On the verge of failure. Sinkholes in Berezniki - ilipin

Man actively and confidently manages our planet. He is most interested in mineral deposits, because they provide an opportunity to develop production, build new cities and create many jobs in the process of developing the deposit and its further exploitation. However, here you can also see not so rosy prospects, because due to deep and branched shafts, voids are formed in the mines underground. Many of them are interspersed with karst sinkholes. In Berezniki and Solikamsk, this state of affairs led to the emergence of several failures that became distinctive feature these cities. About the problem settlements The government has been aware for a long time, but specialists are unable to stop the process of soil subsidence. Today we will tell you about the sinkholes in Berezniki and Solikamsk, and also try to find out what consequences this has for the residents of the two

Let's turn to the specifics of the issue

The failures in Berezniki are not an isolated phenomenon on the world map. Many cities and countries face a similar problem; soil subsidence is especially common in places where active economic activity human or specific natural conditions have been created.

As a result of soil movement, depressions appear in earth's surface. It is extremely difficult to predict their appearance, so houses, outbuildings, railway tracks and other infrastructure facilities may go underground. Similar phenomena cause serious material damage and cause the death of a large number of people. In Berezniki, sinkholes are under close supervision of specialists who conduct hard work to study them and predict new ground movements. Perhaps thanks to their activities mass casualties among the city's population has been avoided for many years.

Causes of sudden ground movements

The failures in Berezniki and other places are due to many reasons. But among the main ones we can highlight the following:

Soil erosion by water. These could be underground sources, leaks from laid sewers, and similar situations.
Deformation of natural voids. In some areas underground there is a large number of unexplored voids and caves. Sometimes they lie so deep that it is impossible to detect them during georeconnaissance. Over time, they become deformed, the soil moves and subsides.
Conducting construction work without expertise. If you start construction in dangerous areas, you can provoke the appearance of another failure. Therefore, there is a rule according to which construction work must be preceded by geological exploration.
Soil composition. Any soil is subject to erosion, but if it consists of limestone or, for example, rock salt, then the risk of subsidence becomes several times higher.

Sometimes the formation of failures is caused by the deformation of various underground structures. But let's move on directly to the history of the formation of failures in Berezniki.

From the history of the issue

Solikamsk and Berezniki are considered the most major cities in the Perm region. The vast Verkhnekamskoe deposit is also located here, where magnesium and potassium salts are mined. Work on salt extraction has been going on here for more than eighty years. During this period there were three major accidents, which partly provoked the formation of failures.

Scientists believe that main reason failures in Berezniki - mines and shafts. They are located almost under the city, which already creates a serious danger for its residents. It is noteworthy that the first voids were discovered under residential areas back in the seventies of the last century, forty years after the development of the deposits. Some of them are located only three hundred meters from the surface.

On this moment The situation has developed in such a way that the only Christian church in Berezniki has been closed and several residential areas have been resettled. Moreover, ground movements are still occurring. A new failure in Berezniki was discovered not so long ago - in March current year. Each of them is under careful supervision.

First failure

At the beginning of 1986, miners discovered a leak in one of the mines. Water mixed with salts, which in local jargon is called “brine,” quickly eroded the soil, and by spring it became clear that the accident could no longer be localized. The flow gradually penetrated into the premises where production was taking place, and was measured at a speed of several thousand cubic meters per hour.

The first failure in Berezniki appeared on the night of July twenty-seventh. In the forest zone there was also a powerful release of salts to the surface. Eyewitnesses said that the process was accompanied by flashes of light, which looked quite impressive against the background of the night sky.

Literally within a month huge failure filled with water and began to resemble a lake with edges twenty meters high. It is noteworthy that the failure formed along the path of a small stream. As a result, a picturesque waterfall emerged, which quickly became a local landmark.

Uralkali (plant) is carefully monitoring the failure of the land in Berezniki. The funnel is measured twice a year. It is worth noting that the depth of the hole is rapidly decreasing, but its width tends to increase. Moreover, experts fear that in the near future, new ones may form next to the first failure, which will increase total area funnels.

According to the latest data, the diameter of the artificial lake is approximately two hundred meters.

The failure in Solikamsk and its consequences

Sinkholes in Berezniki are more numerous than in Solikamsk. But in this city they had more devastating consequences. In early January of the ninety-fifth year of the last century, within Solikamsk there was a powerful earthquake. Several tremors with magnitudes ranging from three to five led to the loss of an entire lake. A sinkhole measuring approximately one thousand meters by nine hundred meters swallowed up the lake and the springs that feed the reservoir.

