
Detroit's salt mine: City beneath the city - Jupe
https://www.detroitnews.com/picture-gallery/news/local/michigan-history/2020/01/26/detroit-salt-mine-city-beneath-city/4523991002/
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rmason
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.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Peigneur#Drilling_disaste...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Peigneur#Drilling_disaster)

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.

~~~
hadlock
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.

~~~
whoopdedo
Typo; it's Zipaquirá. The mine dates back over 200 years and the main
attraction is the Salt Cathedral.

(My mother was born there.)

~~~
rmason
I've got a college friend in Bogota. Now I have two reasons to go see him ;<).

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XiS
For the EU people: [https://archive.ph/YRBZ8](https://archive.ph/YRBZ8)

~~~
eps
Gives a cert mismatch warning (with a Cloudfare cert) and then show 403 /
Forbidden.

~~~
odensc
Do you happen to use CloudFlare's DNS (1.1.1.1)? They have quite a long-
standing [1] issue with archive.is. (or the other way around depending on your
opinion)

[1]: [https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/135222/why-
does-...](https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/135222/why-
does-1-1-1-1-not-resolve-archive-is/135223#135223)

~~~
lorenzhs
If you're using Firefox, also check whether you're using DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH)
with Cloudflare. It's in Settings -> Network Settings -> Enable DNS over
HTTPS.

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Scoundreller
I like what appears here to be an overhead-electric system catenary system:

[https://www.gannett-
cdn.com/presto/2020/01/20/PDTN/dd7f14d1-...](https://www.gannett-
cdn.com/presto/2020/01/20/PDTN/dd7f14d1-937d-4f68-9ecd-862a32908773-27.jpg?width=1280)

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danans
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.

~~~
chipperyman573
Why did it have such a significant impact?

~~~
danans
Well, I was about 8 years old, so it was just ... neat I guess. In a creepy
movie kind of way. I remember it being very yellowish but maybe that was the
color of the lights.

Also I've never been in a mine since then.

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notlukesky
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.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_salt_mine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_salt_mine)

~~~
redis_mlc
Road salt destroys cars, but hey, Make Detroit Great Again (MDGA)!

The drawback with sand is that it doesn't dissolve in water, so silts
everything up.

~~~
saberdancer
What is the alternative? Roads that become icy probably destroy cars as well,
although in a more pinpoint kind of way. At least road salt doesn't cause a
lot of fatalities.

~~~
kijin
Electric coils under the pavement to keep the surface temperature above
freezing. Unfortunately most cities can't afford it, least of all Detroit.

~~~
bcraven
Which cities use that technology?

~~~
kijin
Holland, Michigan for one:

[https://www.mlive.com/business/west-
michigan/2016/02/why_hol...](https://www.mlive.com/business/west-
michigan/2016/02/why_holland_spends_millions_to.html)

~~~
Omin
As the article states, this system uses waste heat from a power plant
transported via water.

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krzyk
For other nice salt mines you can take a look at Wieliczka Salt Mine:
[https://www.krakowcard.com/blog/amazing-pictures-
wieliczka-s...](https://www.krakowcard.com/blog/amazing-pictures-wieliczka-
salt-mine)

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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bochnia_Salt_Mine)).

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josteink
I don't get any article, only this banner about the EU version

> Welcome to The Detroit News’s EUROPEAN UNION EXPERIENCE

Anyone got a link working outside the US?

~~~
modo_mario
[https://archive.ph/YRBZ8](https://archive.ph/YRBZ8)

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angry_octet
How has this not been turned into an underground bunker city?

[https://youtu.be/ybSzoLCCX-Y](https://youtu.be/ybSzoLCCX-Y)

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subpixel
In Cleveland there is a similar mine that extends far out beneath Lake Erie.
Always wanted to get a peek but visitation is practically verboten.

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colordrops
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.

~~~
kijin
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.

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madengr
There is a salt mine in Kansas that has a good tour.

[https://www.underkansas.org/](https://www.underkansas.org/)

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InvisibleUp
I would love to see the remains of these used for underground food farms, like
described here: [https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-
wales-46221656](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-46221656)

I'm not sure how well that would work alongside the existing salt mining
operations, though.

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krsdcbl
On an aside, that automatic EU-page redirect has got to be one of the worst
patterns I've seen so far as a reaction to gdpr ...

~~~
jwr
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).

~~~
usrusr
That "three minute save spinner" is the most puzzling of all. There is
absolutely no upside for the site owner in making the user wait pointlessly
and it seems to be exclusive to US sites. European sites tend to be content
just having that little unobtrusive "yeah right, it's fine" footer/header,
perhaps with some color button trickery for steering users to the non-minimal
option. Which isn't exactly nice but surely not a hill to die on. My guess is
that those "three minute spinner" implementations are expensive third party
compliance plugins that deliberately make the problem they solve look much
harder than it actually is.

~~~
jwr
I suspect the spinner and the wait, like the wild labirynth of confusing
"options" you have to wade through, are all a part of a strategy to discourage
people from clicking anything else than "yes, I agree to everything, use me in
any way you desire, just show me the article".

I think people who design and implement these sleazy dialogs should be ashamed
of themselves.

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pugworthy
Is there urbex down there? Seems pretty tempting.

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ggm
Cosmic say detector? Offline storage? Salt is pretty stable, maybe glassified
radioactive waste?

~~~
fenwick67
Funny enough, Portal 2 takes place in an old Michigan salt mine

~~~
bilegeek
Interestingly, in real life there are no salt mines in Upper Michigan, where
the main Enrichment Center is located. There are plenty of other mines,
though.

Maybe all of those old test chambers were vitrified in salt instead of just
concrete, come to think of it...

~~~
hadlock
There's a 14 mile underground submarine communications system in upper
Michigan. Despite being hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean, it could
contact submarines all over the planet:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Sanguine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Sanguine)

At it's peak the system used ~3MW power plant to run the system.

~~~
janzer
Just a note that while there _are_ [1] 3 transmission lines of 14, 14 and 28
miles in the UP, the lines themselves were mounted on (essentially) telephone
poles. The end of each line does have 1 to 3 miles of buried horizontal ground
wire though and an array of 100 to 300 foot deep bore holes.

[1] or at least were; the project was shutdown in 2004 and while the paths of
the antenna lines still seem to be visible on satellite photos[2] it looks
like the lines themselves may have been removed.

[2] The transmission station itself is at
[https://goo.gl/maps/q5BwduBqbBpAaf1L9](https://goo.gl/maps/q5BwduBqbBpAaf1L9)
with the 28 mile antenna segment running roughly north south just to the west,
one 14 mile segment running east-west a little to the north of the facility
and the second to the south.

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EducatorDirTeam
The salt deposit is a relatively flat seam with an average thickness of 26feet

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The_rationalist
Reminds me of Duckburg

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tiborsaas
Link is broken, it redirects to the .eu subdomain :(

