[HN Gopher] When Abandoned Mines Collapse
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When Abandoned Mines Collapse
Author : impish9208
Score : 104 points
Date : 2025-05-06 18:38 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (practical.engineering)
(TXT) w3m dump (practical.engineering)
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| [Video]
| gruez wrote:
| There's a transcript below?
| tart-lemonade wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I think that rocket still stands [0] :) [0]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxus_(rocket) [1]:
| http://www.astronautix.com/m/maxus.html
| hermitcrab wrote:
| 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.
| autoexec wrote:
| 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.
| cogman10 wrote:
| 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.
| sokoloff wrote:
| > We can't expect that they all migrate.
|
| They can't expect us to cover their losses, especially
| predictable and repeated losses.
| ndileas wrote:
| 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.
| cogman10 wrote:
| This assumes you are moving into an area fresh. But what
| about someone that's been there, potentially for
| generations?
|
| It's one thing to say "don't buy beach front property in
| the Florida everglades" but what do you do with the
| millions who already own such property?
|
| This came up with hurricane Katrina and Louisiana.
| Multigenerational communities were completely obliterated.
| I really don't find "the market said you should move" to be
| a compelling response.
| Legend2440 wrote:
| It's not the market saying that, it's the climate. The
| market is just communicating it to you.
|
| These places are no longer safely inhabitable due to
| rising ocean levels. People are going to have to be
| relocated one way or another.
| bsder wrote:
| 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.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| 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.
| necheffa wrote:
| In general, no. Most of the coal companies went bust and
| the rights are owned by gas and/or fracking companies or
| consolidated by one of the surviving companies.
| bsder wrote:
| > Are the current owners of the mineral rights the same
| people that dug the mines?
|
| Almost certainly not.
|
| > Owning mineral rights doesn't create liability for
| existing mines.
|
| I was under the impression that it generally does. However,
| the documents are generally old paper records (often
| missing) and fragmented between multiple polities in
| Pennsylvania. The owners of the mineral rights obviously
| know who they are but reconstructing the trail from public
| records is quite time consuming and provides a lot of
| "plausible deniability".
|
| But, boy, once fracking made those mineral rights worth
| something, the owners sure showed up and found those
| "missing" records in a real hurry.
| fatbird wrote:
| You can't insure against something you can't reliably quantify.
| Mine subsidence is extremely difficult to predict.
| Legend2440 wrote:
| 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.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| There's also a couple of old mines that are permanently on fire.
|
| Sort of an IRL Hell.
| dboreham wrote:
| I grew up near one. On fire and under the sea, no less.
| nosequel wrote:
| Coal seam fires are a nasty thing.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-seam_fire
| nickpeterson wrote:
| The number one cause of mine collapses, in my personal
| experience, is creepers.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Actually, it is people who come in close contact with creepers.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| 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.
| sbuccini wrote:
| 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...
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