Seeing those pictures makes me feel so sad. My Dad worked in sales for Morton Salt. Morton's mine was across the river in Windsor, Canada. Dad went there on a regular basis taking clients down for tours. As a kid growing up I heard so many crazy stories about the place and I was intrigued.
But you had to be sixteen to enter the mine so my Dad said I'd have to wait. I was so interested that when I turned fifteen I told him that I wanted to go down in the mine on my sixteenth birthday and he agreed.
However that year there was a big collapse in a mine in Louisiana that was under a lake. An oil company got mixed up and drilled down into the mine. The water entered through the hole draining the lake. Though the workers miraculously survived the payouts by the insurance companies were huge.
So then the insurance companies, stunned by the large payouts, banned anyone who wasn't an employee from the mines. Seeing those pictures just brings back all the disappointment.
The good news is that you don't have to go terribly far: there is a salt mine in Hutchinson Kansas that is open for tours. It's massive. I took my kids down there last year and it was a lot of fun. You could walk for days in this place if they let you stray.
In Colombia there's a great big salt mine just an hour outside of the capital city Bogota, Zariquipa, that has tours, they're ~$15. Highly recommend. It is low quality, darker salt, but it's pretty neat. Tickets to Bogota often run sub-$500 usd from the US if you shop around.
From the link it appears there were no deaths in this disaster. I'm genuinely surprised everyone managed to escape, I would expact that a lake draining into a mine is not escapable.
Reminded me when I wanted to visit Battersea Power Station.Until a few years ago it was shut for decades and just before they were planning to start development on the site,they opened it for a couple of days to public.I thought 'OK', how popular can it get? Will go there in the morning, queue a bit and get in.When my GF and I arrived there, there was a queue of at least a couple of miles..It looked like the whole London came to visit it..
could somebody please share the link with outline.com? I have archive.is blocked because sometimes they redirect to dodgy Russian domains. Maybe we could use outline in future? In the hope that outline works for everyone including those of us using cloudflare?
I went down to these mines on a school field trip as a child 30+ years ago. I can almost remember it like it was yesterday, even the smell, and the surprising warmth despite it being the dead of winter outside. I kept a chunk of salt I brought back under my bed for years after that.
The elevator car was very small, and we were packed in, nose-to-buttcheek, since I was quite small myself at the time. Oy. It was only closed at the bottom -- it was shaped like a hot air balloon basket, with the upper sides open. We kids were strictly admonished to not even try to touch the sides of the shaft as they went by, though I don't think I could reach that far up anyway.
Our ears popped several times on the way down. The ride to the bottom took over a minute, which seemed very long for an elevator not stopping at any other floors!
The ride down was dark, which gave our eyes time to adapt. Once we reached the bottom, the mine seemed bright, although the light level was probably quite low in absolute terms. I remember the light fixtures being attached to the ceiling, drilled straight into the salty rock.
There were vehicles down there! This blew my mind, and even at the young age, I recognized them as older style vehicles, Jeeps and such which had been down there for years. I have no idea how they were kept from rusting immediately. The air tasted of salt. Everything was covered in salt dust.
We were given a ride on a vehicle of some sort, I don't remember if we were in the back of a Jeep or on a trailer hayride-style, but we covered quite some distance into the mine. The room-and-pillar system was pointed out, and we got to see the conveyor bringing salt from the active face being mined at the moment, though we didn't get close to the active room itself.
They let us grab some lumps of salt to bring them home. Whatever you could fit in a backpack to ride the elevator back up, is what I was told. Some of those samples made it into my rock collection, some are still in my memory-box. I don't know what became of the others, but I was using one as a paperweight in elementary school.
I don't know why they closed the mine to tours, but it's a great loss to education. Obviously experiences like that are transformative to a young kid!
In the years since, I've oft wondered if the exceptional stability of that geological formation might make it good for other sorts of uses. Archive storage, or perhaps it's the "secret undisclosed location" where important people scuttle off to when bad things happen.
The size of the mine, several miles and with extents under four cities, is remarkable. It's surely expanded further since this map was made:
The convenience of the location is great. Lots of salt is needed to deice all the roads in the Detroit/Michigan area.
The main purpose of the salt there is for deicing. Saves a bunch on transport costs.
The article mentions that the salt was originally used for food. I'm curious how, or if, they prevented contamination from things like machine oil or other artifacts of mining.
Salt is often purified by dissolving it in water and precipitating NaCl back out.
This process doesn't always make sense economically, so it's understandable that Detroit uses their own salt for deicing and imports food-grade salt from places where it's cheaper to make. Or maybe in the past they just didn't care about a bit of contamination.
