boutte
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There seems to be some interest being expressed about this. Here's a photo of the Navajo mine. Notice the bucket which scoops up the earth. I've walked up to one of them, and then walked into it. It's big enough to park a big rig tractor inside. Kind of like walking into a warehouse. And yet the bucket looks small in comparison to the machine. They are ship sized:
There is a man sized door on the top part about the center of the machine that would allow a man to walk out onto the top and then walk around the edge. Don't fall off because it's more than 50 feet to the ground from up there.
This photo looks like it's old, when the machines were new. They didn't look this nice 40 years ago when I was last there, and I doubt that they've been made to look any better since.
They strip off 240 feet of soil off of a 40 foot thick coal bed. They walk ever so slowly up and down a three mile long edge hollowing out a 300 foot wide section of the coal bed, and then stacking the soil they remove onto the top of the last width they dug away.
There are three of them each working their own miles long strip. About once a day the feet come down and it moves 10 or 12 feet to the side and then it keeps digging. Several years to move up and down the length of the area it digs.
They fed coal to 7 power plants all within 5 miles of the mine at the peak. I know most if not all of the power plants have been shut down. 60 years ago there were three power plants. 50 years ago that number had grown to 7. The power fed the city of Los Anglais in California.
I was about 25 when I worked there, just out of the Air Force. I was on the crew that installed the second set of stack scrubbers, working there for about a year. Before the first stack scrubber were installed one would need to rinse the fly ash off of their car almost daily. I remember that when I was in grade school.
After the first scrubbers were installed that chore was reduced to about once a week.
Then there were improved scrubbers installed in the following years. The set I helped install 40 years ago got it so rinsing a car off once a month was pretty good.
Then after I left the area an even better set were installed. It got to a point that the air didn't seem polluted any more. We had had LA kind of 1970's air 800 miles from LA when I was a kid.
Each time the government was making them install better scrubbers the company would cry and say it would cause them to go out of business if they had to do that.
Each time they fought and fought to not do it, but were eventually forced to do it.
They still made a lot of money after having to do that, it never caused them to go out of business.
Even after the scrubbers the air didn't look polluted, but it was still poisonous with invisible chemicals. Acid mostly, caused acid rain, destroyed forests. Still killed vulnerable people who had respiratory health problems.
I'm glad those coal burning power plants are gone. Almost all of them are now gone.
