In Solikamsk they are deciding what to do with the enormous failure that formed on the site of old potash mines. The ground subsided several years ago, but in recent months the already huge hole has quadrupled in size. Are nearby villages in danger?
Now the size of the failure is estimated to be approximately 120 by 125 meters, less than 50 meters. Compared to what it was almost a year ago, the increase is significant, four times. The growth was initially predicted by scientists attracted by potassium miners. Regarding the pace and scale, forecasts can only be approximate.
The distance from this site to the sinkhole is about a hundred meters; it is located on that side, and they are not allowed further for security reasons. The situation around the dangerous territory is monitored by specialists of various profiles. This is a team of surveyors, or rather one of several. Every ten days they monitor the condition of the earth’s surface outside the main fence of the danger zone. “The length of our line can vary from a kilometer to two, or maybe even more. We work along the entire perimeter of the dangerous zone and monitor the movement and see where subsidence occurs, if any,” explains Dmitry Boytsov, surveyor.
Several processes are going on around us in parallel - pumping out groundwater so that it does not fall into the sinkhole. And the opposite - a special solution is pumped underground around the perimeter to create a barrier in the way of water. In addition, a mixture is poured into the hole from above to eliminate cracks and strengthen the soil.
The history of the Solikamsk failure dates back to November last year, when two parallel events occurred - the mine at the second mining department was flooded, now no one is working underground, and, on the site of the old mine, where work took place in the 80s, soil subsidence occurred.
There are several fencing lines installed around the hole to prevent curious or random passers-by from wandering in, and you can regularly come across such full houses warning that it is simply dangerous to go further. As for residential buildings, which are located at a distance of approximately four kilometers from the failure, according to available data, there are no workings underneath them. “Today there is a clear understanding that there is no threat to industrial and residential sector facilities today,” reports Igor Davletshin, acting. Head of the city of Solikamsk.
The local residents themselves said that the sinkhole appeared right in the middle of a garden association that had been abandoned for about a quarter of a century; there are plenty of them around the city. “Well, this is their happiness, of course. And so, who knows what would have happened there, but the fact is that it was in the fall, it failed, it was too late,” he himself does not understand what Alexander Gulyaev, a resident of the city, said Solikamsk. Potassium miners reported that it is planned to begin construction of a new mine this year and complete it in five years in order to develop the remaining mineral reserves here.
Solikamsk failure and SKRU-2 from above. November 23rd, 2014
We also reached the center of famous events. Just photos for now, there will be a video a little later.
View of the failure from the east. In the distance on the left you can see the Solikamsk region, the village of Rubtsovo.
Of course, the area is cordoned off by police and Uralkali security. Uralkali reports that this is done for your safety and no one is allowed there. However, only a couple of checkpoints were seen from above on the local road to Berezniki airport. Well, the airship of the Central Internal Affairs Directorate was singled out. Hanging about 800 meters from the hole, on the edge of the nearest field.
Somewhere at the intersection there is the first checkpoint. If you look closely, you can see the airship of the Central Internal Affairs Directorate. The hole is located directly below the photo.
Another view of failure.
Let's take a closer look. Of course, approaching the edge is extremely dangerous, in case the abyss looks into your eyes and you are no longer among the people. That's why they don't allow excursions there.
A hole in the ground is a source of photoshoppers.
However, the snow showed that among us there were already those in whom the abyss had entered. Are there any readers who still want to stand on the edge and think about the eternal?
Look closely at the marks at the edge. A hole in the ground beckons and calls...
Even our device, armed with medium-focus optics, was unable to see what was there underneath the lid? In order not to tear thousands and thousands of people away from the sofa and computer, otherwise they would personally go on a pilgrimage to the new Solikamsk miracle, our company launched another device, which did look down. The photo quality is worse, but there will be a video (but later).
Below, about 70 meters away, you can see dirty water with clay. No one knows what is there under water.
Another look inside. The depth of the depths shocks and surprises.
The mining department itself, which suffered from the water, could not hide from Kilrogg’s eyes. Naturally, it was not possible to see anything through the 200-meter thickness of the earth, but they took photographs of production on the surface of the planet. Not so long ago, some readers asked for technogenic species, so, almost like Santa Claus, I fulfill the wish.
