One could think of a haul road as only a dirty path that just serves one end, and that is to transfer the mined ore from one site to a new. But that dirty road is the artery of the whole operation. Lacking that dusty haul road a mining operation would soon expire. To care for the road is basically the same as taking care of one's personal physical condition.
We realize what occurs when our arteries stop operating properly, but what occurs when a haulage road is not maintained correctly.
On a normal haulage road you will have haul trucks roaming day and night. Several haul roads have as many as 500 trucks per day. While others can have less trucks but the trucks they do own are many times bigger as well as heavier. Once more many of the operations are 24 hours all day each day with no time for stopping and re-starting.
When you have continuous traffic on these roads you should do something to reduce the dust. Several of these haul roads are greater than 5 miles long and more often than not 50 feet wide. Each one of these roads may require about one gallon per square yard each day to keep the dust down. If you were to work out these numbers you will discover that a normal haul road dust control program will require millions of gallons of water each week. In some locations water is a very treasured commodity that should be conserved when feasible not only for the availability yet also for the expenditure of acquirement. Just ask yourself, what would your water bill be like if you consumed in excess of a million gallons each and every week?
When the Haulage road is watered to keep manageable levels of fugitive dust, the road may begin to erode. This erosion will bring about pot holes and further imperfections which over time will cause the road to turn out to be un-drivable. Not only will this turn into a awfully rough road, but those conditions will furthermore cause early failure to the haulage trucks.
Furthermore, the price of maintaining haul trucks increases noticeably when they have to work in a dusty location. There are a lot of parts on a truck that stop working faster when they are bounded by dust. The engine will ingest dust from the haulage road which will inevitably end up in the engine oil, thus causing a untimely failure of the truck and thousands of dollars in upkeep.
Working on a haulage truck is not a easy duty. You can picture having to change a tire that is 10 feet tall. The year on year cost to operate these behemoths is greater than most American families get paid in five years. If you can reduce that expense you will be saving the company enormous amounts of cash that might be directed at something more constructive.
Alleviating these expenses is quite uncomplicated. One simply needs to utilize a modernized road dust control plan that not only controls the dust yet will in addition add a elevated level of erosion control. The more successful programs will in fact change the old dusty dirt road into a unyielding stabilized driving surface akin to many asphalt roads. This in turn will eliminate the need for water as a dust control agent and will deliver a very level dust free driving surface that will lower the expense of operating the million dollar trucks.
Tallying all these savings at once will without doubt help a mining operation reduce their working expenses to the point where the dust control program has paid for itself within a year's time and the money from such can after that be added to the bottom line.
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