Coal Dust - The Badge Of Miners

Coal dust – the kind that coats a miners face and body – his lungs. It fills his mouth so that he has to spit, rinse his mouth from time to time with his water bottle. Imagine a long-wall face, underground a hundred metres or so, where half a dozen miners are strung along it. The ‘stonemen’ on the night shift have increased the height, above and below the coal, however the ‘fillers’ still have to work on their knees. They wear knee pads and most have on a short-sleeved vest and shorts. The coal has been ‘fired’ by placing charges at several metre intervals – the coal dust – a thick heavy cloud! The ‘fillers’ wait until it settles a little although the air is never clear. The lights on the miners’ safety helmets blink through the murk, their heads swinging back and forth as they shovel the coal behind them to be taken away to the surface. This goes on all shift and each miner on the face is filling a rectangle of coal one metre high, several metres long, by the depth of the cut, about 1½ metres.

In 1948 the ‘fillers’ on a long wall face at a North East British Colliery earned £20.00 (€25/$40) per week. The ‘stonemen’ earned half that amount per week and unskilled men working underground earned around a quarter of the ‘fillers’ wage per week. They came to the surface after each shift, coated with coal dust. At that time the colliery did not have its own baths, so the men went home dirty. Coal dust got into everything and was even sealed into the wounds they received whilst working – forming blue streaks – The Badge of Miners!

I cannot take credit for writing this imaginative and informative piece - it was written by my very good friend Dr Jeff Smith, himself once a miner. It does however concatenate with the solutions that my company Primasonics can offer those power generation plants and cement plants which handle coal, especially fine milled coal which tends to both ‘rathole’ and ‘bridge’ in coal silos & hoppers. It is perhaps fitting that our Acoustic Cleaners can eliminate some modern day problems associated with the storage and discharge of fine coal.