Hard Rock Mining

Along with millions of other people, we watched the rescue of the miners in Chile last week. As some of the details came out I couldn't help but remember my years working in a similar mine.

Instead of Gold and Copper, the Henderson mine was a Molybdenum mine. Located on the east side of Berthoud Pass in the mountains of Colorado the entrance was at 11,000 feet, and the hoist operator dropped us in a wire enclosed “cage” 2500 feet down a shaft to the working level. The half mile descent took a hair raising 3 minutes and when we stepped out to go to work, the temperature was over 90 degrees. In the winter on graveyard and swing shifts the temperature on the surface was sometimes 40 below and when we would emerge from the cage after the shift, wet and steaming, our clothing would freeze between the shaft and the dry room.

While I worked there the mine was still under development; we were digging drifts and shafts to the ore body in preparation for production. The similarity of depth and temperature with the Chilean mine is striking but there was one big difference; the mine in Chile was dry, the Henderson mine was wet...very wet. If we had been trapped underground for very long. the main danger would have been from drowning because the water, which was like a constant warm rain, had to be pumped from every heading to the main shaft where a series of huge pump stations at 6 different levels pumped it up to the surface. There were backups to these pumps and the mine had its own coal fired power plant in case of a power failure, but a serious cave-in would have shut things down and the mine would have quickly filled up with water.

I rode in a carpool with 5 other miners so I only had to drive once a week or so but it still took two hours out of every day just going to and from work.

Looking back, I suppose it was about as safe as a large mining company like AMAX could make it, but it still was dangerous work. Our crew had more than its share of accidents. One miner had a severe compound fracture from a rock fall, (his leg bone was sticking out of the side of his boot,) another had a punctured lung, (a one inch drill rod through his chest,) and I even got carried out in a stretcher one night with a slashed arm when I slipped and fell off of a drill boom onto a sharp edged rock.

After two years of helping to carry injured friends up out of the mine and riding with them in the mine ambulance sixty miles to a hospital in Denver, I decided to find another line of work.

I guess I'm a slow learner.