Flat Bay - Loading Trucks

 

 

Flat Bay

Loading Trucks

As I mentioned yesterday, trucks brought the crushed gypsum to Corner Brook where it was processed and used in gyproc/wallboard. They used large front-end loaders to scoop up the gypsum and fill the large trucks. It was a very efficient, and busy, operation at the time.

Here are a couple of comments I received yesterday ...

The Type of crusher where the trucks dump their load is a jaw crusher and this applies to any open pit mining, limestone, asbestos or copper. This is what is called primary crushing because the end product is generally -3" whereas the secondary crushing is generally a cone crusher.

That gypsum deposit is enormous. Two places it showed up in my youth was in that it ran from Flat Bay to the Railway crossing of the Fishells River (salmon fishing) and then on to one of my favourite trout ponds, Plaster Pond south of the Heatherton railway station. The Plaster pond outlet flowed directly into a gypsum cliff wall over 100 feet high and emerged later in Salt pond and was quite saline. Obviously a salt deposit there as well.

There had been drilling in the deposit and a lot of salt was found. J. Smallwood projected that where there was salt, there was potash. Alas, it wasn’t there.

---

In 1993, I was contracted to create a series of videotapes on Mining in Newfoundland and Labrador

and it was a dull day when I travelled to Flat Bay with a videographer to videotape and photograph the gypsum mining operations, which were quite big operation. It was only a year or so later that this mine closed.

Much of the gypsum from this mine was shipped out of the province in large ships, however some was shipped to a walboard factory in Corner Brook where the rock was further processed to be made into gyproc.

---