Close, oil sands operation working in the tailings department few years back, basically hauling the soupy component which is clay and silt largely. They would have our rather large crew of excavator operators try and spread the slop out on the cold floor of the containment cell so it would freeze (which was difficult at best because it was a warm winter), flip it a couple times, and then finally push it up using D9 and D10 dozers in to large piles that we could sit 90 tonne excavators on top and make frozen mud tail gates on a large fleet of trucks including Cat 777's (100 ton), Cat 785's (150ton), and Cat 793's (240ton). These big trucks would then go to another cell and get loaded with slop by massive Hitachi EX1900 (190 tonne backhoe style excavator), Hitachi EX2500's (250 tonne) backhoe or shovel excavator, or the big machine in the fleet on that job the Hitachi EX3600 (360 tonne) front shovel. All this slop and frozen mud would be hauled to a mined out part of the operation. Because of the weight of these big excavators and shovels before they would start loading slop the haul trucks would haul overburden from the active mining area as this stuff would pack nicely and hold up beneath their enormous weight.
