A report on a recent tour of the facility. Recently, two groups of geoscientists from Phillips Petroleum Company toured the United Salt Corporation mining operations at the Hockley Salt Dome in Hockley, Texas. The purpose of our trip was to see salt formation and deformation structures from a different perspective: from inside the dome with the structures in place. In the end we saw those plus a lot more. Safety is a top priority at Phillips, so we appreciated the fact that Chris DuPlooy, the mine supervisor, gave us a quick topside review of how to operate the respirators each of us were required to carry on our belts during the trip, in case of fire in the mine. It was a little disquieting when we each had to sign out a numbered metal tag and carry it in our pocket for possible post-fire identification purposes, but Mr. DuPlooy assured us that in the 68 years of salt mining operations at that site, there had never been an accidental fire.
He said the only combustible material down in the mine was their equipment, as the salt itself will not burn. So we piled into the main shaft elevator and down we went, 1,540 feet into the mine. The mine elevator is a story in itself, because everybody and everything going down into the mine has to fit either inside the elevator or be able to hang below it. Its dimensions are only 5 feet 5 inches wide by 5 feet deep by 10 feet high, so we were quite amazed at the fleet of vehicles and equipment we saw when we got down into the mine: pickup trucks, dump trucks, drilling equipment, front-end loaders, salt crushing and processing equipment, golf carts, buildings for equipment storage, and much more. Each item that was too big to fit into the elevator was disassembled at the top, brought down in pieces and reassembled down in the mine. One dump truck was so huge that the bed on it had to be cut into nine pieces and welded back together once down in the mine.
The salt crushing and processing equipment are near the main shaft so the air was very dusty as we left the elevator. We climbed onto the back of a flatbed pickup truck
(complete with benches for us tourists) and proceeded on our guided tour of the mine. Temperatures in the mine are constantly in the upper 90s and each worker drinks an
average of three gallons of water on their shift. We soon understood why. It was very hot and stuffy, especially when the truck stopped for us to get out and look at some aspect of their operations.
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