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Posted on 12/26/2020 7:28:23 AM PST by texas booster
Down, down, down. In three minutes, the skip drops nearly 1,700 feet below Cleveland. Then the giant metal door swings open, and you’re deposited in an other-world, with walls, ceiling and floor made of salt.
Dirty brown salt at the Cargill mine’s entrance, where the rock has absorbed diesel fumes and dust for more than 60 years. Pristine white, with glimmering flecks, at the mine’s far reaches, 3 miles north, under Lake Erie.
“I look out at the water, and it’s like, man, we’re under that!” said Cargill employee Cachet Hilton, 45.
Every day, the 5-mile wide mine gets a little bigger, room by room, as crews stick explosives in the walls and blast the salt loose.
Crews jump in a truck to drive out to the far reaches of the mine each day, 20 minutes of bumping and jolting through a PacMan grid of pitch-black tunnels that also serve as a ventilation system.
The air feels dusty, a little gritty on your skin. You can taste the salt on your lips. And you kick it as you walk, like corn snow. Light is nonexistent, aside from the lamp on your hardhat and the headlights on vehicles.
A large ice based type of snow. The snow of California/ western Nevada is usually corn snow.
In my mind I see salt the size of corn kernel and smaller chipped corn. Underground coal mines have scattered debris upon the floor.
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The Cargill salt mine: an other world under Lake Erie
Rock the Lake (Cleveland Lakefront Collaborative) ^ | Dec 1, 2017 | Laura Johnston
Posted on 12/26/2020, 10:28:23 AM by texas booster
The caps of salt domes can be rich in sulfur and potassium-based salts. That is what was being mined and shipped to the powder mills, not sodium chloride.
An old water well driller known to one of my relatives mentioend that any well deeper than 50’ west of the hamlet of Nunica will be salt water. It’s been down there a long, long time. Deeper still is the Marshall Sandstone, with plenty of water, but it’s pretty hard water.
Nobody in New Mexico has ever heard of Ziebart. You can be killed by a De Soto with the original paint.
Sounds similar to the lime mines below the Ohio river south of Cincinnati.
There they have to cut the truck beds in half before lowering them down to the mine along with the rest of the truck in parts, to be reassembled below. Dead heavy equipment is never brought to the surface.
The “rooms” are so big you could play a softball game there - 900+ feet below the surface.
Quite an experience.
Much cheaper and easier to handle, can be mixed right there on the job site as well which makes it much safer for transport.
I used to work in a Lime Mine, by the end of the day my clothes could stand up by themselves after I took them off and It took an hour to get all the dust off me. Worst job ever!
Good points.
5.56mm
also perhaps of interest:
https://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/1480756/posts
https://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1917348/posts
One of the most awesome places I've ever been to.
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