Chapter 10 Coke oven workers: coal-black smoky color all over the face, gray-black ten finger ink on the temples

"Thirty-eight on the top of the head, one hundred and eight on the feet." This is an image summary of the summer working environment of workers in the coking plant of Dagou Coal Mine. Every day there is a high temperature of 38°C on the head, and a coking oven with a temperature of 180°C under the feet. Days of high temperature have made the workers even more difficult. A dirty towel was placed on Li Kaiming's bare shoulders. He was operating the "winch" on the top of the slope. When the switch was closed, a deafening roar came from this simple "winch machine".

This is a kind of power equipment for a rickshaw that relies on mechanical pulling to send coal powder to the coke oven. Behind him is an empty furnace that has just finished producing coke, and the large empty furnace pit is hotter than the sun.Standing by the stove, the suffocating heat wave hits our face. From head to toe, Li Kaiming, who is covered in coal dust, is from Shandong and is the "coking captain" of this coal mine.In this coal mine, he has worked for more than ten years.Most of the "team members" under him are relatives and friends such as cousins, uncles and nephews brought from their hometown.

What they do in the coal mine is another type of work, which is also a miner, but the name needs to be changed-coke oven workers.Coal bosses generally settle wages based on the coke output of each of their coke ovens. In the past few years, due to the continuous boom of the coke market in various places, the price of coke has been rising all the way. Of course, coal bosses will not give up the product market of primary coal processing.It can be said that more than 90% of the "products" produced by the numerous coal mines in Shanxi are "self-produced and sold". This is a "reprocessing" site that "supports" coal mines and coal production.

On the hillside 500 meters southeast from the coal yard, there are more than a dozen popular local coke ovens lying in disorder along the mountain. The so-called coke oven is actually a large pit with some criss-cross fire passages at the bottom that communicate with the outside.Generally, this coke oven can produce more than one hundred tons of coke at a time. The specific process is to first install a large coal pulverizer in the middle of the coal yard to crush the coal into coal powder, which is the "raw material" for coke production.Then, workers use rickshaws to transport the coal dust to the coking oven through a "winch". Since the road has to pass through a ramp of nearly 100 meters, the coal boss installs a "winch" at the top of the slope.This is actually a "winch", one end fixes the steel wire rope on the drum, and the other end hooks the rickshaw that transports the coal powder with an iron hook. Carriage coal powder is filled in the coke oven.

Of course, after transporting the coal powder to the side of the coking oven, how to pour it, its strength, direction, angle and space are all learned in actual operation.There are coking "veteran" on-site guidance, because the bottom of the coke oven is equipped with ignition materials, if you do not pay attention, the coal dust will "drown" the ignition materials, and you must take out the coal dust , reload. After the coal powder is installed, the next step is to "ignite the furnace". In some places, in order to achieve the greatest success, the ignition material is dipped in diesel oil, so that the combustion is more complete.

After the coke oven is ignited, the coke oven master will take a few apprentices to watch beside the coke oven day and night, carefully watching the "ignition point". This job is called "stove watching", and you can't leave the coke oven even if you need to eat, drink and sleep. In the next few days, flames several meters high will burn around the coke oven. The thick black smoke floats freely in the air carrying sulfur, carbon and various underburned chemicals, and finally "swaggers" into the atmosphere. At this time, the sky is hot, the ground is scorched, and the air is dry.

In such an environment, people can't stand it, let alone the crops in the field a hundred meters away? In 1996, the "Decision of the State Council on Several Issues Concerning Strengthening Environmental Protection" explicitly banned and shut down 15 kinds of heavy polluting small enterprises.These include: small papermaking, small tanning, small dyestuffs, soil coking (using backward methods such as "pit type", "Pingxiang type", "tiandi pot" and "open type"), but here, "the sky is high and the emperor is far away" "The vast majority of coal bosses still go their own way in order to save money.

At this time, if more than a dozen nearby coke ovens are fired at the same time, the light from the "flame array" produced by the burning of coal powder can be clearly seen by people on the mountain roads three to five miles away around the coal mine at night. When walking on a rugged mountain road, it is often possible to see the ground without a flashlight. After half a month, the furnace will be poured. This process is the most likely to burn people. At this time, more than a dozen water pumps were working at the same time, and the workers held the water pipes and sprayed wet water on the fire inside the coke oven.

The nearly 500°C high-temperature furnace suddenly poured clean water, and the hydrogen and oxygen molecules in the water were instantly decomposed, and instead became the "combustion aid" of the high-temperature coke oven. The scorching air waves filled the entire earth with soot and dust. Then the furnace is sealed, and the top of the coke oven is tightly covered with fine soil. After a week, the workers dig out the formed coke piece by piece in the coke oven with a residual temperature above 50°C. Based on the calculation of a coke oven with a standard output of 20 tons, it takes half a month to burn a furnace of coke, plus it takes more than 20 days to pour the furnace, seal the furnace, and release the furnace, as well as coke oven maintenance, The time it takes to make up the brickwork takes one and a half months for the entire "coke cycle".