Rio Tinto's Kennecott Copper Mine in Bingham Canyon Utah is getting back into the underground mining business of mining for copper. You see Kennecott Copper Mine has been an open pit copper mine for the better part of one hundred years. But now, Rio Tinto is to get back to mining coppers roots. Well, the underground mining stuff is literally deeper than roots. Tree roots anyway. I've had relatives that worked for Kennecott Copper back in the day and my wife's father worked for Kennecott Copper so Kennecott Copper is sort of like family for me anyway. I've been to the bottom of the Kennecott Copper pit and the scale of the open pit mine is quite the site to see. Being at the bottom of the pit puts the imprimatur on exactly how small the human species is in actual fact. I had an acquaintance that I'd known when growing up and we were sort of friends. So as a young man my sort of friend was able to get a job working in the 'pit' and that turned out none too well for the guy. At the very bottom of the open copper pit is a gigantic thingy called the crusher. Big dang open pit mining ore trucks dump their loads of raw copper ore into the crusher thingy and the ore begins its transformation into the copper wire that brings the electricity to your homes and stuff like that there. Long story short, the 'new kid' got to work at the mouth of the crusher to make sure that the ore was swallowed and the crushing process began its work of reducing raw copper ore into the sludge that gets purified at the processing mill and smelter. Now this tale of tragedy gets cruel...kid is working at the mouth of the crush monster and slips then takes a header inside the ore crusher. The kid did not survive and there wasn't enough of him left whole to load inside a casket. Sad story no doubt. I'm very familiar with Rio Tinto's Kennecott Copper Mine in Bingham Canyon. Now with the news that Rio Tinto is going back to underground mining, well, I sort of had to pause for a couple of minutes for some personal reflection. I had to wonder what the hell those underground miners are going to do when they mine into a Balrog. Gandalf might not be of a mind to save the miners collective asses and that underground mining is that deep and going deeper. I realize that this was a long and winding road of verbose posturing to grab a modestly unfunny joke from the depths of a copper pit. ☺ Machine art comers next and I didn't even have to dig too deep for machine art gold. Or copper in this case.
dancer -
post -
hammer -
collage -
the retelling of the kid that was crushed in the bottom of the copper pit is true oh yes the tale is true. names have been intentionally left off for legal reasons. 😬
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