Published in the March 2010 Australian Longwall Magazine
Currently the production manager at Australia’s top producing longwall, Newlands Northern, this issue’s Longwall Larrikin, Gary Mitford, has had a 30-year longwall career spanning the United Kingdom and Australia.
During that time he has seen plenty of longwall faces and experienced some remarkable events.
Gary has worked at Hucknall, Sherwood, Asfordby and Daw Mill collieries in the United Kingdom and Oaky No. 1, Carborough Downs and Newlands Northern in Queensland.
His favourite hobbies are reading, winding his kids up and sitting in a spa having a beer.
Q: What is your earliest mining memory?
My first day at Moorgreen training centre in the UK. I arrived as a 15 year old complete cleanskin wondering what this working for a living was all about. A group of us got off the bus to be greeted by a sergeant major type who frog-marched us around the training centre with dos and don’ts. This was our induction and it lasted about an hour. About a week later on my first trip underground I was introduced to a wooden haulage (wooden gears) that was dated from sometime in the 19th century.
Q: What made you choose mining as a career?
My mining career started in the Midlands in 1979. At the time the choice was the mines or very little else. Employment was difficult to find and further education was not what it is today. This was an era when mining was big. When I started, there were 246 mines employing 276,000 miners. Most industrial towns were based around a mine at some time.
Q: When was your first underground visit?
One week in down Moorgreen training gallery. This was a previously worked out seam of an operational mine that had the entire infrastructure required to operate – albeit old and out of date. During this visit I was taught how to ride a conveyor belt which was and still is acceptable with appropriate control measures.
Q: What was your favourite job in a coal mine?
One of my favourite jobs was as an 18 year old working in the longwall as a ‘tailgate ripper’ on an advancing longwall of a massive 1.2m height. Along with four others, my job was to excavate and support the tailgate roadway by drill and blast and steel arches. The team I was in was very young for the time (18-27) and also involved significant socialising outside of work. It was like having a second family.
Q: What was your least favourite job?
A few years into my career and with the decline of the UK industry I was transferred (again) to another mine and had a difficult time assimilating into the culture. This was largely because the mine was, in many ways, a stand-alone unit where the workforce didn’t readily accept newcomers, particularly from other geographical areas. This lasted about six months and was probably the most miserable I’ve been.
Q: Who, or what, has most influenced your mining career?
I’ve had a couple of good mentors during my career who I’ve admired professionally and tried to emulate. Additionally, self-determination to succeed has always played a major role in my attitude and commitment. The coal mining industry of the early 1980s was a harsh environment; we were still killing and maiming people by the dozens, and I wanted to make a difference.
Q: What do you consider your best mining achievement?
Obtaining my first-class manager’s ticket in the UK at the end of 11 years of education which started the real beginning of my career. This has allowed me to undertake many roles and assisted my move here to Australia. Another satisfying achievement was participation as a team member of the winning side in an annual UK junior safety quiz competition with the prize of a week in France (to see a coal mine).
Q: What do you see as being the greatest mining development during your career?
When I started in 1979 the average mine had three longwalls (some up to five) with as many as a dozen developments to produce a massive 1 million tonnes in a good year. My first mine was called Hucknall Colliery, had five longwalls and six developments, and only managed to produce around 700,000t in a full year. The first longwall I worked on was 1.2m high and had an upgraded 120hp trepanner coal cutter – used to be 70hp (you’ll have to google that one). Most mines now have 1 longwall with one or two developments and produce anything from 4 to 9 million tonnes. So the greatest development is the evolution of mining equipment and methods particularly longwall performance from an average of 5k per week for a labour-intensive advancing unit to around 180k a week for a highly technological retreating unit.
Q: Do you hold any mining records?
