Coal
My Memories of Coal
Coal powered the UK from the beginning of the industrial
revolution up to the present day and still provides 30% of electrical power
generation (Gas – 46%, Coal – 31%, Nuclear – 14%, Renewables – 5.5% ) although the coal is mostly imported as it
is cheaper to scrape the coal out of a vast hole in Western Australia and dump
it in a ship via massive conveyer belts and then transport it half way round
the world.
About 4% of the world rise in temperature due to CO2
emission comes from the coal burned in UK in the last 100 years.
When I was born coal was an every day experience especially
in Yorkshire which still has the largest deposits of coal in the UK , many of
the familiar towns in the West Riding started as mining towns with many local
coal pits. There were three pits within a mile of our house where I lived from
1946 to 1962. Some of my friends came from coal mining families.
The coal lorries used to crawl up the hill past our house on
the way to the mills in Bradford and they were so laden that the coal spilled
on the road, every day my mum went out to collect the precious lumps scattered
across the road. Outside our house was a gas lamp which illuminated the back
street and my bedroom, the gas came from coal gas made from coal in a local gasworks
about 2 miles away (coal is burned in an absence of air to produce coke, steam
is blown through the hot coke and the shift gas reaction produces carbon
monoxide and hydrogen.)
We had a coal hole to store the coal and we had a coal fire
in the back room always on, I could roast my bare knees when coming in from the
cold, we had a coke stove in front room with the TV, I learned how to light a
fire at an early age. As an aside our house was the first one in our street to
have a TV in 1952 and many neighbours came round to watch the coronation in
1953.
We had horrendous smogs when a high pressure caused fogs
which trapped the particles, then it was
not possible to see even half way across the road so no traffic could move. I
had to walk 3 miles home from school when this happened and your snot turned a
hideous black green colour.
When it rained the washing went black so it was important to
get the washing in before rain. The coal contained a lot of SO2 which forms
sulphuric acid in the waste gas and is exceedingly corrosive. My Gran – Grandma
Crowther - married to Grandpa Margetts, - my dad’s dad – died from damaged
lungs caused by this corrosion. There were many like her.
The biggest coal field is the South Yorkshire field between Leeds and Sheffield
and stretching out to the east with Towns like Wakefield, Pontefract,
Castleford, Rotherham, (see carboniferous in Yorkshire ) . A typical coal seam is 3 meters high and the
engineers drive two parallel tunnels 300 meters apart as far as they can into
the seam maybe 1, 2 or 3 miles, these provide the services to the coal face
which is formed by a connecting tunnel joining the two service tunnels. They
install shearing machinery which moves across the face shearing the coal which
falls onto a conveyer belt and transports the lumps to the service tunnel to
another long conveyer belt , then it is on its way to the surface. As the coal
is removed there are hydraulic jacks holding up the roof but the whole assembly
the shearer and the jacks automatically move as the face advances. Here is
the interesting bit, as the jacks move the roof collapses behind the jacks
so that the whole area sinks. Eventually the whole landscape above drops by about
half a meter across the whole coal field which is huge.
So some degree of housing subsidence was common. Mostly it
was minor but occasionally houses split down the middle. It was quite normal to
phone the National Coal Board (NCB) Representative and they sent round a team
to sort it out, usually they did not quibble, any crack whether due to coal or
not they would fix it. It was a bit like ICI Huddersfield Works where the azo
dyes spray dryer used to occasionally spray out orange dye which covered the
cars in the car park so you could get your car re-sprayed for free. (Only in
Yorkshire !!). Also The NCB board supplied free coal to its employees, giving
rise to the myth that miners kept coal in the bath instead of
using it for ablutions.[2]
References
Industrial Risk Started in the Coal Industry
A famous legal case Edwards v NCB
I think you know that I have been involved with
industrial risk assessment since 1974. Well the beginnings of industrial risk
assessment started in the coal industry in 1949.
Mr Edwards died in an accident after the supporting
structure for the mine roadway gave way. The National Coal Board argued that it
was too expensive to shore up every roadway in all of the mines.
The case turned when it was decided that it was not 'all
of the roadways' that needed shoring up; just the ones that required it. In
essence this established the need to carry out a risk
assessment to establish the cost, time and trouble to mitigate a risk
balanced against the risk and the severity of any harm it might cause. This
case established the concept of "reasonable practicability." The Court of Appeal decided that
"reasonably practicable" was a more narrowly defined phrase than what
was "physically possible." This allowed for the creation of equations
that measured the risk present in a given situation against the reasonable
practicability of mitigating that risk. In other words, the equation asked if
averting the risk was worth the effort it took to negate that risk.[2]
Gas – 46%, Coal – 31%, Nuclear – 14%, Renewables – 5.5%
Coal Mining Pictures
Subsidence
Prince Of Wales
Colliery, Casleford ( I went down this colliery in 1979)