I am honestly amazed at all the inane crap that the media throws at us. I guess a generic redirect to a generic "EU-page" is still better than putting up 5 popups in my face asking me to subscribe and set "cookie preferences" (which takes me to another 3 levels of windows with sleazy anti-patterns, and clicking "Save" displays a spinner for 3 minutes).
[+] [-] rmason|6 years ago|reply
But you had to be sixteen to enter the mine so my Dad said I'd have to wait. I was so interested that when I turned fifteen I told him that I wanted to go down in the mine on my sixteenth birthday and he agreed.
However that year there was a big collapse in a mine in Louisiana that was under a lake. An oil company got mixed up and drilled down into the mine. The water entered through the hole draining the lake. Though the workers miraculously survived the payouts by the insurance companies were huge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Peigneur#Drilling_disaste...
So then the insurance companies, stunned by the large payouts, banned anyone who wasn't an employee from the mines. Seeing those pictures just brings back all the disappointment.
[+] [-] chrissnell|6 years ago|reply
https://www.underkansas.org/
[+] [-] hadlock|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] christophilus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saberdancer|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cosmodisk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pungsnigel|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] XiS|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jve|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eps|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DyslexicAtheist|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Scoundreller|6 years ago|reply
https://www.gannett-cdn.com/presto/2020/01/20/PDTN/dd7f14d1-...
[+] [-] danans|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] myself248|6 years ago|reply
The elevator car was very small, and we were packed in, nose-to-buttcheek, since I was quite small myself at the time. Oy. It was only closed at the bottom -- it was shaped like a hot air balloon basket, with the upper sides open. We kids were strictly admonished to not even try to touch the sides of the shaft as they went by, though I don't think I could reach that far up anyway.
Our ears popped several times on the way down. The ride to the bottom took over a minute, which seemed very long for an elevator not stopping at any other floors!
The ride down was dark, which gave our eyes time to adapt. Once we reached the bottom, the mine seemed bright, although the light level was probably quite low in absolute terms. I remember the light fixtures being attached to the ceiling, drilled straight into the salty rock.
There were vehicles down there! This blew my mind, and even at the young age, I recognized them as older style vehicles, Jeeps and such which had been down there for years. I have no idea how they were kept from rusting immediately. The air tasted of salt. Everything was covered in salt dust.
We were given a ride on a vehicle of some sort, I don't remember if we were in the back of a Jeep or on a trailer hayride-style, but we covered quite some distance into the mine. The room-and-pillar system was pointed out, and we got to see the conveyor bringing salt from the active face being mined at the moment, though we didn't get close to the active room itself.
They let us grab some lumps of salt to bring them home. Whatever you could fit in a backpack to ride the elevator back up, is what I was told. Some of those samples made it into my rock collection, some are still in my memory-box. I don't know what became of the others, but I was using one as a paperweight in elementary school.
I don't know why they closed the mine to tours, but it's a great loss to education. Obviously experiences like that are transformative to a young kid!
In the years since, I've oft wondered if the exceptional stability of that geological formation might make it good for other sorts of uses. Archive storage, or perhaps it's the "secret undisclosed location" where important people scuttle off to when bad things happen.
The size of the mine, several miles and with extents under four cities, is remarkable. It's surely expanded further since this map was made:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~copyrght/image/solstice/sum99...
[+] [-] dmix|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chipperyman573|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notlukesky|6 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_salt_mine
[+] [-] whalesalad|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] malingo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Scoundreller|6 years ago|reply
Salt has a sweet-spot where it works. Too warm and you don’t need it. Too cold and salty water freezes anyway.
The rust belt is just right for using salt.
[+] [-] redis_mlc|6 years ago|reply
The drawback with sand is that it doesn't dissolve in water, so silts everything up.
[+] [-] krzyk|6 years ago|reply
It was run since 13th century till 1996
Also another salt mine that was also used across many centuries lies just around the cordner: Bochnia Salt Mine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bochnia_Salt_Mine).
[+] [-] josteink|6 years ago|reply
> Welcome to The Detroit News’s EUROPEAN UNION EXPERIENCE
Anyone got a link working outside the US?
[+] [-] modo_mario|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] angry_octet|6 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/ybSzoLCCX-Y
[+] [-] subpixel|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colordrops|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kijin|6 years ago|reply
This process doesn't always make sense economically, so it's understandable that Detroit uses their own salt for deicing and imports food-grade salt from places where it's cheaper to make. Or maybe in the past they just didn't care about a bit of contamination.
[+] [-] madengr|6 years ago|reply
https://www.underkansas.org/
[+] [-] InvisibleUp|6 years ago|reply
I'm not sure how well that would work alongside the existing salt mining operations, though.
[+] [-] krsdcbl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jwr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pugworthy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ggm|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fenwick67|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EducatorDirTeam|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] The_rationalist|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tiborsaas|6 years ago|reply