Mine Site One

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  11. Mine Site One

  

 

  

Location

Pristine Mine Site One is located about 130km from the Capital, Clement Basin.  The road from Clement Basin to the Mine is in reasonable condition, though unsealed for most of its length.

  

Layout

Map of Part of Mine Site One, not to scale

 

Accesses

There are five gates in and out all told, though most people just use the main gate or the residences gate.

 

  

Security

We don’t have a lot of video surveillance here.  The gates and the equipment shed mostly.

 – PSO

  

Vehicle Parking

The main vehicle parks are at the PSO, administration, the equipment store, the main pit and the residential block.

  

Area Descriptions

Front Gate

The gate itself is a simple lightweight boom gate on the inbound side.  The Crawler rolls up to a booth just in front of the gate and a blue-uniformed Mining Bureau worker slides open a window.

  

Rear Gate

There’s no booth at the rear gate but there is an intercom where one can buzz for access.

There’s a few ways you can go from the Rear Gate.  If we go down this way we go past the Equipment Store and come around to it.  Turn off near the Equipment Store and we get to the Main Pit and Residential.  Or we can go back past Administration and that takes us down and around to the Rear Gate as well.”

  

Administration

Administration is a cluster of pre-fab buildings joined with inter-connecting corridors.

  

Parking

A vehicle lot out the front of the administration buildings typically containing a small assortment of other vehicles ranging from snow skidoos, light-off-road vehicles, a couple of multi-person open-sided carts, to a crawler or two.
There’s a sign on one of the buildings saying Administration.
  

Administration

One of the pre-fabs is the Administration building.  It contains a foyer with a receptionist and the Shift Manager’s Office.  

  

Human Resources

A pre-fab next to administration.  Contains a waiting room and some offices.

  

Welfare Office

Joel Cagnotti’s office.  Messy desk, smells of tobacco smoke.

  

Public Safety Office

Unlike the prefabs that make up the mine admin offices, this looks to be a drop-ship deployable forward military post.  Though judging by the dirt that has banked up against the sides with plant life growing out of it, it was deployed some time ago.  A military version of their crawler and a couple of off-road vehicles in Legion black with public safety decals are parked out the front.

Whichever he decides, inside the PSO there is a an airlock which is being used much more casually than if this were a forward base in a hostile environment and is now just a heat trap to keep the cold out.
Beyond that is a waiting room and a counter with a buzzer – Please Press for Attendance.

  

Crusher #3

A tall funnel-shaped structure built at the edge of a towering rock wall, conveyor belts at the top and bottom.  A sign indicates that this is Crusher #3.
There is a small control booth near the base of the crusher.  Several sets of stairs and catwalks ring the structure in a steel lattice.  There are few people about, a blurred face can be seen behind the glass of the control booth, but things are pretty quiet people wise.  Noise wise, hearing protection seems to be a good idea; one can feel the vibrations through the structure.
 
Near the top of the metal funnel a catwalk circles the structure.  Arriving at this catwalk, the Ops Manager leads the team around to an area between the rock wall and the funnel.  Here in the side of the funnel is an open fence of metal bars with gaps about 5cm wide.  There is a cross bar about half way up and another near the top.  The fence area is about 3m wide and 2m high.  Either side of it the funnel walls rise another metre or so.  Not far overhead, the inward conveyor extends from the lip of the cliff out over the funnel.  Rocks of various sizes are tumbling along the conveyor belt and dropping off the end into the open funnel, hitting the walls further down and bouncing into a set of slowly spinning toothed metal cylinders at the funnel’s base, where they are being inexorably ground into gravel.  

  

Residential Manager’s Office

The RM’s offices are three of the residential buildings joined together, making for a slightly warren-like interior of living spaces pressed into service as offices.  In a few places it’s obvious that holes have been cut in walls to make things more workable.

  

Ore Transfer station

What Oliver sees is a series of conveyor, plus trucks, dropping crushed ore into a giant, sloped reservoir of rock.  At the end of the reservoir is a chute that empties into the ore buckets.  The buckets themselves arrive on a cable loop and then switch off to a secondary loop where they queue up under the ore chute.  Oliver watches for a time and it seems the flow from the chute is variable depending on how much ore is coming in at any given time, buckets leave when they are full, or after a maximum wait time.  Some are full and some nearly empty.  

When they leave along the secondary loop they switch back to the main loop, waiting for a few seconds if needed so that they are evenly spaced along the main cable. The main cable travels at about 10 km/T (40 km/h). 

There is a large, glass-fronted control booth mounted on a gantry with stairs going up that overlooks the ore loading post.  From the ground, Oliver can see a single figure behind the glass.

“Dunno how you’d fall in [to an ore bucket], there’s not many places you could reach a bucket.  Maybe if you climbed up there on the ore reservoir, or up by the main entrance where the buckets go through the cutting.”

“I guess if you had to jump out the fall’s only a couple of meters in some places, or when you got to the other end I suppose you’d get dumped onto the rock pile at the refinery.”

Along the road back to Clement Basin, the twin line of moving ore transport buckets on their overhead cable running alongside them, a chain of red and yellow lights running beside them on the dark road – there is a red one atop each of the supporting pylons and yellow ones at the corner of the buckets.  Not long before reaching the point where the road begins its curving descent down into Clement Basin, and just before lunch, the line of buckets veers off from the road in the direction of the spaceport.  A rough service track branches off from the road to run alongside the bucket line.

 

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