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By Thomas Leonard, Philip R. Berger, Bryan E. Papillon

Bardon Trimount Inc., a large producer of aggregate, crushed stone, and concrete, was experiencing significant public opposition to its five quarries in the Boston area. It was believed by the authors that this opposition could be significantly lessened if the total number of blasts per week were reduced. Although the blasting company at these quarries, Austin Powder Company, contended that this could easily and safely be accomplished by increasing the size of the blasts, regulations precluded this alternative by limiting the total amount of explosives that could be used per blast.

Jan 1, 1996

By John C. Brulia

The IME member companies, the ISEE along with its chapter organizations, the Federal, state and municipal regulatory agencies, and the industry consultants and suppliers have developed safety equipment, provided safety guidelines, promulgated safety-oriented regulations, and conducted safety training for blasting personnel in an effort to reduce explosives-related accidents.

Jan 1, 1994

Blastserve, ISEE’s Listserve is being replaced by our new Blasters Forum-online, an exclusive member benefit. Our goal is to provide an ISEE forum for you to network with your peers and exchange technical information and get answers to your technical questions. This forum is unique in the fact that only ISEE members are permitted to review or post on the site. Over time you will be able review the discussion history and use the archived discussion as a valuable resource for trends in the industry. The following are a sample of the discussions that too place recently on Blastserve

Jan 1, 2013

By Steve Dillingham

The origin of the written blasting log or shot report can likely be traced back to the earliest annals of blasting and record keeping. These records were, for the most part, a way of checking inventory, production progress, or billing, and not necessarily designed with the intention of being used as a legal document in a court of law. As our litigious society has evolved to include far reaching regulatory requirements, however, the blasting log has developed to support and aid in the defense of the common blaster from blasting lawsuits by providing a comprehensive written report of his or her actions.

Jan 1, 2002

By Carlos Neto

Traceability is the capacity to recover background, application or localization of an item, through a single, standard and registered identification. It is the identification process necessary to follow all events, occurrences, handlings and movements of a product. Generally speaking, companies and governments in the world are seeking ways for tracing the distribution of controlled products, such as food, medicines, firearms and explosives, within the supply chain as to increase safety of its consumers and the environment (ISO 14000).

Jan 1, 2007

By Jim Smith, Jeff Hudreth, John White

Jan 1, 2000

By John C. Adams, Darrel D. Porter

After conventional drill and shoot methods were determined to be unfeasible due the fractured nature of the ground, a "coyote" blast was designed to produce 250,000 tons of rock from Rhone-Poulenc's Maiden Rock silica pit located near Butte, MT. This paper will cover the design and excavation of the explosive drifts, the placement and priming of 190,000 pounds of explosives, and the backfilling of the drift to provide confinement of the charges.

Jan 1, 1993

By Tristan Worsey

This work was performed during the summer of 2008 during the junior year of a BS in Mining Engineering. It was observed that the mine was having a problem with back break during the blasting of development drifts. The unwanted back break was causing the mine extra costs in ventilation, ore dilution, ground support, back fill, explosives and man-hours. The blasting practices were observed for four weeks and the problems and their solutions were defined. In this paper the reasons and causes of the problem are explained with the proposed solutions to eliminate back break.

Jan 1, 2010

By Carl E. Jones

This presentation discusses the properties of the two-component explosive, KinePak, and how it is used by the utility industry.

Jan 1, 1978

By Robert Hopler

Torpedoing Wells. – On the completion of the drilling, or when the production is found to decrease, it is usual to “torpedo” the well to increase the flow. This process was patented in 1862 by Colonel Roberts, who believed, with many others, that the oil was contained in crevices in the rock, which might not have been tapped by the bore-hole. He therefore proposed the use of nitroglycerine, gunpowder, or other explosive, to break up the rock at the bottom of the well, so that these rich “pockets” might be brought into communication with the well.

Jan 1, 2007

By Paulo Cesar Pavan

T&T or Traceability, is a concept of generating, storing and on demand providing information about all traceable items in the supply chain

Jan 1, 2019

By Timothy Fogarty, Gregory Poole, Roger Reeder, David Switz

This project involved the construction of a new pump station and intake structure at an existing water treatment facility. Although the project involved a significant amount of rock removal, the specifications said no blasting.

Jan 1, 2012

By Ashley Haslett

A European Directive on Identification & Traceability of explosives came into effect on the 4th of April 2008. This directive is intended to establish a harmonised system for the unique identification and traceability of all packaged explosives, detonators, reels of detonating cord and primers used in civil applications across the European Union. The directive must be adopted into the national legislation of each European Union member state by the 5th of April 2009 with compliance achieved throughout Europe by the 5th of April 2012. The requirements of the Directive apply to all explosives manufactured, used and imported into the European Union from 5th April 2012.

