Dust Monitoring, Characterization and Prediction in an Opencast Coal Mining Project

Dust pollution is the most important environmental issue associated with any opencast mining activity. Drilling, blasting, loading, transportation, crushing, conveying, haul road and the exposed overburden face generate large quantities of fugitive dust. Silica is a potential carcinogen and its exposure to the workers may be detrimental to their health which may result in progress of silicosis and lung cancer. Prediction of dust concentration in and around the mine is essential to have an impact assessment of the mining activity over the surrounding environment. In the view of this, current project work focuses on the real time monitoring of dust level at different sources of the mine using DustTrak II, personal exposure of dust to different workers using personal dust sampler, characterization of dust collected from different locations using FT-IR and finally prediction of dust concentration at different locations of the mine and nearby areas using AERMOD view software. Lakhanpur opencast project, the largest opencast mine of MCL in the Ib valley area producing more than 15MT of coal per annum, was chosen for study to have a better knowledge about the impact assessment due to dust from large opencast mines. The monitoring was conducted during December 2013 to assess scenario of dust pollution. The dust concentration was found to vary between 0.474mg/m3 to 150.0mg/m3 in PM10. Drilling and Surface Miner operations were found to be the major sources of dust generation. The dust exposure of worker was found to vary between 4.55mg/m3 to 29.41mg/m3. Minimum quartz content was found at coal transport road at 0.23% and maximum quartz content was found at wet haul road of LOCP at 0.49%. The predicted value of dust concentration (PM10) at most of the places was found to be below NAAQS-2009 limit for annual average of 60µg/m3