areas of sulphide rich workings is another unplesant way to die if you happen to get unlucky.

Persionally I wouldnt go near old workings without a cartrige mask and a propper gas monitor at the very least.

Recently I was north of charters towers digging FANTASTIC signals with the z and had to leave unfinished business (filled in the holes 8.( )because wife and I smelt rotten eggs from surface diggings only. The smell only lasted moments but having to walk to higher ground to catch my breath and try and dig a bit more also becoming nauseous we thought that some bad methane maaaannn, and it sunk to the lower gullies and hovered, we could smell it from our legs kicking it up much later also. Memory loss occurred extreme for 3-4 days and on some research we now think it was hydrogen sulphide the gas form of sulphur. Can occur naturally in soil usually near volcanic history.
 
Volcanic gases cause a lot of deaths (although I doubt that was the cause of what you smelled). For example, I remember when a crater in Cameroun let off a large carbon dioxide belch (it was simply a crater lake, not a volcano normally belching ash and gases). It was expelled with sufficient force from below the floor of the lake to fill the crater and roll down the outside walls of the volcano, and settled on a village in a valley where everyone was asleep - invisible, tasteless, odourless. 950 people never woke again. People hike up to Ruapehu volcano in New Zealand and admire the quiet lake in its crater - few realise that the water has a pH of 1 and would rot the togs off you, or that a layer of molten sulphur liquid underlies its waters :)

Back to the topic - old mine workings make great rubbish dumps as councils are desperate for land-fill sites in some areas (eg the old Wonga pit at Stawell). Rotting rubbish produces methane. They might belch occassionally as well, but more often the gas would penetrate long distances through the workings to arewas where there is no rubbish - and where unsuspecting people might enter the workings.

When I was a kid I used to collect zeolite crystal specimens from old quarries in the suburbs of Melbourne - no sign of them now (filled with garbage). These sites are huge greenhouse gas emitters, mostly methane. Some enterprising businesses have drilled into them beneath their buildings and run power plants on the methane.
 
Something else that is overlooked is the weather or more specifically the barometric pressure fluctuations associated with it.
In normal or high barometric pressure the weather is usually associated with fine or clear weather. In times of low barometric pressure it is associated with cloudy days, rain or storms.
Natural caves & unventilated man made underground voids such as tunnels & abandoned mines etc. "breath" with the fluctuations in the barometric pressure. In a normal surface atmosphere high pressure pushes good air into the void while low pressure draws the mine air out. Over normal daily fluctuations this is likened to breathing in & out.
What displaces this good air in low pressure conditions? In some mines it may just be more good air from elsewhere in the mine but in a lot of cases it can be displaced by bad air from deeper with the mine.
Storms can cause a rapid drop in the barometric pressure which will draw out air, either good or bad, from deeper within mines more rapidly. Some of these areas can hold the gases mentioned above or even damp. A sudden drop in barometric pressure can leach these gases or damp into areas that are otherwise usually good air. This can cause unexpected problems in otherwise usually "safe" caves or abandoned mines.
 
Exactly right mbasko.
Knowledge in these matters are vastly important for those who venture underground along with the many other dangers such as arsenic leeching from ghe walls and the earlier mentioned moulds that can cause long term health issues or even death.
Off course there are other issues that should be brought to mind as well such as, in some mines I've gone through here in Victoria, they were reworked in the 60s, 70s, and 80s and often asbestos was used along with other hazards.
ie: rubbish and chemicals etc
Cheers Steve
 
rsenic is present in many gold mines, but should not be a problem if you wash your hands etc (since you are only visiting). More of a danger is piles of white arsenic around old sulphide roasters = very toxic, occassionally cattle die where it leaches into adjacent farm dams (e.g. around Bewthanga region, Victoria). Mercury was used on many gold mines. However, realistically, gas and dangerous workings likely to collapse are the biggest killers. Most others things require prolonged exposure or sudden significant ingestion.
 
goldierocks said:
... The old timers used timber to a large degree to support roofs and walls, and timbers have a limited life span - they rot, collapse and give off gas (today we use steel rock bolts, wire mesh and spray walls and roofs with concrete, as even small rocks can do you in falling from the height of many stopes). ...

And in case some people interpret that as meaning that shotcreted and bolted roofs are safe ... I worked for Freeport in Papua a few years ago. They had a smaller mine under the open cut at Grasberg which they used for training. On May 14, 2013, 30 or so, mostly contractors, reported to the OH&S training room in that mine for their regular refresher, The room was a separate construction inside a large tunnel maybe 10 or 15m across and a similar height, all rock bolted, shotcreted etc, inspection regime in place. Class was just about to start, so the instructor walked out of the room to get the last couple of attendees inside, and without warning the roof collapsed and squashed 28 people to a pulp. I THINK there might have been four survivors in the room.
 
cml said:
goldierocks said:
... The old timers used timber to a large degree to support roofs and walls, and timbers have a limited life span - they rot, collapse and give off gas (today we use steel rock bolts, wire mesh and spray walls and roofs with concrete, as even small rocks can do you in falling from the height of many stopes). ...

And in case some people interpret that as meaning that shotcreted and bolted roofs are safe ... I worked for Freeport in Papua a few years ago. They had a smaller mine under the open cut at Grasberg which they used for training. On May 14, 2013, 30 or so, mostly contractors, reported to the OH&S training room in that mine for their regular refresher, The room was a separate construction inside a large tunnel maybe 10 or 15m across and a similar height, all rock bolted, shotcreted etc, inspection regime in place. Class was just about to start, so the instructor walked out of the room to get the last couple of attendees inside, and without warning the roof collapsed and squashed 28 people to a pulp. I THINK there might have been four survivors in the room.
Wow. When yor times up it's up. No escaping.
 
Excellent advise Goldierocks... Sounds like we have worked in simular Environments...

Hydrogen Sulphide Gas is caused from rotting vegetative matter as well(most common).... If you walk into an old Mine and you see water lying around... Poke it with a stick. wait..And if you see bubbles rising, Get out of there.... Buy the time you "feel" the effects you are Dead... can form anywhere... Around 15 years ago 2 guys died in Darwin checking drain levels with a staff(measuring pole)... one couldn't quite reach the bottom so he climbed in and buy waving his staff around stirred up the gas and collapsed. Man 2 went in to rescue man 1 and he died too... one survivor on top didn't go into the Drain... that's why He survived....

In Mexico City the record was 27 dead from a simular situation.. One after the other went in to "Rescue'' their mates... :rolleyes:

Cleaning out Grain Silos is another Way to Die from this... When I did my Confined Space ticket with Mines and Rescue it really opened my eyes up to the Hidden Dangers of entering Old and even New works. New Drain Pipes are a killer.. Worked in some very Toxic Environments and had 2 Gas Monitors on me... just in case one was not working... Glad I don't do that work anymore, but still remember Most things.... Only recently, 3 Died from using petrol powered water blaster in a Water tank... Carbon monoxide got them... :( Why Didn't the Wife stay on top and wait for help... instead she entered.... 8.(
The Definition of a confined space is... "Anywhere where Gas may build-up.". Not a 'small space'... that's what a lot of people think it is.... Open pits with machinery working in them are very bad as well...
Stay Safe Gentlemen, we don't want to Lose anyone from here... ;)
LoneWolf....
 

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