14
MODERN QUARRYING
January - February 2014
Right:
A general plant scene.
Centre:
The driver of this truck
was Sonny. He was paralysed
with fright in the cab and
wouldn’t let go of the brake and
steering wheel. It took a lot of
pleading to convince him that
the truck had been secured and
would not roll further down.
Far right:
Jackhammers drilling
for a production blast. Note the
bare feet of the spanner boy,
whose job was to collar the
drillbit, pull hoses and fix air
hoses.
passed. It was a miracle nobody got hurt that day.”
Henry says these were eventful days with farm-
ing and mining taking place simultaneously on the
same property. “We kept beehives and donkeys in
a camp above and behind the quarry. One day a
donkey decided to scratch its itchy body on a bee-
hive, seriously annoying the bees. This resulted in
the frightened donkey blindly dashing with out-
stretched legs over the edge of the quarry. The
dimension stone guys working at the bottom of
this 80’ face were quite surprised to have a donkey
splattered in a heap alongside them.”
Henry left Effingham some years later to work
at Coedmore. He was recalled there to destroy old
explosives that had been left in the magazines. “As
this was a nitroglycerine-based explosive, it was
dangerous work that could leave you with a very
serious headache,”he says with a smile.“There were
five 25 kg boxes with five 5,0 kg packets in each
box, with some stuff oozing out of it. I took this
load to an old disused, waterfilled quarry; tied one
5,0 kg packet to a piece of detonating cord, low-
ered it into the water and detonated it. This was an
amazing spectacle and I then decided to better it.
What happened next was beyond all expectations.
“The water actually came up in a mushroom
shape like an atomic explosion, splashed back
over the quarry highwall nearly dewatering the
quarry completely. The next instant, the sun was
hidden by the evaporated and atomised water in
the air. It was as if I was standing in a very thick
mist. I saw the most beautiful rainbow very close to
me. Unfortunately all the fish and frogs in suspen-
sion started coming down to earth again, and I was
left standing there with fish and frogs falling on my
head and hitting me in the face – this I count as one
The poor donkey ran over the
80’ face, landing up in a bloody
heap at the bottom of the
quarry.
a run for it, and for the first time in my life I saw a
man running so fast that his long beard actu-
ally split into two.
“Pieter ran into the sugarcane,” Henry
says with a laugh. “I can still see the cane
splitting in a path as he ran through
with his big stomach and his back
arched like in the comics, in an
attempt to keep his boep out of the
way of his feet!”
Blasting boulders
was another hazard-
ous activity. A small
hole was drilled into
the boulder with a
jackhammer and
then charged with
gelignite and a
slow-bur ning
safety fuse. “The
cheesa boys would
line up for me to start their cheesa
sticks, and on my signal all would
start lighting fuses and then run for cover.
“On this particular day, one of my regular
cheesa boys was absent, and I grabbed the first
guy in sight and explained the procedure to him.
Unfortunately I started his cheesa stick first and
while I was battling to ignite the other cheesa
sticks, he started lighting fuses without any of us
noticing. By the time we realised what had hap-
pened, it was time for the boulders to detonate.
We all started running for cover with the first holes
detonating behind us. We were overtaken by fly-
rock and in turn overtook one another, only to
be outrun again by the same person you had just
FACE TO FACE