As a result, water penetrated into the first and second mines, and most of buildings in the city fell into a potential collapse zone. However, the workers managed to completely save the second mine and stop the water that could have flowed under the city and destroyed it.

Sinkhole trend

Due to the development of the deposit, the soil and soil in the mine area have become very mobile. This partly provoked frequent earthquakes in Solikamsk and Berezniki. From the late nineties to the beginning of the 2000s, several hundred of them occurred.

Many small failures have formed in the risk zone. They were scattered at a sufficient distance from each other and did not cause significant damage. However, in the eyes of experts, these failures were only harbingers of future problems. They made a forecast according to which by 2006 it was necessary to expect increased seismic activity and the formation of new failures in the area of the Verkhnekamskoye field. It is worth noting that the experts were right.

Accident at the first mine

In the autumn of the sixth year after another earthquake, workers noticed water entering the mines. Initially, the brine resembled a small stream, but it very quickly eroded the rock. After just a few days, the flow reached simply incredible speed - more than one thousand cubic meters at one o'clock.

The mine was rapidly flooding. The plant management tried to eliminate the consequences of the accident, but pumping out the water did not help desired results. After another couple of days, it became clear that it would not be possible to resume work. Therefore, people were ordered to be brought to the surface and the mines left in a flooded state. This caused a new failure to appear.

2007 disaster

A year after the accident, serious ground movement and a collapse occurred at the mine. The initial diameter of the resulting crater did not exceed seventy meters. However, the failure grew rapidly and after a couple of weeks it was approximately five hundred meters in size.

At the bottom of the funnel, water accumulated and a small lake formed. It is noteworthy that the water level in the sinkhole is regularly rising. According to the latest data, it reaches just over a hundred meters.

Consequences of failure

The huge crater caused significant damage to the state. An urgently formed commission stated that it was at least one billion rubles. However, the most a big problem The problem was that the failure occurred dangerously close to the railway line and residential areas of Berezniki.

The authorities, after many attempts to solve the situation in a different way, had to build a bypass branch and urgently deal with resettlement local residents. It took almost one and a half billion rubles.

Eight years ago, the state once again calculated the losses from the resulting failure. As a result, almost eight billion rubles were demanded from the company developing the field.

Closing of Berezniki station

Seven years ago, the accident at the first mine made itself felt again. In November of the tenth year right in the area railway station a new hole has formed. Its diameter slightly exceeded one hundred meters, but the station’s operation ceased.

After some time, the hole was filled in, and one of the bulldozer drivers died in the process. At the site of the crater, the soil continues to settle to this day, so the station is in an abandoned state.

Funnel in Solikamsk

Three years ago, a small sinkhole was noticed in the city. Its size is eighty by fifty meters. It did not bring serious consequences, but is a wake-up call for local residents.

Another failure in Berezniki

The school garden at number twenty-six, located practically in its courtyard, has been abandoned for several years. Self educational institution and all the nearby buildings were occupied ten years ago. And as events have shown, it was not in vain. After all, two years ago it was here that a new failure arose.

It was preceded by numerous cracks that spontaneously appeared throughout the city. They started appearing about five years ago, passing through city squares, paved streets and even houses.

In February 1915, right in the yard of a closed school

Another crater was discovered. Its diameter did not exceed five meters, but experts are confident that the size will increase.

The latest data confirmed that they were not mistaken. The funnel has already reached almost thirty meters in diameter.

Kotovsky Street: site of a new crater

Two last year specialists are closely monitoring the movement of soil on Kotovsky Street in Berezniki. They noted that the soil began to subsidence, and this process was accelerating every month.

As a result, in March of this year, a sinkhole appeared on the street. Its dimensions did not exceed two and a half meters. A month later, another crater eight meters deep appeared nearby. In the near future, scientists predict the formation of new voids in the same area.

What does the future hold for Berezniki? Nobody knows. But many experts have more than once raised the topic of relocating the city to a more safe place. Otherwise, one day it may completely disappear from the surface of the earth.

I admit that I had no idea about such a phenomenon as man-made failures and ground subsidence of such a scale, when holes form in a huge area. earth's crust depth up to 100 meters.

Want to see what it looks like in real life?

