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Transportation of the mined ore in any mining company is one area that gives a number of opportunities for cost savings. Maintaining a dustless haul road is merely one technique by which a mining business can start to trim down operating expenses.

One may think of a haul road as merely a dirty path that only serves one purpose, and that is to transport the mined ore from one site to another. But that filthy road is the artery of the total operation. Lacking that dusty haul road a mining company would soon die. To care for the road is essentially the same as taking care of one’s own physical condition.

We realize what occurs when our arteries stop working properly, but what happens when a haul road is no longer maintained correctly.

On a standard haulage road you will have haulage trucks roaming day and night. Certain haulage roads have as many as 500 trucks for each day. While others could have less trucks but the trucks they do possess are many times bigger and heavier. Again many of the operations are 24 hours each day every day with no time for stopping and starting.

While you have nonstop traffic on these roads you have to do something to reduce the dust. Several of these haul roads are in excess of 5 miles long and typically 50 feet wide. Each one of these roads will require approximately one gallon per square yard every day to keep the dust down. If you were to evaluate these numbers you may find that a typical haul road dust control plan will necessitate millions of gallons of water every week. In a number of places water is a incredibly treasured commodity that should be preserved whenever feasible not only for the availability yet also for the cost of acquisition. Just ask yourself, what would your water bill be like if you consumed in excess of a million gallons each and every week?

When the Haul road is watered to keep up manageable levels of fugitive dust, the road may begin to wear away. This erosion will set off pot holes and new imperfections which over time will cause the road to be un-drivable. Not only will this turn into a horribly uneven road, but those conditions will in addition cause untimely failure to the haulage trucks.

In addition, the cost of maintaining haulage trucks increases noticeably when they must run in a dusty environment. There are lots of parts on a truck that fail quicker when they are encircled by dust. The engine will ingest dust from the haulage road which will predictably end up in the engine oil, as a result causing a early breakdown of the truck and thousands of dollars in repairs.

Working on a haulage truck is not a simple duty. You can imagine having to change a tire that is 10 feet high. The annual expense to run these behemoths is greater than most American families make in five years. If you can lessen that expense you will be saving the business huge amounts of capital that might be directed at something more valuable.

Alleviating these costs is very easy. One just needs to make use of a modernized road dust control program that not only regulates the dust yet will in addition add a high level of erosion control. The more successful programs will actually change the old dusty dirt road into a unyielding stabilized driving surface similar to many asphalt roads. This in turn will get rid of the need for water as a dust control agent and will deliver a exceptionally smooth dust free driving surface that lowers the expense of operating the million dollar trucks.

Totaling all these savings together will effortlessly help a mining operation reduce their operating costs to the point where the dust control program has paid for itself inside a year’s time and the money from such can subsequently be added to the bottom line.

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