Catacomb of Coal Mines Gives Wyoming Community a Sinking Feeling

In the movie “Paint Your Wagon,” the fictional town of No Name City falls through the ground because of gold digger tunnels that worm their way underneath.

In Rock Springs, that sinking feeling is more fact than fiction.

“We had a little lady watering her lily bush one time and as she was watering it just went whoosh,” says engineer JaNell Hunter, waving her hands downward.

The bush sank about 55 feet. The lady, luckily, did not. “It was humorous at the time,” said Hunter, who works as city liaison to the state on the sinkhole problem.

That brand of humor is well documented in Rock Springs, a town of 20,000 people living over a catacomb of old, poorly built coal mines.

The first documented event, according to “A Historical Report of Subsidence Occurrences in Rock Springs, Wyo.,” dates back to May, 1909.

“State Hospital is Undermined,” read a local newspaper headline. Large cracks and seams inches wide were discovered running in all directions, an indication the ground was sinking into the mine shafts, the story said.

Other examples:

On Jan. 4, 1949, people coming out of midnight Mass at the South Side Catholic Church were greeted by a sinkhole 60 by 80 feet wide and 40 feet deep that caused the collapse of an overpass in downtown Rock Springs.

*

On Jan. 16, 1968, settling earth fractured an entire neighborhood, causing moderate to severe damage to 10 of 17 homes in the two-acre area.

Joe Fisher, an 80-year-old retired miner, provides a more recent--and more typical--example.

The middle of his home settled several feet in the early 1980s. His plumbing doesn’t work. There’s a crack over his door. And the floor tilts so much that “you could roll a beer can from one end to another.”

“I got no insurance on it,” he says. “I can’t get insurance on the damn thing. It’s ready to fall in a hole.”

While most folks think of mines as being out in rural unpopulated areas, many towns actually grew over and around mines.

“Rock Springs is kind of the showcase for the nation where it’s undermined,” says state Sen. Frank Prevedel of Rock Springs. “This is where experimenting (with controls) began 15-20 years ago.

“This subsidence (sinking) is kind of an insidious thing. It doesn’t just collapse overnight. It’s a thing that continues over a number of years until it begins to crack.”

Prevedel was among initial critics who said officials could have picked up and moved the entire town for the amount of money spent so far in trying to fill the holes. He now believes town ground eventually will become sound.

The federal government has spent $26 million in Abandoned Mine Lands money to fill sunken spots in the last four years, said Kent Simon, project officer for the AML Division of the state Department of Environmental Quality. An additional $13 million will be spent to finish stabilizing troubled areas, he says. The AML reclamation fund is supported by taxes on coal mine production.

Sitting in Wyoming’s barren southwestern corner, immense coal deposits around Rock Springs were first reported in 1852. The city flowered in the 1860s with the coming of the railroad. Since then, more than 100 million tons of coal have been mined in the field.

Hunter says Rock Springs “simply grew as a result of miners wanting to live 500 feet from the portal of the mine. There were fairly primitive mining methods in the 1860s. They didn’t have the roof support methods that we have now.”

About 80% of the original town is undermined at varying depths. “There’s more miles of underground workings than there are miles of streets,” Simon says.

Tunnels burrow under 900 acres of the town, with 200 acres already corrected and an additional 100 acres considered at-risk areas, he says.

The mines are filled with “grouting,” a combination of fly ash, sand, cement and water sent down a hole to harden in the mine shaft. Officials started grouting the shallowest areas and are working their way down.

But periodic holes in the ground are not the only problem. The town’s housing market has been devastated.

*

For years, the old adage, “Let the buyer beware,” applied. One area of town was redlined by federal housing authorities in the late 1970s and early 1980s, preventing sales.

Rising water levels also have turned mine fill-in work into a delicate balancing act. A recent summary by an AML advisory committee said water levels in three of the largest mines have risen 600 feet since pumping was stopped in 1945.

The earth is restoring itself to pre-mining conditions and filling in the tunnels has to be weighed against possible effects water will have on the grouting, Hunter said. “Water is an enemy.”

Hunter points out that one of the worst trouble spots is also a favorite place for residents to walk dogs, jog, ride off-road vehicles or just party.

The undeveloped area sits 100 yards from a park and is pockmarked with about 100 sinkholes, some big enough to park a truck in.

“Kids think it’s a great thing to go down in those holes and party,” Hunter says. Beer bottles and other litter support the statement.

A subsidence insurance program was set up in 1985 that costs homeowners $2 per $1,000 value to participate. About 1,000 families have the insurance, mostly at the insistence of their mortgage holders.

“A lot of them have the attitude that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” Hunter says.

Unlike Joe Fisher, Alfred and Margie Kudar’s house shifting occurred late enough to benefit from federal aid. Their entire area is being grouted and filled. Workers also are smoothing out a street wavy enough to make skateboarders drool and driving “a lot of fun,” Alfred Kudar says.

The Kudars have lived in the house 15 years. Two years ago cracks appeared in the basement and they lost their water main. “When you put your life savings into a house, it kind of upsets you,” he says.

While the Kudars have taken advantage of the federal help, they believe it has just stirred up a hornet’s nest.

“All the money they spent here they could have bought us out and moved us up the hill,” Alfred says. “They don’t know what they’re doing. They just want to spend the money.”

Simon says decisions not to relocate are based on politics as well as economics.

“People have a lot of pride in their neighborhood,” he says. “A lot of these people have lived here a long time and they’re not going to move.”