Walking the Dumps..... Memories!

[Michael Alexander]

I was tipped of by Skinny that the Flamingo;s had returned to the Salt Pan on the other side of the Southern Dumps.... Yesterday afternoon seemed like the perfect time to take Shadow and head south through the dumps..... each step a memory back to the 70's..... not the same as those years, most of the junk , the castles, tracks , wild horses, cannons, tanks ..... long buried..... the following snaps are all titled and in no particular order and will have no meaning whatsoever to those of you who did not spend your youth building an empire in those grand old dumps....

the one part of the trip which still remains are the chimney stacks that were removed from the power station and dumped here in the late 70's.... as kids, without knowing what we know today, we played on these giant tubes.... fibres blowing in the wind....

There appears to be a top level of ground that has been used to cover all that junk.... to the west towards town garage , a large hole.....

I also saw a speeding ostrich hurtle passed Shadow at an incredible rate of knots...

We found a concorde in the dumps..... this boat seemed well and truly lost...

[Michael Alexander]

 

[georgswa (Georg Ruf) (RIP)]

And i am almost sure those fibres from the chimney was asbestos......

[Michael Alexander]

 

[Michael Alexander]

 

[Michael Alexander]

 

[Michael Alexander]

@ Georg, I think you are indeed right, as a 9 year old kid, we did'nt know what it was, we still played with the stuff...... 30 years down the line, I am still healthy..... what does get me..... is that about 12 years ago, the entire dump got covered.... except for those chimneys and a small section next to the gun club......

[Mike Voden (RIP)]

You'll be surprised what you find at the old dump site, back beyound the Gun Club. I can remember dumping a few of the smaller gennies from the Power Station back in the early eighties. They were dumped and then quickly buried for some unknown reason.

[Michael Alexander]

Clint and I would go ballbearing hunting behind the town garage.... down near Tyre City.....

Was the item in the below pic not taken form the abattoir?

[Mike Voden (RIP)]

Difficult to say Mike, there was also plenty of material that went missing from the abbatoir

[Michael Alexander]

Like Biltong......   

[Bob Molloy]

Some famous dumps
Just north of town (about a kilometre of so) on the road leading to the old Central Fields there was a sand road to the left that led to the old South Workings which included a number of well-equipped workshops and a cable railway system designed to drag cocopans up a kilometre-long slope from the mine to the screening plant and then gravity-feed them back to the mine.
The workshops, fully fitted with drilling and grinding machines, lathes, work benches, bench vices etc also included inspection pits fitted with power points for checking vehicles. The whole complex was powered by an on-site generator driven by a diesel engine which was a complete unit taken from a scrapped WW2 German U-boat. Such a setup was the accepted make-do-and-mend attitude of the postwar days when there was very little available in the way of equipment or even building material.
The South Works closed about 1950 and became a standard dumping ground for obsolete machinery and other plant. That included the diesel-electric unit, still in pristine condition, plus the entire cable railway system, spares, tools, electric motors ecetera.
Due to the security restrictions, which were still strongly in force when I left Omund in '67, it is unlikely that any of this was removed and most probably it's all still there, waiting for some 25th century archeologist to wonder at the holocaust which destroyed all this industry. My foreman, a helluva nice guy called Fritz Heiser, regarded it as a spare parts store for Siemens-Schukert motors during the years before we replaced everything with the newer squirrel cage motors. I often nipped down there to strip off an item here and there for reuse.
Further on, taking the right fork on the tar-sealed road towards the old Ovambo compound and North Electrical Workshops, there is a screening plant dump on the right just past the old Gemsbok screenplant and workshop. This is the graveyard of a number of old Siemens-Schukert scoops and an immense piece of machinery known as the Sauerman Scraper.
The scraper was a huge steel tower about 40 metres high which moved on caterpillar tracks like a tank. It also had a smaller "slave" tower which stood at some distance and acted as the other end of a gigantic dragline system which used a massive steel bucket to remove the sand overburden from the workings. So huge was that bucket that it was possible to park an entire landrover in it, so it was a substantial piece of equipment.
The main tower was fitted with an engine room which carried a heavy duty compressor for the air operated system and a 600 horse, 1,000 volt electric motor to run the tracks and dragline. On the top, above a dizzy series of access ladders, was a tiny, glass-enclosed operator's cabin with a single seat and a bank of levers.
Operating the big scraper from that height was the equivalent of riding a bucking broncho when the cables heaved and jerked the tower around the sky as they took up the load. Bored sparkies would relieve the routine by scaring the bejeezus out of new Appies by asking them to stand behind the operator's seat and hang on while the sparkie "tested" the electrics after the weekly maintenance check (first locking the cabin door in case the joke went wrong). Too heavy a hand on the controls caused the most alarming swaying so that anyone not hanging on was flung around like a rag doll, myself being the worst offender. At the same time I would scream some such phrase as "jeez, we're going over" and look panic-stricken. It never failed to raise a reaction. I gave up that little game after one white-faced youngster had to be helped down the ladderway and refused ever to go up again.
Sorry, didn't mean to digress, had almost forgotten my evil ways.
When the Scraper passed its use-by date in the early Sixties it was "retired" and was crawled over the desert to a point at the foot of the Gemsbok dump. There both towers were laid flat in line with the dump, together with the huge bucket, and dumping continued. Within a year the dump had advanced to completely cover all trace of this huge machine. This was a popular and easy way of disposing of awkwardly large machines in those days.
Just further north along that same road at the point past the compound on the left of the road (in fact just next to the old North Electrical workshop) is a huge collection of Siemens-Schukert motors and switchgear from the old days of German management when the company used real equipment and not the American crap of later years. All this was dumped in a huge excavation just behind the workshop and covered up.
In fact, almost the entire Gemsbok area between the road and the sea is a graveyard of machinery and old screening plants. It would have required a major earthmoving operation to bury them so I assume most of it is still visible.
Regards,
Bob.

[Michael Alexander]

Thanks again Bob, mining history...... I got to thinking about Bob's words.... currently there is a private company removing all scrap from the main scrapyards on the mine... I believe this contract to be worth about 600 million for the mine (income from scrap). I am now wondering how many of these scrapyards they might have missed, due to the sand covering large machines, as was the practice back in the day..... perhaps a good few millions worth?

[Alfred Boehme]

Hi Bob

The rail line and plant was that not just south of the tank farm about 5 km's, maybe got a few photo's of the stuff always wonderd were it was used and when?

[Alfred Boehme]

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