dangerous jobs

[Arlos]

He indicated that that WAS the speed he had to go in order to keep up with the flow of traffic, given that he was getting passed often at that speed. If he was blowing past everyone at 20mph over the speed limit, he'd hardly have been getting passed all the time, correct?

-Arlos

[Tossica]

Yeah, that is very obvious, but to say you just typically fly along at 20mph over the speed limit for an equally arbitrary reason...is fucking moronic.

Get a job, you bum.

[Mop]

Ive been told I drive like shit, but usually im fairly cautious and pay attention to what is around me - I dont talk on my cell or the radio while driving. I havent had a ticket for a moving violation in like 12 years now. Tho last week I got pulled over for flicking a cig out my car window and it turned into minor possession ticket and a court date. One cop was a total ass, the other one was pretty cool asking about my car if I liked the drive, how much stuff cost where I work, was kinda funny.

Long story short, drive safe ~ oh and Cupertino cops are generally asshats that couldnt make it in the city.

[Gaazy]

Ok, so, about coal mining

first, I dont work underground full time anymore. I used to but not anymore. Right now I work for a company that builds underground equipment, so Im still underground a lot if theres a service call and one of our equipment goes down or whatever. Speciifically, we build new and rebuild belt lines, scoops, and coal haulers. It happens a lot, because the coal mines are extremely hard on it and runs 24 hours a day no breaks, one shift after another, so it doesnt get a break. They break shit like all the time. Also, I do a lot of buying/selling.and rebuilding of equipment, so im under a lot surveying possible trades and rebuilds. Some weeks Im under every day, sometimes not for weeks at a time. Just depends on whats goin on really.

Coal minin is the most dangerous job I have ever been around really. So many freak accidents, and so much shit that can go wrong you just wouldnt believe.

A lot of accidents are equipment related. I mean think about it, on the main section youve got continuous miners, roof bolters and pinner, feeders, belts, shuttle cars, scoops, haulers and others that are passing within inches of each other alllll day long, in a dark, slick, wet, muddy environment. Theres just so much goin on in every direction and so many people doin their own jobs, you just w ouldnt believe it. And in most mines around here, you cant even stand up straight. Some mines, like one I used to work in, the max ceiling is 32 INCHES. Not even 3 fucking feet. So your mobility and movement speed is already rectricted like a motherfucker. Im in mines all the time that arent even above 36" ceiling. Some mines go up to 10 or 12 feet, but most id say average 4-5 feet around here. Out West, the mines are a lot higher because the seams are a lot bigger. some mines out there are 20+ feet high, but here, the seams are a lot smaller. Our coal sells for a lot more because of the quality of it, so out there they have to mine out a LOT more coal to be profitable.

The main source of injury in mines though is electrical related. Youve got SO many cables, lines, and power centers (that are carrying enough current to fry you before you even know what the fuck is happening) to beware of underground. All miners have to have metatarsel boots and and all that good stuff. I know a guy who was killed last year working on a power center that was crawled up inside it and got up against a coil, fried him before he even knew what was going on.

Then of course youve got the obvious, roof related accidents. There are roof falls daily in most mines. Its just part of the business. There are tons of signs and shit you can watch and listen for that just really comes with experience...knowing what to look for. Ive watched ceilings sag all the way to the ground slowly but surely that never even fell, just sagged and cracked all the way down. Sometimes it sounds like being in high school and someone is moving desks and chairs around on the floor above, and sometimes theres cracks that you can barely hear. And with all the loud ass equipment and hearing protection you have to wear if you want your hearing in 20 years, theyre easy to miss a lot of times. Youve just got to use your head and pay attention.

The problem is, when you work underground for so long, you get too used to it, and thats when people get killed. It gets to be too much a routine and you dont pay enough attention to hear or see the signs.

Ill even cap this off with a few stories because theyre fun to tell hehe.

One time I was underground looking at a scoop we built for a big longwall operation. They were moving the shears and getting ready to set cribs to support a section of bad top

One day last year I was under with a guy I worked with surveying some equipment and I sat down along the wall to take a break in a dry spot. I got up, and my buddy sat down in the exact same spot I was in to adjust his boots. Not 30 seconds after I got up, a piece of slate slate fell off the roof and landed right on his head. It was only a 2 x 2 piece or so, and Ive had bigger pieces shave off and fall on me twice as big as that. Usually it just breaks apart (if you know what slate is, you understand) and shatters and doesnt even really hurt. Well, I guess it just landed just right on him and compressed his spine or whatever and snapped it. Hes fine and back to work now, didnt paralyze him or anything like that somehow, but still scary.

Another time (and my closest call yet I think), I was crawling out of the operators deck on a scoop, and the break release valve broke. I was only halfway out of the scoop when it lost the park brake and pinned my head against the wall before it caught on a rock and stopped. Cracked my hard hat plum in two. Another half inch and My head would have been crushed like a melon~ I remembering sitting there for like 5 minutes wondering if I was dead or not. That was a scary fucking day.

