Salt Mining
WA Surface Mining made an innovative decision to use their machines to surface mine salt at Useless Loop in Western Australia. This proved to be a very successful endeavour, with production rates of 500 tonnes per hour being loaded directly onto road trains.
The floor of the pond at Useless Loop consisted of an excessively thick layer of salt crystals that had been untouched by the existing harvesting machines for many years. The machines in use at the time simply could not deal effectively with the uneven floor or the hardness of the salt caused by the continually developing salt crystals. The W2000 road profiler was set up with laser-levelling equipment to create a perfectly level floor. The pond that was harvested was approximately 300m by 350m in size, leaving behind a perfectly level floor to enable better growth for the salt.
Today, many of the road profilers have been converted with sealed cabs for the mining of salt into WASM’s surface mining technologies. Another 2500SM will be arriving in November 2008.
WASM's fleet consists of:
- 2 Wirtgen 2200 surface miners
- 2 Wirtgen 2500 surface miners
- laser systems for accurate level control
- 2 fully equipped service trucks
- 2 water trucks (capacity 15,000 litres each) to service the surface miners and to aid in general dust suppression duties
- 1 Caterpillar IT Loader
- transportable site offices and amenities
- transportable workshops
- generators to supply all site and workshop power needs
- extensive spare parts storage for on-site accessibility
- a fleet of 4-wheel drives