When Abandoned Mines Collapse

https://practical.engineering/blog/2025/5/6/when-abandoned-mines-collapse

by impish9208 • 1 year ago

228 79 1 year ago

practical.engineering

LeoPanthera• 1 year ago

[Video]

gruez• 1 year ago

There's a transcript below?

tart-lemonade• 1 year ago

True, but it references visuals only present in the video. It would be nice if there were stills from the video included for those who prefer to read.

schiffern• 1 year ago

Direct link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZg1zOKm5wk

I do appreciate creators who give us a real website alternative, not just drop videos on <centralized platform>. Everyday Astronaut is another great one.

varjag• 1 year ago

I remember visiting LKAB in Kiruna, Sweden. Enormous iron ore mining operation and not abandoned at all. I believe it accounts for 10% of all concrete consumption in Sweden. The town in all its Scandinavian mid-century glory at the time was slowly collapsing with facilities and people being moved away a few km. Really hope they saved that erect rocket from the town square.

tilt_error• 1 year ago

I think that rocket still stands [0] :) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxus_(rocket) [1]: http://www.astronautix.com/m/maxus.html

hermitcrab• 1 year ago

I have been down the mine with my family. It was fascinating. I wish they would allow tourists into more big industrial facilities like this.

autoexec6• 1 year ago

I was surprised that insurance companies wouldn't cover damage from mine subsidence. I guess the lesson is to never buy property if you can't get insurance to cover something (wildfire, flood, hurricane, etc) at a reasonable rate since you're all but certain to encounter it eventually and be left on the hook for high costs.

cogman102• 1 year ago

It's why programs like FEMA are so important.

The issue with private insurance when it comes to natural disasters is they don't like losing money (understandable) and the climate is changing.

Those two things together mean that this year you could have good insurance that covers freak accidents, but what about next year, or next decade? An area that may have only seen flooding once a century might be predicted to see it once a decade or even once a year.

People still live there. Some people lived there with the insurance coverage for those natural disasters only to see it slowly go away or to be outright cancelled. We can't expect that they all migrate.

sokoloff3• 1 year ago

We can't expect that they all migrate.

They can’t expect us to cover their losses, especially predictable and repeated losses.

ndileas3• 1 year ago

I feel strongly that we should save every human life it's possible to save during disasters. Fema is pretty great at that.

However, that doesn't neccesarily imply that there should be flows of money available to rebuild in vulnerable locations. Insurance becoming unavailable or unaffordable is probably the best signal available that someplace is a bad place to live. If you can't afford the price or the risk ... There are lots of other places in the world.

_carbyau_• 1 year ago

I mean, we don't have to expect they will want to migrate. But life is all about how we handle change, both at the personal level and as a society.

When people throw money at an IPO only for it to tank we don't go around refunding them. Investments generally are NOT guaranteed, this includes assets like a house.

Should society at large be paying for someone's luxury beachfront home to be rebuilt over and over in the face of lack of insurance? Should people ignoring the climate observations and making dumb decisions NOT be penalised by losing their assets?

Honestly, there are good answers to this last question - no one wants to see an instant slums and the ongoing effects burdening society. No one wants to see grandma thrown to the curb. To be considered a society one has to act like it, which includes helping those who are down.

But not by trying to reset it back the way it was. Not by guaranteeing that people can make decisions - silly or not - with any level of guarantee.

Maybe a government buyback for property in an area that is rezoned because of climate reasons. Maybe a change in building standards to make rebuilds more reliable in the face of the new normal. Maybe public housing elsewhere to absorb the impact of such events until people can remake their lives and move on. Feel free to insert better ideas.

But the change in circumstances - in this case climate activity - has to be handled or it borders on stupidity.

lqet2• 1 year ago

The issue with private insurance when it comes to natural disasters is they don't like losing money (understandable) and the climate is changing.

I strongly believe in mandatory house insurance. We live in an area where full house insurance was mandatory and organized by the government until the 90ies. It was cheap, because it was subsidized and everybody paid in. Then they privatized the insurance, and they weren't mandatory anymore. A relative of mine realized that insurance that would cover flooding would now be nearly twice as expensive in his area as the previous mandatory insurance, so he got one which did not cover flooding. 8 years later, his house was flooded.

A few years ago, a family of 5 here became homeless because their house burned down. They did not have any insurance and lost 600,000 EUR and their place to live.

FuriouslyAdrift• 1 year ago

FEMA has nothing to do with insurance. They do grants, cover temporary gaps in coverage time for insurance, and coordinate repsonses across regions (multi-state).

You are thinking of programs like the NFIP (national Flood Insurance Program)...