So I became curious when local Perm bloggers put together a tour and invited me to join them in examining the sinkholes. It’s almost impossible to get here, so it was simply stupid not to take advantage of the situation.

All this was legal and organized jointly with the regional administration and, of course, we were everywhere green light, since the territories are cordoned off, guarded and there is round-the-clock monitoring of the state of the movement of the earth’s crust.

So that you understand, Berezniki is not some kind of Russian outback, it is a powerful industrial centre Perm region. The place is unique for its reserves of potassium-magnesium salts. What you see is stopped due to man-made disaster part of the giant enterprise Uralkali.

After inspecting the main failure, we went to the center for monitoring such zones.

And there are many such zones, here on the monitor in live you can monitor the state of the failures. Unfortunately, they affected not only the industrial area, but also the residential area, since part of the residential area is located above the mines.

This was not a surprise, since scientists first started talking about ground subsidence and the danger of house collapse back in the mid-1970s of the last century, and in 1986, as a result of an accident, the mine of the third mine department (BKPRU-3) was flooded.

The first hole then formed in the forest, which gradually filled with water. And when the BRU-1 mine was flooded, traffic began to move towards the city and the next failure formed at the industrial site in 2007, in 2010 a third appeared, already on the railway tracks near the Berezniki-Passenger station, which disrupted the railway connection with the city .

At first there were attempts to restore the soil, but they were unsuccessful and now all sinkhole zones are turning into exclusion areas with increased control. Modern monitoring devices make it possible to recognize dangerous areas in advance and with a high degree of probability predict new failures and craters. So far there have been no errors in the forecasts.

Living in such areas would be unsafe and the authorities decided to resettle the residents of these areas to new areas. The first resettlement attempt was made in 2010.

It was for these purposes that the new microdistrict Usolsky-2 was built. However, due to negligence, the houses were built from very cheap materials that did not meet modern building standards. And now 89 houses have turned into a ghost village, unsuitable for living.

In 2014, we decided to start again, on a new site. And in January 2015, the Perm Territory Development Corporation OJSC won the largest contract for the development of the right bank of the city of Berezniki for the resettlement of residents of dilapidated houses. So we began the construction of the Lyubimov residential complex.

This time the matter will be brought to an end, since all this was taken under the personal control of the Acting Governor of the Perm Territory Maxim Reshetnikov.

New modern houses will meet all the requirements for a comfortable stay.

In addition, all the infrastructure necessary for life will function: school, kindergarten, clinic and shopping mall. Already established transport connection with enterprises in the region and the city.

And the new apartments will be delivered fully furnished.

To provide the new microdistrict with heat, the capacity of the local heating plant was increased.

We also managed to look here.

And then we went to the largest titanium production enterprise - the AVISMA plant. Almost all titanium used in the global aviation industry is produced here.

I was able to visit the smelting shop for the first time. Of course, I couldn’t help but be amazed by the scale of production.

It’s even strange that I haven’t written about the Bereznikov failures before - it would seem that there’s nothing else to write about if you live here, in close proximity from events? The point, perhaps, is that I like to give a complete picture, and not part of a process with an unclear ending. The story of the flooding of the First Berezniki potash mine has no end, although it began more than six years ago, in October 2006. I will not undertake to describe all the processes that took place during this time in the city - this is a voluminous and very complex question - but I will limit myself to the immediate area near the collapse and my favorite railway - it suffered from the flood, perhaps more than all other “participants in the process”. Today I will try to tell and illustrate everything from the very beginning, to give a picture in motion. I can no longer rely only on my photographic materials (although they will be in the text) - the territory adjacent to the sinkholes is protected, and it is not easy to photograph in the surrounding area. And the scale of the holes in the ground is clearly visible only from the air. Almost all the material was taken from the longest thread of the Berezniki forum, as of today there are 852 pages. So let's get started.

October 2006. Perm region, Berezniki. In the oldest potash mine in the city of the First Potash Mining Department of OJSC Uralkali, water appears in one of the old workings. It took several days to find out that the water in the mine seeps from above, from the layer of supra-salt groundwater. Another week later, on October 28, 2006, a decision was made to stop the fight for the mine - there had already been experience of a similar accident, and it suggested that active actions, and in particular the attempt to pump out the water, only aggravates the situation. Salt dissolves in water, so no one in the world has ever been able to stop the process of flooding a salt mine. A long process of flooding of mine workings began (I’ll jump ahead and say that it lasted for more than three years).
To understand why the majority of Berezniki residents were very nervous about the flooding, let’s take a look at this map.

