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Mining Mishaps Down Under

Digger Blogger | 18:21, Thu June 30 2011

I have recently been in contact through Facebook, with an old school friend called Michele McNulty who has lived in Western Australia for some 24 years now. By pure coincidence her son is a mechanic in the large open cast mines in the Perth area, and she has kindly sent in this first batch of photos to share with us.

I am sure many of you will have seen some of these shots before, but they are still worth another look. I know from the emails I get from readers just how much you enjoy the “cock up” shots!

First up this Hitachi EX1800 has taken a tumble over the side of the massive on site low loaders that they use to transport these monsters around on.

The large Hitachi excavators appear to be in the wars on these massive mining sites, no detail on this shot but it would seem that there has been a bit of a collision with the Cat dumptruck !

This Hitachi machine has been buried under a massive land slide, with the large rocks causing considerable damage to the body work!

Landslides seem to be a big problem in the mines; in this shot we can see further results of such incidents, with a large dumptruck all but buried..

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In this shot one of the large walking draglines teeters perilously on the edge, having been attached to some large winch/anchor points, whilst a small hydraulic excavator digs away underneath the machine to aid with the uprighting 

The driver of this Caterpillar 785 dumptruck had clearly not realised his skip was still in the raised position as he attempted to drive under this temporary tunnel on site.

This Terex/O&K RH340 appears to be extracting itself from a flooded pit.

And finally in this batch, a Cat dumptruck is being rescued after backing over the edge at the tip area. I cannot see any evidence of any kind of bund at the edge, the like of which we are currently being enforced to construct on UK sites today.

The Digger Blog is really looking forward to more exciting material from the big mines in Western Australia... Keep your eyes peeled over the coming months.

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