Fly rocks produced during blasting have been a dominating contributor towards injuries/fatalities and dangers to the property. Majority of blasting accidents, about 25 percent, in open-pit mines are due to fly rock. Fly rock is commonly generated due to blasting of shallow holes. Excessive fly rock can be resulted due to geological conditions, blast design parameters, type of explosives and their distribution in the blasthole, blast face condition, boulders blasting or carelessness of human beings. Investigations were carried out by the authors at four open-pit mines in India to study the generation and propagation of fly rocks and solution thereof. The experimental work at each site revealed that the excessive inclination of shot holes was one of the important reasons for generation of fly rocks. It was found that the reduction in inclination of holes made the problem of fly rock surmountable. The results also indicated that stemming length to burden ratio in bench blasting played the key role in controlling the distance travelled by the flying fragments. The stemming length to burden ratio of 0.7 restricted the fly rocks within 100 m.
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