[RightWhale]

What little I know about mining I learned at the School of Mines, Fairbanks. The best part of the course was the field trip where we got to drill a rock face way back in the zinc mine and blow it up with dynamite. There was an amount of stupid behavior with the detonation and explosive handling which shows that:

education is not a cure for stupidity.
--Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 1787

[Eric in the Ozarks]

I was mine manager for a couple of years at a two dragline operation. We used ANFO to shoot overburden and DuPont Tovex to shoot the coal. Most of our overburden shots were blast-cast, to move 30 percent of the material into the empty pit as we created the new pit.
When we got close to farm houses, we would "deck" the shot, splitting the column into two shots with two delays to reduce vibration. I saw one of these on a 80 foot deep bench where the scraper operator went within a few feet of the farmer's house. One shot could consume 10,000 pounds of ANFO.