In early August 2012, following failed wage negotiations and civil unrest, about three thousand striking platinum miners employed by Lonmin plc gathered on a hill close to the town of Marikana in the North West province of South Africa. Nine out of ten Lonmin miners were migrants, mainly from the Eastern Cape, who lived next to the mine in squalid shacks and informal settlements.1 During a confrontation on 16 August, police opened fre, wounding 78 miners and killing 34 others. Many of those killed and injured were shot in the back.

Mining operations may be classified into surface mining, where the operations are unconstrained and open to the sky, and underground operations, where mining takes place in tunnels and galleries. In both situations roads play a key role as a typical mining operation consists of moving overburden (waste material) and ore from where the material was formed or deposited, to waste dumps or beneficiation plants.

In history, before miners had access to productive equipment  and blasting agents, mining was hard and hazardous manual work. The idea of excavating large volumes of rock to access even the richest mineral zones was not feasible, and, as a result, ore veins were selectively followed, predominantly close to the surface, or inside mountains. During the past century, introduction of diesel power and electricity, combined with new methods of mineral dressing, paved the way for large scale open pit mining, and later for mechanized underground mining. Nevertheless, the largest quantities of ore are still excavated from surface deposits.
Atlas Copco, as an equipment supplier with a truly global presence, has been at the forefront of technical and innovative development. From pneumatic to hydraulic power, from railbound to trackless haulage, from handheld to rig mounted rock drills, and lately, from manual to computerized operation, Atlas Copco expertise is making mining safer and more efficient. <...>

Engineers in the mining industry often must solve problems while in the field at prospects, projects, or places far from any personal bookshelf, company office, or public or private library. And it isn’t always feasible to bring along the voluminous authoritative books on mining topics so familiar to the profession. This handbook, then, is designed to fill the technical reference gap for the mobile professional who is away from the normal workplace with its comprehensive store of technical information and resources. It is a distillation of key technical information from the mining literature.