Jaguar and The Float

Gday to everyone.  I thought it was about time I put up another post on my blog since I have now got a few days off work.  To be exact, today is my first day off since moving to Jaguar mining camp just over 6 weeks ago.  I haven’t done a lot today apart from catch up on sleep, although my body clock still managed to wake me at 4am this morning it was a great feeling to be able to roll over and go back to sleep.

I was at Jaguar for 4 and a bit weeks.  At the beginning, camp life was rather good.  Although there was only a dozen or so of us staying in the camp, so there wasn’t a whole lot of atmosphere, the food was pretty good, the rooms were excellent and the facilities (gym, rec room, etc.) weren’t too bad either.  I was joining a crew that had started building a tailings dam.  This is a dam where the tailings, (waste slurry) is sent to after the processing mill has extracted the minerals out of the slurry.  Eventually the slurry will harden in the dam and become part of the landscape.  I started out on a dump truck again but as time went on I was able to jump onto other machines including the water cart, grader, rollers and front end loaders.  Once we had finished constructing the dam wall (which was 1800m in circumference) a few of us were given the task of laying drainage (aggi) pipe on the floor of the dam to assist with the hardening process.  This was fairly labour intensive but was a good change from being in the machines.  By the end of the project there were only five people left in the camp which was quite dull and the food was becoming rather repetitive so I was definitely looking forward to the project finishing.

 Top: The view of the tailings dam from on top of the waste dump (we used this waste dirt to build the dam)

Bottom: The view from the centre of the dam of two loaded dump trucks travelling around on top of the dam wall to compact it 

A few days before finishing at Jaguar I was told that the float driver had lost his license for drinking too much and not getting a taxi, and asked if I wanted to float the machines back to the yard from Jaguar.  I jumped at the opportunity as it was a chance to learn something new and also meant I would have some work in between Jaguar and the next site starting.  So for the last two weeks I have been racking up the kilometres on a beautiful caterpillar prime mover and expandable float.  On my first solo day I was given a baptism by fire as I was asked/told to bring back the big water cart (a caterpillar 769, which holds about 70,000litres of water).  This machine was so big that I had to remove the water canon on top so as to be able to get under powerlines.  That said, when the water cart was loaded onto the float I was 4.6m high (the maximum allowed for my permit) and 3.6m wide which meant I required a pilot vehicle as well.  There were a few scary moments when there was an oversized load coming the other way but all in all the trip went pretty well, as did the following two weeks, and I learnt a bucket load in a very short amount of time.



 Top: The float loaded with the cat 769 water cart

Bottom: The float loaded with a 30tonne excavator

 

Tomorrow I have booked in for a round of golf with three other boys from the dongas here in Kalgoorlie.  I then have Monday and Tuesday off before travelling to the next job on Wednesday.  The next site is called Edna May and is located just off the main road half way between Perth and Kalgoorlie.  Again this will be a camp job.  Hopefully there will be a few more people in the camp this time to provide a bit more buzz.  This project is a tailings dam lift.  Once a tails dam is full and it has hardened the hardened slurry can be dug out and used to build up the walls of the dam, which provides more volume to the dam.  The lift on this dam is estimated to take 6 weeks, so I will be making the most of these few days off as it will most like be another 6 weeks before I see a sleep in again.  After that I will have to wait and see what comes up.

I have been loving the warm weather here in WA and hope that the sun is shining where you are too.  Cheers