This is nothing more than the imposition of working boundaries on city map. As you can see, the situation is quite sad. Flooded workings stretched under the entire city, excluding only the northern - not the most developed - part of it. Berezniki — unique city, nowhere else is a huge mine field combined with multi-storey residential buildings (up to 12 floors), which determined all of its current problems; they - with or without a backfill, a flood - would still have emerged over time. Neighboring Solikamsk also stands above a salt mine, even older than the First Potash Mine, but the residential area there is disproportionately smaller, and most importantly, the 9-story buildings are located in a separate zone, under which there will never be workings. And the last difference is that the Solikamsk mine is still in a dry state.
All the lyrics above refer to the entire mine field. Now what relates directly to the place of breakdown of the waterproof layer. Water entering the mine through a breakdown washes a cavity in salt; sooner or later, depending on the rate of flooding, this cavity collapses, forming a failure. The approximate territory of the breakdown, and therefore the collapse-dangerous zone, was calculated very quickly, here it is.

Place of future failure-2, 2004.

This area is directly adjacent to the mine's industrial site. One problem - the main routes of the station pass here. Berezniki, at that time, was the only railway exit from Solikamsk and Berezniki. One more card - don't pay attention to the purple lines for now, they all appeared later.

All Berezniki enterprises, except for the suburban mines of Uralkali, and Solikamsk were under the threat of a sudden loss of communication with the “mainland”. It was necessary to do something urgently. The solution came quickly - a small 500-meter railway loop around the perimeter of the danger zone. The branch was built in December 2006. Until the summer next year it stood idle, but later it came in handy.

What about passenger service? At the time of the flooding, several electric trains ran from Berezniki - to Yayva, Kizel and Ugleuralskaya, from Solikamsk - one pair of electric trains to Chusovskaya and a pair of electric trains to Yekaterinburg. Immediately after the contours of the danger zone were clarified, the traffic police and trains were moved to the Berezniki-Sortirovochnaya station. In the diagram above you can easily find it; it is located twenty kilometers from the city. IN old times The train reached Sortirovka in half an hour. The specially launched buses needed an hour. In fact, Sortirovka was not a single alternative solution - it was possible to organize communication from the Kaliynaya station, which is located much closer to Berezniki than Sortirovka. But by 2006, Potassium, due to prolonged exposure, or rather inaction, turns out to be completely unprepared to receive a large flow of passengers - pedestrian bridge fell into disrepair and was destroyed, the station was closed, and the approach from the bus stop was blocked by a fence. If desired, all these problems could have been solved, but in the end no action was taken to put Kaliyanaya in order either in 2006 or in all subsequent years.
So, neither in 2006 nor at the beginning of the next year, 2007, were there any incidents in danger zone did not happen at the mine. The railway regularly handled freight trains, the bypass was inactive, and the mine was slowly filling with water. Thunder struck on July 28, 2007 - a failure formed in the danger zone, 50x70 meters and 15 deep. According to the general indexing of the Berezniki failures, it receives number 2 after the 1986 failure. The hole doesn’t seem that big in the photo, but take a closer look - the building next to it, the administrative and administrative building of the technical salt factory, is a three-story building.

Gas release from failure-2.

The process of flooding, and therefore underground washing, so quite naturally the sinkhole began to grow. Photos from August 13. In the foreground you can see bypass 1 and the old five-track park. After the collapse formed, the old tracks began to be dismantled.

Since the summer, despite the failure, they began to let passenger elements from Berezniki to Solikamsk. What was wrong here? Summer 2007 - RA1, 2008 - TEM2 with pass. carriage, 2009 - VL11 with the same, 2010 - ED4, RA1. In the summer of 2010, RA2 took place for a short time. After the Kid, pass. traffic to Solikamsk was abolished.
Although in general the development of the failure proceeded within the framework of the forecast, it still becomes scary to keep a message on a thin thread just a hundred meters from a hole beyond any control. In September, next to the old bypass, they begin to build a new one, already two kilometers long; on my diagrams it is designated as bypass-2. It is noticeable that the new bypass has moved only thirty meters away from the old one at the narrowest point - the thermal power plant 10 and the brine preparation factory still operating at the mine’s industrial site are preventing it from moving further. Since both the thermal power plant and the factory are planned to be closed in the future, the construction of a larger bypass is being pushed into the future - if necessary, the closure of facilities can be forced. By December, bypass-2 was put into operation.

