Big Muskie

Big Muskie in February 1999.

Big Muskie was a coal mining Bucyrus-Erie dragline owned by the Central Ohio Coal Company (formerly a division of American Electric Power), weighing nearly 13,000 metric tons (13,000 long tons; 14,000 short tons) and standing nearly 22 stories tall. It operated in the U.S. state of Ohio from 1969 to 1991.

Design specifications and service

The Big Muskie was a model 4250-W Bucyrus-Erie dragline (the only one ever built). With a 220 cubic yard bucket, it was the largest single-bucket digging machine ever created and one of the world's largest mobile earth-moving machines alongside the Illinois-based Marion 6360 stripping shovel called The Captain and the German bucket wheel excavators of the Bagger 288 and Bagger 293 family.. It cost $25 million in 1969, the equivalent of $208 million today adjusted for inflation. Its bucket could hold two Greyhound buses side by side. It took over 200,000 man hours to construct over a period of about two years.

Specifications

Manufacturer:	Bucyrus-Erie
Model:	4250-W, "Big Muskie"
Weight:	27 million lbs., or 13,500 short tons
Bucket Capacity:	220 cubic yards, 325 tons
Height:	222 ft., 6 in.
Boom length:	310 ft.
Machine length (boom down):	487 ft., 6 in.
Bucket weight (empty):	230 tons
Width:	151 ft., 6 in. (comparable to an eight-lane highway)
Cable diameter:	5 in.
Electrical power:	13,800 volts
Mobility:	Hydraulically-driven walker feet

Big Muskie was powered by electricity supplied at 13,800 volts via a trailing cable, which had its own transporter/coiling units to move it. The electricity powered the main drives, eighteen 1,000 horsepower (750 kW) and ten 625 horsepower (466 kW) DC electric motors. Some systems in Big Muskie were electro-hydraulic, but the main drives were all electric. While working, Big Muskie used the equivalent of the power for 27,500 homes, costing tens of thousands of dollars an hour just in power costs and necessitating special agreements with local Ohio power companies to accommodate the extra load. The machine had a crew of 5, and worked around the clock, with special emphasis on night work since the per kilowatt/hour rate was much cheaper.

Once it had stripped all the overburden in one area of the pit, it could move itself short distances (usually less than a mile) to another pre-prepared digging position using massive hydraulic walker feet, although due to its 13,500 ton weight it traveled very slowly (8.8 feet per minute, roughly .1 mph) and required a carefully graded travelway with a roadbed of heavy wooden beams to avoid sinking into the soil and tipping over or getting stuck.

During its 22 years of service, Big Muskie removed more than 608,000,000 cubic yards (465,000,000 m³) of overburden, twice the amount of earth moved during the construction of the Panama Canal, uncovering over 20,000,000 metric tons (20,000,000 short tons) of Ohio brown coal.

Fate

Increased EPA scrutiny and a rapid drop in demand for high sulfur brown coal following the passage of the 1977 Clean Air Act, coupled with regular yearly increases in electricity costs and continued public opposition to strip mining operations in Ohio eventually made Big Muskie unprofitable to operate, and it was removed from service in 1991. Attempts to sell the machine to another coal company found little interest due to the massive costs involved in dismantling, transporting and reassembling the machine. Additionally, by 1991 the few US coal companies still practicing open-pit mining had transitioned to smaller, newer, and cheaper digging machines with much lower operating costs. The only remaining large scale open-pit brown coal operations that might have been suitable for Big Muskie's design were located in Germany, where more efficient giant bucket wheel excavators had long since made draglines obsolete.

After 8 years of inactivity, the final act for Big Muskie came in 1999 when the state of Ohio and the Environmental Protection Agency began moving to enforce the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, which required all equipment be removed from former strip mines so the sites could be environmentally remediated. Since further delays would result in millions of dollars in fines, and the cost of moving the obsolete machine would also run well into the millions, the COCC opted for immediate on-site scrapping. Despite calls by enthusiasts and historians for Big Muskie to be relocated and made into a museum, the machine was broken down with explosives in late 1999 and sold for scrap with the exception of its massive bucket, which was preserved and relocated to a newly constructed Miners Memorial Park in Morgan County at 39°41′57″N 81°43′52″W.

A wildlife park called The Wilds, which opened in 1994, was created from 10,000 acres (40 km²) of the land stripped by Big Muskie and reclaimed. It is home to numerous species of African, Asian, and North American fauna.

See also

• Dragline
• The Silver Spade - another large coal mining machine from Ohio
• MAN Takraf RB293

References

• Little Mountain
• Strip Mine

External links

• Tribute page, with pictures
• Miners' Memorial Park -- Noble County tourism website
• Attraction listing at Roadsideamerica.com
• The Wilds –- wildlife park constructed on land mined by Big Muskie