 |
| A bagger on a bog near Edenderry. © Eugene Brennan |
The remains of a bagger on a bog at Mount Lucas near Edenderry,
photographed in 2009 (using a dumb phone, so quality not great and I
didn't have the digital camera with me). Baggers were like mobile
factories, with bucket excavating arms that harvested turf, macerated it
and turned it into sausage-shaped sods for burning in power stations.
They were powered by a trailing cable connected to local 3.3 kV power
lines. This machine was later moved to BNM's Edenderry depot and the
transformer removed, I'm guessing because it contained (or they wanted
to check whether it contained) polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which
are organochlorine compounds, once used for cooling electrical equipment
and making carbonless copy paper. They are highly toxic and were
subsequently discovered to be carcinogenic.
