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...
The number one cause of mine collapses, in my personal experience, is creepers.
Actually, it is people who come in close contact with creepers.
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.
I think that rocket still stands [0] :) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxus_(rocket) [1]: http://www.astronautix.com/m/maxus.html
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
After Harvey was the first time I remember hearing about FEMA doing buyouts of property in susceptible locations just so they don't have to continue to pay each time weather moves in. A lot of times, families in these situations cannot sell because no buyer will want to purchase such disaster prone property. This government buyout at least gives the families a fighting chance to move.
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.
Well, "compelling" isn't a good organizational principle. I'm not saying we should evict grandma at the first hint of insurance prices rising. There could absolutely be compensation for property, negotiated buyouts and moving costs, or other good policies.
For better or worse, markets are the clearest signals we have in a hugely messy world. That shouldn't prevent us from doing the best thing available, but the world is not inherently fair and safe, and it's not possible for it to be perfectly fair and safe with our current technology and psychology.
Does Florida have multigenerational communities?
Oldest city in America is in Florida
I have some sympathy. Those communities are valuable and should be saved where possible. However, it also doesn't make sense to keep rebuiling the same high risk locations, especially when all indications are rhat the risk is increasing.
The millions that own beach front property should accept the value of their land will decrease as it becomes harder to insure. If they don't want to lose equity, sell it sooner than later.
> We can't expect that they all migrate.
They can’t expect us to cover their losses, especially predictable and repeated losses.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
You can't insure against something you can't reliably quantify. Mine subsidence is extremely difficult to predict.
There's also a couple of old mines that are permanently on fire.
Sort of an IRL Hell.
Coal seam fires are a nasty thing.
I grew up near one. On fire and under the sea, no less.
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.
[Video]
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.
There's a transcript below?
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.