[Sequoyah101]

Fair enough. After I wrote that i remembered seeing pictures of a dragline moving over some pretty good looking land.

Never spent much time up in that country. Been there, don’t want to go back.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

Surface mining requires preservation of the upper layers. Top soil and the best underlying clay are peeled off with motor scrapers and then stockpiled separately. A mine manager will observe this stripping with an eye toward collecting the most good dirt at the bottom of draws and swales where it has been moved by erosion over time.

The shale is drilled and fractured so the dragline can create a pit for the coal to be removed. The width and depth of the pit is dictated by the dragline’s boom.

The dragline operates from a flat shale bench, created by a dozer. As the pit is exhausted (at the property line or where the coal crops out,) a second and third rectangle is opened up, with the overburden from the next cut being reclaimed into the previous cut with dozers or cast blasting.

A perfectly timed operation will see the scrapers picking up clay and top soil in the third or fourth cut and laying it down over graded and terraced shale in the first and second, ready to be put back together.