One of the shittiest moments I had underground was when there was another piece of slate that fell off the roof and hit my head and broke the cable on my light. I got to sit there for 2 hours in the pitch black waiting for someone to find me. Finally someone on their way out stumbled on me. Was a new panel and they hadnt put the life line (rope on the roof you can grab onto in case of emergency that will lead out the primary and secondary escape routes to take you outside, eg. if visibility is lost or its too dusty to see)

Oh, this one is cool. There is a form of minin called retreat mining (also k nown as pillar mining). Its also the most dangerous form of mining, looooots of people killed in it. On these sections, after they mine all the way in to however far they want to go, they pull back out and mine out the panels. If youve ever seen a mine map, youll notice that they mine in squares, in between them and leave a section shaped like a square that is usually 100' x 100' (google a mine map and youll see what I mean). They mine the insides of th ese pillars out and hold the roof up with manual roof supports (big ass hydraulic lifts that hold the roof up), then when they get done with a pillar, they blast the entire section of the mountain and drop it. It creates a wall of air when the pillar drops (displaces the air, whatever you want to call it) that can kill you in that alone. Ive never worked on a pillar section, only been on one a couple of times really. One day I was working on the equipment while they were pillaring, and I guess I was standing in the wrong place at the wrong time, but the wall of air came and knocked me plum on my ass through the air. I flew at least 15 feet back into the wall. Now THAT shit was fucking crazy. You want to talk about a loud fucking boom? Imagine a mountain coming down in front of you, pretty much.


Im still thinking about going back to work underground. As godamn weird as it sounds, I love it. I love the work, I love the coming home sore, bumped and bruised, and dirt under the fingernails. Makes you feel like you actually earned a paycheck. Not that office people dont earn a paycheck, I just hate it. I fucking hate sitting in an office. I absolutely cant stand it, and I do it most of the week most of the time. I actually look forward to being able to get up and go do some real fucking work. Man's work I say~

Coal mining is really all I know heh. All my entire family knows really heh. Its in my blood I geuss you could say. Part of our culture, part of our lives. Its an unbelievably hard, rough, and dangerous job, and I wouldnt recommend it to anyone that is afraid to get their hands dirty (99% of our lazy country) and afraid of a little work, but its good work. Its definitely not for the claustrophobic (sp?) either heh. If you couldnt crawl on your knees in a 36" ceiling, dark as nigh with only the light on your head and a few headlights from machines, in a foot of water, mud and crud, then its not for you hahaha. My cousin operates a mine thats right along a river, and I wear river fishing waders when I go in because theres a lot of water runoff or whatever, so in some spots the water is chest deep. The ceiling is 6-8 foot so its not too too bad really. The shittiest is this little rat hole I sold some equipment too that has a 40" ceiling, and the water is usually about a foot deep. Gets so cold and wet after a few hours that you get pretty fucking miserable.

Anyways, ya, coal minin in a nutshell




Oh, an dI can add to that trucker talk. One of my uncles runs about 45 coal trucks that haul coal from the mine to the docks. Lot of people killed every year from that too. With the 80,000 pounds of coal per load on average or something like that, it takes damn near a football field to stop one. Ive driven them some too when I used to work for him as a diesal mechanic (I sucked at that, that was my summer job when I was 14, 15, and 16), and its a fucking tough job.

[araby]

Thank you Gaazy. I enjoyed reading that.

[Ouchyfish]

Thank you Gaazy. I enjoyed reading that.

[Gaazy]

To add, I think the worst part about working underground wasnt really the hours like it use to be in the older days. (A lot of mines now run 3 shifts of 8 hours. The mines I worked at ran a day shift of goin under at 6am or so, til about 4pm-5pm, an evening shift about 5pm to about 2 or 3am, and a maintenence hoot owl shift for the rest of the hours that just worked on equipment and kept it greased up, etc.) The worst part was not seeing daylight. About this time of year was the most annoying. Youd go under about 6, and by the time the shift ends at about 4pm or so, you had the sometimes 1/2 hour - 1 hour trek to the surface, then another half hour or so to get changed and get everything lined up for the next shift and your next day, so by the time you made it home, its dark out rofl. You, literally, do not see daylight. Even in the summer months and longer days, you get like an hour or two of daylight most of the time. Most mines work 1 saturday on, then 1 off. So the hours arent bad at all. Years ago, most mines worked 12 hour shifts, 7 days a week. But anymore, its a little different.

Then of course every now and then something fucked up would happen, like the main belt line or the main section miner goes down. No belt line, no coal getting outside. No miner, coal can be mined. Therefore, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of bucks are being missed out on by the company. So that turns into a "work until the godamn fucking problem is fixed" day. My longest shift was when the belt blew a motor, THEN after that, as soon as the belt got fixed, they fired up the miner, and ill be godamned if a roof fall didnt cover the miner up. So after we got the miner uncovered, we realized it severed the catheads (where the cable goes into the miner to power it), so we got to work some more to redo the cables. That turned into a 28 hour shift wuwu~ With a 30 minute nap/snack break every few hours. Later that same week, we worked a 16 hour shift when a shuttle car went down. Hello paycheck!