I’ve been involved with a few achievements. I was a longwall deputy in 1987 that raised the mine shift record of longwall metres cut from 1080m to 1550m on a 1.2m high advancing unit. This was achieved during a three-week Christmas competition (the great turkey run), no doubt spurred on by the motivation to win a turkey per man for the highest performing crew on each longwall – a real incentive. I’m not going to bore you with others as they are meaningless with the evolutionary, almost revolutionary, improvements over the last two decades. The most recent record I’ve been associated with is Newlands Northern Underground with a short-lived weekly output of 269k (beaten by Oaky North shortly afterwards) and the current Australian annual record of 8.7Mt.
Q: Do you have any unfulfilled ambitions?
Complete my Australian Class 1 manager’s qualification. I would like to think I’m close, having recently obtained the Advanced Diploma.
Q: What was your most embarrassing moment in a coal mine?
Too many and equally too embarrassing, but now laughable (to me), to tell.
Q: What was your scariest time in a coal mine?
I was a deputy at Sherwood Colliery in 1988 and was supervising a team recovering a BSL ‘ramracker’.
We were short of labour so I operated the endless haulage engine whilst the two guys accompanied the load up a drift. They were approaching the top when the haulage jerked, breaking the rope, followed by a cloud of dust suggesting the load had run away.
Knowing that haulage teams travelled one in front and one behind, I ran up the drift fearing a serious injury or worse.
First I passed the load which had come to rest under the conveyor, then to my horror a belt complete with cap lamp and rescuer. I frantically searched until I found him huddled in the roadway side, squeezed into the flange of a steel roadway arch.
The load had caught a steel arch, point loaded the rope then ran back as the rope broke. The man behind the load, seeing what was coming his way, made himself as thin as possible, moulding into the steel support flange. The only reason the incident had a rosy ending was that his belt had deteriorated to the point of near failure so when the load passed and snagged him it simply broke and took his lamp, rescuer and belt.
Q: What is your worst memory of coal mining?
I was a shift under-manager at Asfordby Mine in the UK which I considered to be one of the best mines I’d worked at until that point. It was 1997 and safety awareness and cultural change was being pursued with earnest.
I believed I was working at the safest mine in the UK but it still didn’t prevent the worst shift of my life. It was 4:25am and I was approaching the pit bottom when I was hailed by the control room on the Dac and asked to ring them immediately. I was informed that a loader driver, Charlie, had been discovered unconscious further inbye.
To cut a long story short, the driver suffered a fatal trauma as a result of a faulty park brake on his loader. Everything that was humanly possible was done to try and save him but to no avail.
I remember not sleeping for several days. I remember looking at his widow with four young children at his funeral. I remember trying to justify in my mind the unjustifiable loss and I distinctly remember pledging that this was not going to happen again.
Q: Do you think the day of the fully automated remotely operated face is near?
Longwall operations have undergone tremendous change during my career from units producing an average of 5k a week, industry best 20k a week to now where we regularly see performances of 200-300k a week and worldwide annual performances of 10Mt not far away.
Technologically, we have gone through an industrial revolution in term of coal mine performance in just 20 years. However, I think the fully automated and remotely operated longwall is still some time away and I cannot foresee the time where the longwall will operate without human intervention onsite. I believe the fully automated longwall will happen sometime in the next five years, but remotely, that’s a big question.
Q: What major improvements would you like to see on longwall operations?
From a human perspective we still have some way to go for environmental improvements with regard to dust, noise and other atmospheric contamination for underground mine workers, as we still rely heavily on one of the least desirable forms of personal protection with PPE.
We should set evolutionary improvement targets to incrementally and progressively reduce peak and average exposure limits within a technological achievable framework in the same manner as we do budgetary control or performance improvements.
We need to focus on automation to reduce the inconsistencies of human involvement. No two individuals or teams work the same, consequently the only way to optimise, standardise and guarantee consistency is to reduce dependency on human interactivity.
Automation means consistent repeatability thus eliminating wastage in terms of time, and optimisation in terms of rate. Humans will always be required to review and monitor the operation to ensure compliance to pre-determined parameters and to effect repairs.