Together with bypass-2, they are building an incomprehensible loop in the forest south of the city, what is designated by me as “bypass MK-24”. To be honest, I still don’t understand what exactly he is avoiding and what threats he is insuring the railway against. However, the MK-24 bypass was built and launched in December 2008.

TO late autumn 2007 should also include the decision to design and build a 53-kilometer bypass line from Yaiva to Chashkino, the bypass that I call NUBAM. Many, including me, then considered this project excessive - to bypass a local problem, just a couple of hundred meters wide, a huge and expensive bypass loop was built, with at first glance an excessive supply. However, subsequent events showed that the bet on NUBAM was the right and timely decision, but more on that later. I will only say about the NUBAM route - such a long distance was required in order to bypass not only the flooded mine, but also all the existing and future mining allotments of potash mines, that is, salt will never be mined under NUBAM. This means that any problems related to the geology of the subsoil are excluded for the road. Very serious and almost unsolvable traditional means Problems.
The gap, meanwhile, continues to grow. November 1, 2007.

November 23, 2007. In the far part of the hole you can see a “roller coaster” - the whip of the Nart branch. Unlike the main paths, they were not dismantled, they were simply cut off different sides danger zone.

January 20, 2008. old park already completely cut off by failure. The supports of both failed branches are visible; for some time they worked in parallel, then failed-1 was dismantled.

The beginning of NUBAM. In March 2008, a construction base was organized in Yaiva, design work to speed up, they are carried out simultaneously with the deployment of earthworks. The one and a half year construction of the 53 km bypass begins.

In the summer of 2008, work on the construction of the third failed railway was again accelerated. bypass, but they did not go further than excavation work in the Zyryanka area. The sinkhole has almost stopped growing, and it was decided to abandon the expensive temporary construction (it would have been necessary to dig up the entire Zyryansky hill, demolish many capital structures at the BKRU-1 industrial site and close CHPP-10).

Big changes in the pass. no traffic occurs. The summer one-car “train” is being launched again to Solikamsk. Without much noise, electric trains are transferred to a stop at Kaliynaya - in Shishi there is simply nowhere to turn two electric trains at once. Electric trains run from Kaliyanaya to this day. Neither the station nor the platform are left there anymore; the crossing bridge was demolished in 2007, so you have to take a detour along the tracks to get to the train. But it’s still more convenient than getting in Shisha.
June 8, 2008. Panoramic view of the collapse area, in the center of the picture is the dismantled bypass route-1

And the water continues to rise.

December 27, 2008. View from Zyryanka, southern approach to failure-2. The dead-end path goes straight ahead to the dismantled bypass-1, on the right is bypass-2.

January 2009. Panoramic views from the north of the perimeter of failure-2. The water is already quite high.

April 2009. Water fills the entire bowl of the sinkhole and splashes out, flooding the surrounding area. The process of flooding the mine is completed, the sinkhole stabilizes and almost stops growing. Its current size is 380x360 meters.

July 20, 2009. The water-filled hole could be mistaken for a natural lake, if not for the ruins of a factory nearby.

NUBAM is launched in December 2009, according to the already established tradition in Berezniki - ahead of schedule, on the eve of the New Year - on the 20th. On January 11, 2010, the Sverdlovsk PDS was transferred to NUBAM from Sortirovochnaya. As before 2006, it will depart from Berezniki station, although it will go north rather than south. Also, as an experiment, a pair of Kizel-Solikamsk electric trains are running through NUBAM. In January 2010, I visited the Solikamsk junction, and then took a ride on the train. The NUBAM electric train did not last long - it ran almost empty to Solikamsk, and was canceled in the spring.
On April 5, the unexpected happens - at NUBAM, a train car derails due to a track overshoot. The wild acceleration of construction is making itself felt. The entire NUBAM is closed for preventative work. But what to do with the Sverdlovsk PDS? There is only one solution left - the train is launched without unnecessary noise along the old track - to Kaliynaya, past the failure along the 2nd bypass. A difficult situation with NUBAM helped me overcome many years of caution. Trains ran past the hole for a whole week, then traffic along the large bypass was restored.
Proval-2 April 29, 2010.

May 2, 2010. As in the old antediluvian times, in the passenger park st. Berezniki is located on the Sverdlovsk subway station and the Solikamsk electric train.

