Were did the red hills go.

[grumpytramp]

The Parksider wrote: Red hills and black hills. Sure the black hills are the usual shale and of course as a coal mine at some point it's typical coal mine heaps.Was the "red hills" from the iron coloured fireclay that would almost certainly be involved here??At West Yorkshire Colliery pit hills at Austhorpe there's a lot of red clay/shale waste.After all the bricks of Leeds are all red and of the fireclay mined from this area.Your intriguing thoughts please?? OK I cannot make any constructive comments about these spoil heaps as I have no recollection of them ........ however on the matter of red shale .......mmmm!The majority of red shale found in spoil heaps is not a product of fireclay or brick industry (there waste is typically easy to spot being made of lumps up to cobble size of hard fired clays) but from one of mother natures little tricks.The vast majority of 19th Century colleries had neither a market for or the technology to recover fine coals and therefore fines were either left on the deck underground or ended up in the spoil heaps. Modern collieries have been able to exploit various clever technologies (cyclones, froth floatation etc) to recover fine coals from the run of mine production. As a consequence many old colliery spoil heaps have relatively high coal contents (sometimes as much as 20-25% ) and often in quantities to justify washing or re-washing the tip to recover the coal. These spoil heaps were often a loose tipped mixture of shales, mudstones, sandstone, fireclays and fine coals (often the shales were carbonaceous in nature). As these come into to contact with air Iron Pyrites in coals and shales begins to oxidise, which as a by product produces heat which as consequences accelerates the oxidiation of further materials until ultimately there is sufficient heat for spontaneous combustion of the coal content (the same problem existed underground with air passing over the wastes were fine coals were liable to spontaneous combustion). The result is a burning tip (or bing as they are known here in Scotland)See http://pro.corbis.com/images/EC002256.j ... AF83EB7%7D which shows the burning bings at the former Polkemmet Colliery in West Lothian, or http://www.entecuk.com/downloads/pp_015.pdf the problems on the otherside of the M8 at RiddochhillObviously in the core of the tip there is insufficient oxygen for a 'blaze' but the core temperatures can reach extraordinary levels and sufficient for the shales/mudstones to be baked to the orange/red colour that one would associated with bricks. The red shale (or as it is known in Scotland, Red Blaes) produced makes an excellent general engineering fill and is frequently recovered in reclamation schemesUK Coal recovering red shale at the Sharlston Colliery reclamation scheme see http://www.ukcoal.com/sm-sharlstonThey are not good neighbours apart from the risk of openfires at the surface they are often characterised by the sulpherous stink that they generateWhere burning shale (or in this case a burning seam of coal) comes into contact with the air the results can be spectacular see the second half of this page:http://www.cargolaw.com/2004nightmare_coal-face.htmlor a little less spectacularly at Riddochill http://www.flickr.com/photos/10484985@N ... otostream/ (note the burnt area of shale in the background), http://www.flickr.com/photos/10484985@N ... otostream/ etc

[chameleon]

That was quite something - I can't help thinking that Mr H&S these days might be a tad unhappy at carrying a fire around in a dumper     

[Jak]

THANKS FOR ALL THE INFO I HAVE FOUND OUT MORE ABOUT THE PIT HILLS IN THE LAST WEEK THAN ALL THE YEARS I LIVED THERE AS A LAD.

[grumpytramp]

chameleon wrote: That was quite something - I can't help thinking that Mr H&S these days might be a tad unhappy at carrying a fire around in a dumper Although it looks a tad chaotic it was a carefully planned operation, see http://www.qrc.org.au/conference/_dbase ... lf.pdfThat said, imagine going to see your insurance broker for a quote for your plant when you have some nice free publicity shots on Youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngyQFOl9CjkThere is some really scarey stuff happening there, what the Cat 777 dumptruck is dooing standing vertical is anyones guess!

[chameleon]

grumpytramp wrote: chameleon wrote: That was quite something - I can't help thinking that Mr H&S these days might be a tad unhappy at carrying a fire around in a dumper Although it looks a tad chaotic it was a carefully planned operation, see http://www.qrc.org.au/conference/_dbase ... lf.pdfThat said, imagine going to see your insurance broker for a quote for your plant when you have some nice free publicity shots on Youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngyQFOl9CjkThere is some really scarey stuff happening there, what the Cat 777 dumptruck is dooing standing vertical is anyones guess! You know, I suspect these days, some enterprising sole would find a way of making a profit out of a disaster like that, probably selling it off as 'instant coal'