Jan 1, 2010

By Milos J. Bila

I would like to discuss today several safety topics that we at Nobel feel are going to be particularly critical to all of us who are involved in the manufacturing, transportation, storage and use of commercial explosives during the '90s. My purpose is to identify these topics in order to allow those in the commercial explosives community to better understand the potential difficulties we face.

Jan 1, 1992

By Braden Lusk

A typical rural house surrounded by a surface coal mine was instrumented in 2008. Information regarding ground vibration, airblast, and sounds inside the house was collected. Previous publications have included conclusions about this data with regard to blasting source (far-field or near-field) and results as to how the residents experience the blast were made. Several events were also recorded that were not related to blasting due to the nature of the trigger system. The trigger of the monitoring system was attached to one of the mid walls of the house, thus other normal daily events produced vibration levels significant enough to trigger the monitoring system.

Jan 1, 2011

By J. Pizarro

Any organization that subjects its activities to a continuous improvement methodology, aiming to optimize their processes and services, must be able to adequately measure the results of the implemented changes to pursue better outcomes. This is no different for mining companies. When it comes to blasting, an accurate fragmentation analysis can correlate blast design and rock mass parameters to particle size distribution, enabling us to further analyze the correspondence of specific design patterns, applied to specific rock mass properties and the result in measured fragmentation indicators. Over time, many tools were developed for us to obtain PSD data, albeit each of them had their own shortcomings. The first ones to be developed involved photographing the muck pile including a scale object, uploading those photos to a PC, and using specialized software to analyze each one. As a result, analysts would get a PSD curve that served as reference for the performance of the blast. This method, which is still used, has major shortcomings. The most obvious one is that it is only able to capture a slice of the blast, which corresponds to the exposed section of the muck pile the analyst has access to, and even there its reach is limited to the areas that are safe for getting close enough for placing the scale, which are not many. Consequently, this is a very limited way to get a fragmentation performance assess for a blast. Currently, autonomous systems are capable of taking continuous pictures of the muck pile. Installed on a shovel, conveyor belt or crusher feed, these systems can take a continuous stream of pictures that are later analyzed automatically without the need of human intervention. These systems greatly increase the volume of data and, consequently, we have a PSD curve that is more representative of the blast performance. However, this technology still had issues when trying to sample front end loaders mining operations or getting results from underground blasting due to the inherent difficulties of these operations. New algorithms used for capturing and processing data for front end loaders can overcome the harsh environment of their operations and produce PSD data in high vibration environments and difficult mining angles. For underground mining, algorithms can be used to sample each truck exiting the mine, giving a reliable source of fragmentation analysis that can be traced back to their stope of origin. The development of this technology extends the existing system’s capabilities and helps us in our efforts to improve fragmentation results with each blast.

Jan 1, 2024

By Steven Putt

The paper presents new results from Datacloud during recent Seismic While Drilling trials in iron ore, metallurgical coal, and hard rock mines around the world. The measurements are compared with wireline geophysical logs, core data, drill cuttings, and conventional measurement while drilling (MWD) systems to validate the technology and show how the data can be used.

Feb 1, 2020

By K Uenishi, H P. Rossmanith, N Kouzniak, A Daehnke

This contribution presents an introduction into that part of the field of elastic wave propagation which is relevant to blasting of boreholes and addresses briefly borehole breakdown and the formation of the fracture network around a borehole which ultimately leads to the disintegration of the rock mass. Phenomena of this kind are encountered in mining and quarrying. Numerical as well as experimental work referring to stress wave expansion from a detonating borehole is addressed.

Jan 1, 1998

By Ryan Redyke, Jared Redyke

The demolition of an old power plant boiler house in Parsons, Kansas calls for the use of some linear shaped charges. The steel is thick and the structure is heavy but gravity can be a blaster’s best friend. This entry did not win in a very competitive category. We thought it was worthy of coverage in the Journal of Explosives Engineering.

Jan 1, 2015

By Jody Todd, Ernesto Villaescusa, Ronald Lachenicht, Kelly Fleetwood

In the underground environment, characterisation of a rock mass during the mining cycle becomes increasingly difficult due to a lack of rock mass exposure for measurement or observation. In most cases rock mass characterisation occurs prior to mining by inspection and logging of exploration drill core, or prior to mass excavation through drive mapping for geological and geotechnical data. Characterisation strategies, if applied during the mining cycle, can reveal near-field anisotropies that may affect the behaviour of the rock mass with respect to excavation. These methods can aid in understanding the performance of stopes based on geometry, in-stope extraction sequence, and stress modelling. One such method of characterisation involves the use of production blast vibration monitoring and analysis as indicators of rock mass anisotropy through travel-time tomography.

Jan 1, 2008