View from the passenger platform towards failure-2. Even in such a photograph you can see a decrease in the relief - the paths clearly go down. But there is a sorting hump ahead, there should be no reductions. Here, near the hump control room, there had been accelerated drawdowns for several years before, which for the time being no one paid attention to.

Again, for the umpteenth time, it seemed that everything had settled down, settled down. At the very least, the trains are running, Railway it works, the sinkhole hardly fails and looks like a harmless lake. Quiet life ended in late autumn. Early in the morning of November 25, 2010, eight hundred meters from failure-2, a small hole appeared directly under the main path. The new failure, the third in a row, popularly called the Little One, was really small at first - only one hopper from the train passing along the tracks could fit into it. But that was only the beginning.

The kid almost finished off the station. The Sverdlovsk PDS returns to Shishi again (only in May 2011 it was transferred to Solikamsk - a logical decision that could have been made immediately), suburban turntables to Solikamsk are cancelled. The station is being cut off again - new line The cut passes 700 meters north of the old one, all tracks at the station become dead ends. The through passage to Kaliyanaya ceases to exist, it becomes clear how NUBAM was built on time; in those conditions it simply saved the situation. Moreover, about the possibility of new failures next to the old one knowledgeable people warned back in 2006. Groundwater, during three years merging through a break in the water-protective layer into the mine, washed out cavities in the cover salt, in general, the entire underground hydrology near the failure changed, turning the surrounding area into a very unstable and dangerous territory.
November 30, 2010, failure-3.

January 21, 2011. Column of dead ends on cut line-2.

ilipin in Provaly in Berezniki

From above, of course.

There were probably about five forays into or through Berezniki. However, only once was it possible to photograph the city from above - either there was no time, then the weather was not right, then we climbed deeper and not up. Not even six months had passed, as they say, and finally the First Department of the country-famous Research Institute of Coptero and Suspension Construction completed censoring the photographs of Berezniki. Once the go-ahead has been received, it needs to be published.

Sinkholes No. 3 (2010) and No. 4 (2011) near Berezniki station. On the left with the red roof is the Berezniki railway station, closed forever. Passenger trains will never arrive at the platform again.

There are currently 4 sinkholes in Berezniki. Three appeared after the flooding of the first mine, or BKPRU-1, in 2006. About a year after the flooding, the ground collapsed near the technical salt factory right on the territory of the enterprise.

Current, for the summer of 2014. state of failure at the technical salt factory of the first mine department.

Initial failure state #2

The depth of the hole is about 100 meters.

In May 2007, the construction of a shut-off dam on the industrial canal was completed, which, as stated, eliminated the danger of a large volume of water from the Kama entering the area of possible failure.

A canal, in the distance two dams are visible to cut off the flow of water into the mine and the flow of brine into the Kama.

Salt dump of the first mine. Before the failure it was much higher. Due to the formation of the sinkhole, salt from the dump was used to prepare a saturated solution and pump it into the dying mine.

The industrial channel is a part of the Zyryanka River, where barges used to enter to load Uralkali products. Now, due to the failure, the canal is blocked by a dam (at the end) so that the brine from the failure does not flow into the canal and the Kama.

Flour mill and sludge storage facility (in the background) of the first mine

In the background is a photo of the length of the pipe of CHPP-10, which is still working on the edge of the failure 1 and 2

Another view of the second failure.

View of the second failure and mining operation from under the clouds.

In 2010, at the Berezniki station, which is located above the flooded BRU-1, a new failure occurred. As a result, transit through the Berezniki station was stopped, all 14 tracks of the freight, passenger and sorting fleet were shortened by one third and became dead ends. In 2011, on the first anniversary of its appearance, the sinkhole was filled in, but this did not allow the station to be completely restored. Two years later, after the buried soil subsided, a lake formed again at the site of the crater. The failure on the territory of the station became the third in number and size of the Berezniki failures and received popular name"Baby"

You can see how the rails have been dismantled. This railway line connected the Solikamsk-Berezniki agglomeration with the rest of the world.

As of the summer of 2014, the issue of moving the station was being considered. The bridge between the filled-in and fourth failure remained, but the lake formed due to continuous subsidence above the two failures continued to advance.

Closed building railway station Bereznikov.

On December 4, 2011, north of the mine construction department building, not far from the Berezniki station, a new, fourth failure occurred. By now, failures 3 and 4 are one lake.

