Orgreave S24's washout (1 of 3)

This short sequence of three photographs is a rare chance to see how adverse geological conditions affected a (relatively) modern longwall face. They were taken on 2nd May 1980 at Orgreave Colliery, near Sheffield, South Yorkshire.

Please note that I did not take these photographs. They were taken by my colleague Jim Batty who was the NCB area photographer for South Yorkshire. I have used these on many an occasion to illustrate geology lectures and I am most grateful to him.

Photo 1: A view looking along Orgreave S24's face in the Swallow Wood seam. The coal seam is on the right, the banks of hydraulic powered roof supports are on the left. The normal travelling way (a crawl!) is beneath this canopy of supports. In the centre leading away into the distance is the armoured steel conveyor (the 'panzer'). You can also see the sprocket chain that coal cutting machine (not visible here) used to haul itself along the top of the conveyor.

This particular coal face operated in the year before the mine closed, and it was beset with geological difficulties, which were suspected in advance, and that's why this particular patch of coal was one of the very last to be worked.

The main problem was the irregular, undulating sandstone roof. In essence, the coal was worked beneath a complex 'fossil' river channel system, where sand originally deposited by the rivers fills in the channels and eventually gets turned into sandstone. In this photo the sandstone is pale grey and sits fairly evenly on top of the coal. But it is already breaking into large lumps and falling out prematurely. Further on, in photos 2 and 3, the river has cut down more deeply and eroded away the vegetation that was to eventually become coal, causing a 'washout'.

It was part of my job to map these channel features and to try to predict what they would do next. So I spent a lot of time on this particular face. I remember it very well indeed.