Unfortunately, programs like this create perverse incentives. People keep building homes where none would be if disasters were priced in.

bsder2• 1 year ago

In Pennsylvania, it's a sop to industry because they magically could find the owners of the mineral rights when fracking became profitable.

Those mines still have owners, and they can be found by the state if they really, really want to find them.

jandrewrogers2• 1 year ago

Are the current owners of the mineral rights the same people that dug the mines? Owning mineral rights doesn't create liability for existing mines.

fatbird• 1 year ago

You can't insure against something you can't reliably quantify. Mine subsidence is extremely difficult to predict.

dmurray• 1 year ago

Predicting things like that is exactly the job of insurers and reinsurers. They're very good at it and it actually becomes easier at scale.

How many houses will be made uninhabitable by subsidence in the US in the next 5 years? I predict more than 100 and fewer than one million. There, that's a prediction. A team of actuaries armed with historic data could massively improve it.

This is much easier than the same kind of prediction for earthquakes or hurricanes, which have tail risk of unlikely but devastating events. If insurers don't want to cover this kind of risk, it's either because it's too small to be worth spending time on, or so predictable that it's not worth spreading the risk (better to just condemn the handful of houses built on top of known mines and move on).

Legend24402• 1 year ago

You should read your insurance contract carefully so you aren’t hit by any nasty surprises.

Earth movement in general - from landslides to sinkholes to shifting foundations - is excluded from most home insurance policies.

ajb• 1 year ago

This may depend on jurisdiction. UK buildings insurance usually covers subsidence (although it may then be difficult to sell the property, as any buyer will have difficulty getting their own insurance even after a repair)

I don't know specifically about mines or sinkholes, but I don't think they are generally excluded. However one difficulty would be that buildings are generally insured up to the value of the rebuilding cost, IE what it would take to put the building back after it was completely destroyed. But in the case of a mine or sinkhole, the land itself may also be unusable. In an expensive city the rebuild cost may be only a fraction of the cost of buying an equivalent home, including the land it sits on.

gkanai• 1 year ago

In Japan, except for certain areas in the top major metros, only land has value. Buildings lose value over the life of a 30 year mortgage due to the changing nature of earthquake regulations for buildings. It will almost always be cheaper to tear down and build new than retrofit. Its also why Japan has very creative residential architecture- owners can build what they want without caring about resale.

Many non Japanese who are buying in Japan without understanding this fundamentally different aspect of real estate in Japan do so at their own risk.

potato37328423• 1 year ago

As a general rule don't expect insurance to cover anything where there isn't an easily sue-able responsible party unless you're specifically paying for that type of event to be covered.

lqet2• 1 year ago

We recently bought a house, and we learned that it is surprisingly difficult to get insurance that covers damage from asteroids / meteors / satellite parts. It is AFAIK impossible to get insurance that covers war damage.

vharuck• 1 year ago

Even if an insurance policy covered war, the chance of collecting the full amount would be almost zero. War levels extremely large areas, most buildings aren't bomb-resistant bunkers, and fighting drags on. There's no insurer who could handle paying all the claims they'd receive at the same time. Only governments could handle that level of funding.

ChrisMarshallNY• 1 year ago

There's also a couple of old mines that are permanently on fire.

Sort of an IRL Hell.

dboreham• 1 year ago

I grew up near one. On fire and under the sea, no less.

nosequel• 1 year ago

Coal seam fires are a nasty thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-seam_fire

leoapagano• 1 year ago

Centralia, PA has a mine that has been on fire since 1962 and will be on fire for at least another 250 years [0] - the town had to be evacuated in the 80s because it caused people to fall into sinkholes that randomly and suddenly opened up. Scary.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire

foobarian• 1 year ago

Just drove through there a couple weeks ago. There are basically crevices in the ground exhausting hot humid drafts. Almost uncomfortably hot for a hand, and will fog up glasses.

nickpeterson• 1 year ago

The number one cause of mine collapses, in my personal experience, is creepers.

johnisgood• 1 year ago

Actually, it is people who come in close contact with creepers.

mschuster91• 1 year ago

I can only recommend a visit to the "Ruhrpott" area of Germany. Probably thousands of mines were dug over the centuries, hundreds alone after WW2 when people dug for coal on their own under horrendous conditions, and none of them documented. Accidents and incidents aboveground happen frequently when old shafts collapse. A lot of former mining sites have been converted to museums, although none of them actually allow access at the old depth. You can spend a month in NRW and not be able to visit all the museum sites!