Then youve got the faggot lazy fucking piece of shit dickhead fucker asshat cockbag cumguzzling gutterslut UNION cocksuckers, who would have said, oh, well, we dont have to work over our shift, so fuck you guys. Lazy fucking greedy good for nothing union workers...

[Ouchyfish]

Then youve got the faggot lazy fucking piece of shit dickhead fucker asshat cockbag cumguzzling gutterslut UNION cocksuckers, who would have said, oh, well, we dont have to work over our shift, so fuck you guys. Lazy fucking greedy good for nothing union workers...

ahahahahahahahahaha

[Lueyen]

"work until the godamn fucking problem is fixed"

we dont have to work over our shift, so fuck you guys.

I would take issue with both lines of thought honestly. Absent any un-resolvable issues, working a few hours extra especially when you are being paid extra shouldn't be a huge issue. On the other hand a 28 hour shift is not offset by frequent half hour naps/breaks, and quite honestly productivity and safety are quite possibly degraded. Frankly when you consider the very real likelihood that equipment will break at some point, shutting an operation down, any business plan that doesn't take that possibility into account when calculating the bottom line is flawed, yes even when you are talking millions per day lost production. You hope it doesn't happen but you expect it to.

[Gaazy]

I think youd just have to see how badly and often they abuse the union to see what I mean.

[Evermore]

Black Lung?

[Gaazy]

You wont see Black Lung in the future like you do in the older guys that worked the mines 30+ years now, or at least not anywhere close to as bad as they do. The scrubber and the intake filters and all that shit are getting so much more advanced every year it just hel;ps clear the dust up a lot. I know many, of many of old guys who cough up black sludge with every cough and have to stop every 10 feet to sit down. Ive even had more than my share of black hacks after a day on the section.

Then, on the other hand, nowdays a lot of the miners dont even practice all the safety and health deals they could (and are a lot of times required by Federal law to do), but just dont to save time and work toward that production bonus. Example, there are supposed to be certain water lines ran every so often on the longwall section to keep the coal and rock dust down. But its a pain in the ass and takes too much time. A lot of those lines and shit are federal law, but unless the state or federal inspectors are around, they dont hardly get ran, at least near as much as they should. Which I cant say much, I hardly ever ran those damn things either.

[Tikker]

Then youve got the faggot lazy fucking piece of shit dickhead fucker asshat cockbag cumguzzling gutterslut non-UNION cocksuckers, who would have said, oh, well, we dont have to do the job properly,we've got a bonus to chase, so fuck you guys. Lazy fucking greedy good for nothing non-union workers...

[Gaazy]

If you are referring to safety when you say "doing the job properly", you're kind of wrong. But anyway, doing the job properly IS keeping the mine moving consistantly, as fast as possible. On top of that, most miners wont do anything that puts anyone in danger. Some mines, usually smaller ones, are sorta like an army platoon, if thats makes any sense, in the sense of brotherhood, because youve got to put your life in the hands of the other guys, just like they do you sometimes.

That, and 90% of coal companies give a bonus, called the safety bonus, that you get after a certain time with no major injuries (usually a couple months or so). Some companies give one hell of a saftey bonus, Ive heard them bein up above $2,500. So theres another reason they want safety~

Those water things are horseshit anyway. So are a lot of the other 19203810381 regulations.

[Gaazy]

Ehm, while im thinkin about it ill add to the subject of the union, that there is a reason or two I can see someone joining one, and thats the benefits packages. Almost all companies are full benefits now though.

But yeah, 75 years ago, the union saved the coal business, hands down. The main thing it brought on were safety and wages. In the old days and days like my great grandpappy and his brothers and my Papa and his brothers worked in the mines (the day of shovels, picks, and a cart on a mule), it was an everyday thing it seemed like for someone to die, and youd b e working for a couple dollars a day. The Union made the mines safe(r), made wages and benefits a milion times better, but now, I just dont see as much of a need for it. Like I said, especially if you could see the way so many people just plain out abuse it (kinda like welfare). Its still needed at times sure, but not to this extent I just dont think.

Now, most miners start at 14-18 dollars an hour as a red hat (less than 6 months experience), and when they work under for 6 months, they become a black hat (experienced miner), and their pay moves immediately to between 18 and 24 an hour. Then after a little bit more you usually get a raise to 25 or 26 or so depending on what job you want to do (runnin a buggy, hauler, belt man, maintenence, whatever). You can get into an apprentice electricians program that after you complete it will put you usually at about 30, all the way up to 40 if you're good and experienced. I know regular electricians that make 45 bucks an hour. Then youve got the boss level guys, like the superintendant, mine foremans, chief electicians, even some section bosses, that can make 6 figures pretty fucking easily.

A lot of that money, even up towards 30 bucks an hour, isnt like a bunch to most of you, especially the ones living in Florida, So Cal, or places like that, but in Southern West Virginia, thats damn good money. Our cost of living isnt shit hardly. On just the shitty 15 bucks an hour thats plenty for a halfway decent apartment, and a little car, of course if you know how to manage your money and dont go buying everything in sight.


Sorry, more keeps coming to me and I keep rambling. I saw a little bit of interest earlier, so I figured what the hell, might as well post it

[Narrock]

Reminds me of that movie, "North Country." lol