Powder River Basin Coal
Guided Day
Back when we were planning this trip, we signed up for a guided tour of the Eagle Butte mine just north of Gillette for this day. It begins at the Gillette Visitor Center. We board a small bus driven by a young woman who is a school teacher in that season and works at the mine in the summer. She has driven haul trucks carrying overburden and was offered the job of giving these tours. As part of her introduction, she describes the mining operations here as a “slow moving hole in the ground”. It is not something you think of right away in just a few days of looking. With this suggestion, I can start to imagine it. Almost a year later as I am finishing writing this, timelapse imagery has been put together from NASA’s Landsat satellite data spanning the last 28 years. Go to http://world.time.com/timelapse/ - click on “Explore the World” – click on Wyoming Coal or type in “Gillette, Wy”. You can zoom and pan around and see the mines on the move, often in spirals. Watch the trailing edges compared to the surrounding land. The reclamation efforts are quite apparent.
We start by going to an overlook area back by the main road that we had passed the day before. A big shovel is out there loading overburden into a working fleet of 240 ton trucks which pass close by under the road bridge. She points out the big fat “extension cord” alongside the haul road across the grassland to the shovel – it is completely electric. After this we take a tour of the equipment around the train loadout area but there is no train there. The haul trucks loaded with coal come close by to dump into the chutes feeding the underground crushers and conveyors. This close and moving, they look even bigger. An asphalt curb is in front of the unload chutes to keep them from backing up too far – it is about 3 feet high and doesn’t come up very far on the tires.
The expectation is to go from here to the active mining front, but the radio comes on informing us that a train is pulling into the loading loop and will be loaded right away. She drives over and parks the bus only a few feet from the tracks close to the loading tower. While we wait for the train to come into view around the loop, the people on the bus ask a variety of questions. The production staff is paid $20 - $45 per hour. Her dad works at the mine in a variety of roles and family is eligible for summer work. Only a driver’s license and two days training is required to begin driving haul trucks. She preferred the overburden trucks because the coal trucks were heavier, climbed steeper grades very slowly and mostly were more boring. Someone asked what the most dangerous job in the mine was – she had to think for a while. “None of them are inherently dangerous but inattention will make any of them so because you are working around such large heavy equipment.” I liked her answer – good advice all around – no texting for sure. That led to pride in the safety record. The mines keep track of days since a lost time accident. This is defined as an accident serious enough that the injured cannot report to work for their next shift. Eagle Butte was at 8 years. I’ll bet even most McDonalds are not that good. They really do take it seriously – everyone who works here.