The second Solikamsk mining department of Uralkali.
Entrance road to Solikamsk. View of the SKRU-2 waste heap known to all residents.
View of the waste heap from above. In the background is an industrial complex.
Work has currently been stopped, the conveyors are turned off and are not pouring out sludge.
At the bottom of each salt mine waste heap there are always non-freezing lakes - brine collectors. Sediment flowing from the waste heap washes away the salt and remains in these lakes. Driving past, I always dreamed of swimming in concentrated brine, but I was never able to spare half an hour on the way from Solikamsk.
On the left is a sludge settling tank, a “dead sea” that does not freeze in the most severe frosts.
Industrial complex SKRU-2
The square building in the center is the granulation department. Advanced production, unique for all of Uralkali.
View of the workshop from the road.
Another view of production.
Especially for the media, incl. electronic, reminder: if you want to use a photo, first buy it and get permission, contacts - in contacts.
For groups on social networks. If you are from VK, then next to each photo there must be links to
Tell me, are we really all going to fall underground? - the girl we asked asked us how to get to the sinkhole on the outskirts of Solikamsk.
We don’t know what to answer her; we ourselves are not allowed to go to the place where only recently there were country houses, and in a matter of hours a hole the size of half a football field appeared in their place. The road to the village is cordoned off, stern guards allow only departmental vehicles to reach the scene of the emergency, and a police balloon hovers in the sky.
Let us remind you that one of the potash mines of the Uralkali company in Solikamsk began to be drowned with underground water on Tuesday, November 18. 122 miners were urgently evacuated to the surface. The mine was de-energized for fear of a hydrogen sulfide explosion.
And the next day, 3.5 kilometers from the flooded mine - in the very center of the holiday village of Klyuchiki - they discovered a gigantic failure - 45 by 30 meters.
“We’re sitting on suitcases, we’re afraid to fail”
The village of Klyuchiki is located near the old highway leading from Solikamsk to Perm. Under the entire district there are mines of the second Solikamsk mining department. The ore layer stretches from Berezniki almost to Krasnovishersk and passes under the southern outskirts of Solikamsk - the village of Shakhterskoye. This settlement is built up mainly with private wooden houses, but there are also three five-story buildings, each with 70 apartments.
We were all invited to a meeting of residents,” says Vera Nikolaevna, a resident of one of Shakhtarsky’s Khrushchev buildings. - They said that there is nothing to be afraid of, there will be no new failures, but we are still nervous - who knows what nature will do. Someone is already sitting on their suitcases, afraid of falling through. They say that the failure is 3.5 kilometers away, but in reality it won’t even be two kilometers.
Residents of Solikamsk have already experienced one emergency in 1995. Then, due to the movement of layers, the vaults of the second mine collapsed (there are three mines in Solikamsk in total - this one is located on the southern side of the city) and an earthquake of magnitude 4 occurred.
I was working as a dispatcher for the mine department when all this happened,” says Valentina Nikolaevna, a resident of Shakhterskoye. - After the earthquake, the soil subsided throughout the area, including in Klyuchiki. Then, by a lucky coincidence, there was no one in the mine - there was a funeral at the mine, and the head of the mine sent everyone there. Everything turned out to be a slight fright.
However, due to the failure of the mine, the underground lake, from which summer residents in Klyuchiki took water to water their gardens, went into the void, and there was no water. After that, people began to leave their dachas, and while no one was there, some smart guy cut off all the wires and handed them over to a non-ferrous metal shop. Since then the village has been without power.
No, no one keeps a dacha there anymore,” says local resident Alexander. - Unless young people come there to have fun in the summer, but it’s no longer possible to run a farm there.
“A failure is an echo of an earthquake”
After the soil collapsed in Klyuchiki, scientists unanimously declared that they had been waiting for this for 20 years. According to our source at Uralkali (in the 90s, the current Solikamsk branch of the company was an independent JSC Silvinit; the merger of the potash giants took place in May 2011), then the layers shifted, but the water was never able to penetrate the soluble salt layer . All these 20 years she has been looking for passages and only now she has poured into the mine.
