Heigh-ho, heigh ho...

Sometimes you just have one of those days where you are just so pleased that your job is what it is. For me, yesterday was one of those.

I had been invited, with my departmental health & safety hat on, to visit the underground laboratory at Boulby Mine, on the Cleveland/North Yorkshire border. So, I spent most of Thursday travelling up country, met up for dinner with the staff of the lab and the other couple of visitors that were also making the trip, and then crashed in a local hotel.

The next morning started fairly early so that we could have our safety briefing, get kitted out in lovely orange overalls and the assorted safety gear, and then catch the 08:30 cage ride into the pit. The cage drops about 1000 metres in something approaching 10 minute and is quite an experience being sardined in with 20-odd miners going down to start a shift. Boulby is a working potash mine (with a sideline in rock salt), so the scientists have spent a lot of time and effort building up good working relations with the mine workers.

The whole trip was an incredible learning experience. We were given a thorough tour of the lab area, the good, the bad and the ugly, which was fascinating, but what really astounded me was the mine itself. It's an environment that is so amazingly alien to me and which I had no real concept of what it was like.

We didn't have time to visit the working face (which would have been close to a two hour round trip), but we did get to visit a location where some scientific equipment (a muon detector) was about to be set up. This location was a half hour drive from the shaft! I had heard that there are about 100km of tunnels, but even that hadn't really prepared me for the scale of the mine. Many of these tunnels are full sized roads where two vehicles can easily pass each other (though there are some larger vehicles that find this less easy!). Travel around has to be via trucks, buggies and other diesel-powered vehicles due to the distances involved. Our guide and driver pointed out features like when we were passing under the coastline and began driving beneath the North Sea, or the workshops where the heavy mining equipment is assembled and maintained.

On the way back we were shown a "safe haven", a refuge where in the event of an emergency, workers could shut themselves in and have access to piped or bottled air supplies while they await rescue. Given that the ambient temperature there is around 40 degrees Celsius, you can imagine the discomfort if there are fifty men crammed in there breathing through smoke hoods, with a fire outside and no water supplies inside. Well, you can treat dehydration and heat exhaustion but you can't treat dead.

Unfortunately I don't have any photos of this as we weren't allowed to take any electrical kit down. But you'll just have to take my word for it, this was an awesome experience. And I owe great thanks to the team that was looking after us.