Tonka Trucks and Big Rocks

October 30, 2005

I got to ride in a dump truck! Sounds like fun doesn’t it? You would think that I might have had enough of riding around in trucks. Each truck is very much like the next one. They’re loud, hot, bumpy, and unless they are brand spanking new, they have been hammered by countless others before. All of this is indeed true, but this was no ordinary dump truck. This was a CAT 777C; a monster of a dump truck.

As I approached the front bumper I couldn’t help but notice that the bottom of the bumper was just above eye level. The first step of the ladder is at least three feet in the air. Seven steps up the face of this gargantuan and I was standing on the “hood”. Three feet above my head was the lid of the bed. Six long strides across the front and I arrived at the cab. It’s a one person cab with a jump seat for a second. My driver spoke no English and I speak no Bombara so conversation was not to be had. I’m sure he thought I was a freak for wanting to ride along, but I don’t care because it was cool.

Not physically cool, I mean I’m still in Mali. There were buckets of sweat pouring off each of us as we drove our 100 ton payload to the top of the hill. The trucks are rated for 90 tons, but they run them heavy. It was slow, loud, hot, and bumpy. Driving one up and down the mine ten hours a day, seven out of every ten days would suck. Riding one up the hill, dumping the load, and riding back was awesome. Who needs the roller coaster anyway?

The dump truck ride was just the icing on the cake. I had mentioned to some folks at a party last night that I was interested in checking out one of the big rigs. Hennie suggested that we meet him today at the lip of the mine pit. He would be blasting a section around one and then I could go down in the pit for my ride. We stood next to him while he commenced the countdown into his walkie-talkie. After one, there was a slight pause and then five hundred holes loaded with fertilizer and wired electronically to a computer erupted simultaneously. The Earth moved and a section of the mine went up in a cloud of dust and smoke. It was amazing!

As with most of the miners I have met, Hennie is a career man. Probably somewhere in his fifties, he has been mining for twenty or thirty years. He speaks to me as if I should know what he’s talking about. It’s hard to keep up, but I find it all so fascinating that I hang on every word. In eight years of operation the Sadiola pit has produced six cubic meters of gold. Currently the most lucrative mine in AngloGold (the second largest mining company in the world), they must extract three grams of gold for every ton of Earth processed to remain profitable at the current price of ~$450 an ounce. It is projected that some of the rock contains as much as six grams per ton while the majority carries somewhere between 1.5 and 4 grams per ton.

Let’s put that into perspective: There are 28 grams in an ounce and sixteen ounces in a pound. This makes 448 grams in a pound. There are 2,000 pounds in a ton so that means there are 896,000 grams. For every ton of Earth there will be 895,997 grams of waste. This waste material is sorted for potential future profitability and stored at various locations around the site.
Today was an intense crash course in geology and the art of profitable mining. I still have difficulty understanding a great deal of it, but while I’m here the visual evidence is unmistakable; there is a big hole in the ground and lots of dirt surrounding it. Huge quantities of Earth are moved every hour of every day to extract miniscule amounts of gold. All of that dirt gets hauled in big ass dump trucks and I got to ride in one!