Simply put: above the sylvinite layers (this is the potassium ore that we mine) there is carnallite ore, and above it there is a layer of covering rock salt (this is the ordinary salt we use to salt borscht), says Uralkali. - Already above the salt there is a thin clay layer. It plays a very important role - it prevents the penetration of groundwater into salt horizons. And salt dissolves in water. When the earthquake occurred, this clay layer saved the mine, because in that place it was very wide and did not completely fail, but was blocked and groundwater did not pass into the soluble layers.
By the way, the then head of Silvinit, Pyotr Kondrashov, having received this lesson, thought seriously and began laying mines. The mined-out arms of the mine were filled with a special brine, which was saturated with salt to such an extent that it no longer dissolved the walls of the mine.
Today, at the second mine department, the capacity of the hydraulic filling complex is 4 million tons of this brine per year, says our interlocutor. - The point of hydraulic filling is that the solution, unlike hard rocks, fills all the cracks very well and turns to stone over time.
According to a representative of Uralkali, the site where the failure occurred today was laid in 1997, so the soil did not go into the mine, but into the void formed due to the fact that groundwater entered the unmined salt layer, washed it away and flowed into the mines. This collapse occurred at a depth of 140 meters.
It is impossible to approach the site of the collapse, because this mine is sealed, says a Uralkali representative. – By the way, science has already recorded similar phenomena in this place in 1997.
“Nothing threatens Solikamsk”
“It’s all nature that answers us,” local resident Alexander exclaims near the cordoned-off hole. “You can’t take from her endlessly, you need to give back, so she returns.”
The head of Solikamsk, Sergei Devyatkov, said in one of his interviews that if the brine completely floods the second mine, it can also wash away the partition that connects it to the first mine. And 30 percent of the mines of the first mining department are located near Solikamsk.
Initially, when the second mine was built - in the 50s - 60s, it was the southern site of the first mine, says a Uralkali representative. - At the end of the 60s, a concrete bridge was built between the second and first mines, after the accident in 1995 it was strengthened, and now a decision is being made to strengthen it again. But you need to understand that if fresh water flows, it will corrode everything around this jumper. No matter how you plug this passage, the water will bypass it. Now all our “technicians” are trying to secure the first mine.
But if water does flow into the first mine, will it really be a disaster for the city?
The mine field of the first mine affects urban development, but the laying of these mines was carried out back in the 90s - 2000s. No subsidence or failures are planned here. In Belarus, for example, mines are constantly drowning. They close them for a while, pump out the water and start working again. So nothing threatens Solikamsk, you can reassure the residents.
However, there is still the prospect of ground subsidence at the border of the first and second mines. And it is in this place that Anashkin Farm stands - those three five-story buildings that we wrote about above.
Nobody is saying that tomorrow five-story buildings will be taken over and collapsed. Most likely, nothing will happen to them, he says. Chairman of the Government of the Perm Territory Gennady Tushnolobov. – If you have to move, three houses is not a hundred. It's OK.
How does the Solikamsk failure differ from the Berezniki failure?
Now the Solikamsk failure is primarily associated with a similar emergency in 2006 in Berezniki. Let us remember that then fresh water poured into the mines of the first Berezniki mining department and put an end to the mine, simultaneously creating four failures over the course of five years (one right on the railway tracks, where a freight train car landed), because of which it was necessary to move the railway and evict several blocks from the historical center of the city - the area of Reshetov Square and BRU-1.
Everyone compares us to Berezniki, but, firstly, mines were not laid there at such a pace and in such volumes,” says a representative of Uralkali. - The second feature of the Solikamsk events is that the carnallite formation was not mined here. Carnallite contains a lot of magnesium, it is very porous and dissolves instantly in water. All processes associated with soil subsidence in Berezniki are associated precisely with the dissolution of carnallite in water. And the third is that the developments of the second mining department of Solikamsk are located outside the city limits. The nearest houses are the Anashkin farm, three five-story buildings, but there the distance to the sinkhole is 3.5 kilometers.
According to the interlocutor, science gives Solikamsk an optimistic forecast - there will be no subsidence of the earth’s surface or the formation of new sinkholes in the residential area. Now various institutions are drawing reference lines, setting up beacons, and constantly monitoring the situation. All monitoring systems that were used in Berezniki are now used in Solikamsk.
Failure in Berezniki at the Uralkali mine.