The entire Ruhrpott settled and sank so much that if the water pumps in the largest mines would cease operating for too long, the entire area would flood. It's literally called "Ewigkeitslasten" (forever burdens) for that reason.

grandinj• 1 year ago

Sounds like an opportunity to get an inland lake!

fransje26• 1 year ago

They also have those, once they flood the open-pit coal mines they've been relentlessly digging...

sbuccini• 1 year ago

A great companion piece on a government bureaucrat who solved the problem on how to optimally support the roofs in longwall mines: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/mic...

niccl• 1 year ago

That was fascinating. And contained some interesting stories relating to the function profit = f(lives_lost)

alhirzel2• 1 year ago

Especially the part where improved safety tooling (bolts) were used to increase efficiency rather than safety: regulatory dysfunction at its finest. Interestingly, in other regulated areas (such as toxic emissions into the environmental), there are clear echelons regarding what is required such as BPT vs BAT (best practicable vs achievable technology). For the coal mining case, if BAT had been the requirement (and the regulating body had enough teeth to enforce it), Chris's work might have been easier to fund.

Ataraxic• 1 year ago

Thanks so much for sharing. Enthralling.

Zamiel_Snawley• 1 year ago

Thank you for posting this. Simultaneously uplifting and tragic.

ghuroo1• 1 year ago

what a great read and inspiring story.

owenversteeg• 1 year ago

Wow, what an amazing story. Fascinating from an engineering perspective. Quoting a few of my favorite bits:

Mark began by taking a vertical slice of, say, Chartres and replicating it in a special kind of plastic. He’d then hang fishing weights from various points on the plastic replica, like ornaments on a Christmas tree, to simulate the actual external forces acting upon various parts of the cathedral. There was the direct load of the overhead stone, of course, but also the winds. (To estimate the winds in the 12th century, he found anemometer readings in rural France going back a century. Not perfect, but good enough.) He placed his fully loaded plastic model in an oven, where it was subjected not just to heat but also light. Warmed, the plastic model revealed its stresses, sort of like the way an MRI reveals damage to soft human tissue.
“The very words ‘statistical analysis’ seem foreign to many in rock engineering. Engineers are trained to see the world in terms of load and deformation, where failure is simply a matter of stress exceeding strength. Statistics are generally given short shrift in engineering curriculums, and so the entire language of statistics is unfamiliar. Yet statistics are the tools that science has developed to deal with uncertainty and probability, which are both at the heart of mining ground control.”
Real-life American workers were different from his mental model of them. “I had thought if they only knew what I thought, they’d see things how I do,” he said. That idea now struck him as so obviously nuts that he didn’t bother to let them know what he thought. His fellow coal miners were less concerned with his ideas about the economy and their rightful place in it than in simply making a living. Their morale, at that moment, was actually sky-high. “Coal was booming,” said Chris. “We were going to save the world. Thank god we have all this coal so we’re not reliant on Arab oil. People felt good about themselves.”
“A mine is unlike any man-made structure,” said Chris. “It’s not a designed environment. Most of the material the structure is made from is kind of unknown. With rock you don’t know what the engineering properties are — what the loads are. You have a problem that is really not an engineering problem, but people were insisting on using an engineering mindset to solve it.”
Again, he found work done by others and repurposed it for his uses. Back in the 1940s, geologists working for the Agriculture Department in national forests created a crude method for work crews to determine if some rock would work as a road: whacking it with a ball-peen hammer. Oddly, it didn’t matter how hard you whacked it. There were just a handful of ways the rock might react, and its specific reaction revealed its strength. Chris started whacking mine roofs with ball-peen hammers. “It’s not precise,” he said, “but it does get you in the ballpark.”

Arn_Thor• 1 year ago

What a great read! Thank you for sharing

RetroTechie• 1 year ago

That was a great read! This bit struck me:

"Both spent their lives measuring the stress in stone. Both used scientific methods to answer questions that had seemed to everyone else beyond the reach of science."

Nothing, I repeat NOTHING is beyond the reach of science!

Go and investigate something that no-one investigated before, and you will find something that no-one found before.

Don't let anyone ever tell you otherwise.

Now whether [what you find] is worth the trouble of investigating (or: where one's efforts are best spent), that is another matter.

andybak• 1 year ago

NOTHING is beyond the reach of science!

Events outside of our light cone? (I was going to say "past events" but I suspect that's superfluous)

alhirzel2• 1 year ago

That article touched on so many facets of a person's career: the pursuit of meaning, grit, familial context... It should be required reading for all young engineers.

fads_go• 1 year ago

Alexander Humbolt, perhaps the greatest scientist ever, was a government bureaucrat. Started his career working as a mining examiner.

One evidence of greatness: Humbolt has more geological features named after him than anyone else. Like the Humbolt Current etc.

dang• 1 year ago

One thread from last year:

The Canary - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41478771 - Sept 2024 (54 comments)

When Abandoned Mines Collapse

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