When you have the responsibility of supplying coal to an important facility like a power station, you don't have the luxury of time when it comes to unblocking the bins and chutes which load trains.

So Leigh Creek Coal Field, which serves the Port Augusta Power Station in South Australia, had to move quickly when its clam shell train loading chutes became choked recently. Not only was the situation causing train loading delays; the resultant buildup in its 9,000t bin itself was reducing capacity to less than 5,000t of flowable product.

Leigh Creek had experienced this type of problem before and had always had difficulty finding a company to clean the chutes and bin without causing major delays. Ideally the clean up operation has to be woven in between train loading operations.

They were justifiably sceptical when Australain Silo Clean undertook to get the job done in the specified time frame. Essentially the contractor needed to clean out the bottom of the bin, open up all the chutes and remove as much product as possible within 14 hours. This 14 hour "window" also included a four hour operation to crane equipment up and down, which left just ten hours for the cleaning and removal operation.

But in fact, by using the Australian Silo Clean System, it took only nine hours to clean the bottom of the bin, open up every chute and remove 2,700t of material.

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