Last November, residents of Russia learned that a huge hole had been discovered in Solikamsk, Perm Territory. This was not a joke or a prank - in photographs from the scene of events, a giant crater of an almost perfect circle gaped in the ground.
Solikamsk can be called the salt capital of Russia. Here are the oldest museum and salt monument. Now a new attraction has appeared here - the Solikamsk failure.
Chronicle of events
On November 18, 2014, an accident occurred at the Solikamsk-2 mine - some of the pumps began to flow with brine (a mixture of salts and water), and at 13:50 Moscow time it was decided to introduce an emergency response plan (ACP). 120 mine employees were immediately brought to the surface. Explosive hydrogen sulfide entered the mine along with the brine, so the power supply was turned off.
Three and a half kilometers from residential buildings in Solikamsk, on the site of the company’s old unexploited mine, a sinkhole was discovered on the same day, the dimensions of which at that time were 20 by 30 meters.
Place of events
The Solikamsk-2 mine management is a factory for the production of potassium chloride and, in fact, is itself part of the Uralkali company. Its owners are Mikhail Prokhorov and Uralchem, headed by Part of the shares owned by a Chinese company.
Uralkali is one of the leading companies in the production of potash fertilizers, supplying the market with about 20% of the world's volume. The accident, which stopped the work of the Solikamsk-2 mine, led to the collapse of the company's shares.
The village near Solikamsk, where a failure formed that stopped the work of the Solikamsk-2 mine, is called Klyuchiki. It is located above abandoned mine workings, several kilometers from the city limits and residential areas.
Reasons for what happened
Now experts are working to find out what caused the formation of the Solikamsk failure: man or natural factors? If we talk about past similar incidents, they partly occurred due to disruption of technology. The average lifespan of potash mines is approximately 50-60 years, and over time they all become flooded with groundwater. But the negative consequences of this can still be minimized. Those voids that are formed during the mining of potash ore must be filled with waste rock.
Above the potash mines there is a heterogeneous layer of rock: above the layer there is a layer of rock salts, and even higher - more than 100 meters of rock saturated with groundwater. The latter are gradually making their way into the voids formed during the production of potash ore. An earthquake can spur this process. This happened, for example, in 1995, when a magnitude 4 earthquake caused cracks in the rock, a brine leak, and a sinkhole. It is believed that the earthquake was the cause of the November accident at the Solikamsk-2 mine.
By luck, the Solikamsk failure did not occur in a populated area, otherwise casualties would not have been avoided. The holiday village of Klyuchiki has long been abandoned. After the 1995 earthquake, the water supply here was disrupted, and gradually the buildings and dachas were abandoned. But residents of Solikamsk fear that their city may suffer the same fate as Berezniki, where sinkholes have begun to occur within the city limits. For now, it has been decided to install sensors that transmit information online in residential buildings located in the immediate vicinity of the company’s second mine.
Forecasts for the future
According to experts and engineers, the Solikamsk failure will grow. In December 2014, it increased in its upper part due to natural subsidence of the soil. Now the Solikamsk failure, the depth of which has not yet been precisely determined, has increased again. According to the latest data, its dimensions are 50 by 80 meters. During this time it became three times larger. If the influx of brine into the mine continued in the same volume, it could be predicted with a high probability that the failure near Solikamsk would continue to increase if urgent measures were not taken to eliminate the consequences of the November accident. In December it became clear that the amount of water entering the mine was several times less. And if at the beginning of the events the company believed that the mine was practically lost, now experts say with a greater degree of confidence that it can still be saved. From the beginning of December, the mine began extracting rock to fill the voids.
All repeats
The Solikamsk failure is far from the first in the history of Uralkali. Similar events occurred in 1986 and 1995.
In 2006, the mine of the BKRU-1 company, located near the city of Berezniki, was flooded, and a year later a sinkhole formed in its place, which grew larger over time. Over the next few years, several more sinkholes appeared and began to threaten residential buildings. As a result, the Uralkali company was forced to take on part of the financing for relocating residents from the dangerous zone and laying it bypassing the railway.
Reaction on the Internet: photoshopped
The Internet community reacted to the incident near Solikamsk with a kind of humor.
The failure has become a popular photoshop. Some of the “masterpieces” turned out to be quite funny, despite the seriousness of what happened.