Geotechnical soil properties of Podkrušnohorská overburden dump

Abstract

Since the very beginning of its development the brown coal openwork in Sokolov area has been marked by lack of overburden dumps for piling up overburden materials. Under these circumstances virtually all of these overburden dumps of operating opencast mines were fully or partially built up on a seam area and overlap part of coal reserves not being in the past designed for mining, or with awareness of necessary partial extraction in the future. The overburden dump management works continually with tense balance of discharging areas, therefore it was always necessary to use the discharging areas to the maximum. Many measures were worked out for the purpose. We can say that without these measures we could not solve a whole series of complicated conditions of overburden dumps structure in this area and thus in some degree ensure reliability of dump capacities.