On the left you can see failure No. 3 on the tracks of the Berezniki station, on the right - No. 4.

Sinkholes 3-4, in the background is the salt dump of the first mine. On the sides of the sinkholes there are buildings going under water.

Another view of dips 3-4.

The railway also had to be rebuilt. New sections of the railway were built in several stages, bypassing the border of the mine fields. By 2012, the reconstruction was completed, and mineral fertilizers can now be safely transported by rail.

Filmed railways on a closed branch.

Branch of the railway to bypass a dangerous area

In 2012, a new dangerous zone appeared near Reshetov Square. Asphalt and buildings in these places are cracking, the rate of soil subsidence is regularly measured, and it seems to be increasing. At any moment, most likely, another failure will occur in the spring. We tried to photograph the place, which still looked like a normal abandoned block, in order to compare it with the future hole in the ground. Place your bets when an emergency expedition to Berezniki is needed?

Reshetov Square is the site of the future failure.

There will soon be a hole somewhere in the center of the photo.

A couple of techno-natural landscapes that are not directly related to failures.

Dam of the pond of the first mine

Boat bases and a river port are visible in the background.

The first pond and the village of Zyryanka. On the horizon is the salt dump of the third mine, which was flooded in 1986; there is also a sinkhole at number one.

Original taken from leksandrych c On the verge of failure.

Part two. Endless story.

It’s even strange that I haven’t written about the Berezniki failures before - it would seem, what else to write about if you live here, in close proximity to the events? The point, perhaps, is that I like to give a complete picture, and not part of a process with an unclear ending. The story of the flooding of the First Berezniki potash mine has no end, although it began more than six years ago, in October 2006. I will not undertake to describe all the processes that took place during this time in the city - this is a voluminous and very complex question - but I will limit myself to the immediate area near the collapse and my favorite railway - it suffered from the flood, perhaps more than all the other “participants in the process”. Today I will try to tell and illustrate everything from the very beginning, to give a picture in motion. I can no longer rely only on my photographic materials (although they will be in the text) - the territory adjacent to the sinkholes is protected, and it is not easy to photograph in the surrounding area. And the scale of the holes in the ground is clearly visible only from the air. Almost all the material was taken from the longest thread of the Berezniki forum, as of today there are 852 pages. So let's get started.

October 2006. Perm region, Berezniki. In the oldest potash mine in the city of the First Potash Mining Department of JSC Uralkali, water appears in one of the old workings. It took several days to find out that the water in the mine seeps from above, from the layer of supra-salt groundwater. Another week later, on October 28, 2006, a decision was made to stop the fight for the mine - there had already been experience of a similar accident, and it suggested that active actions, and in particular an attempt to pump out water, would only worsen the situation. Salt dissolves in water, so no one in the world has ever been able to stop the process of flooding a salt mine. A long process of flooding of mine workings began (I’ll jump ahead and say that it lasted for more than three years).
To understand why the majority of Berezniki residents were very nervous about the flooding, let’s take a look at this map.

This is nothing more than the imposition of the boundaries of workings on the city map. As you can see, the situation is quite sad. Flooded workings stretched under the entire city, excluding only the northern - not the most developed - part of it. Berezniki is a unique city; nowhere else is a huge mine field combined with multi-storey residential buildings (up to 12 floors). This is what determined all its current problems; they - with or without a mine, a flood - would still have emerged over time. Neighboring Solikamsk also stands above a salt mine, even older than the First Potash mine, but the residential area there is disproportionately smaller, and most importantly, the 9-story buildings are located in a separate zone, under which there will never be workings. And the last difference is that the Solikamsk mine is still in a dry state.
All the lyrics above refer to the entire mine field. Now what relates directly to the place of breakdown of the waterproof layer. Water entering the mine through a breakdown washes a cavity in salt; sooner or later, depending on the rate of flooding, this cavity collapses, forming a failure. The approximate territory of the breakdown, and therefore the collapse-dangerous zone, was calculated very quickly, here it is.

Place of future failure-2, 2004.

This area is directly adjacent to the mine's industrial site. One problem - the main routes of the station pass here. Berezniki, at that time - the only railway exit from Solikamsk and Berezniki. One more card - don't pay attention to the purple lines for now, they all appeared later.

All Berezniki enterprises, except for the suburban mines of Uralkali, and Solikamsk were under the threat of a sudden loss of communication with the “mainland”. It was necessary to do something urgently. The solution came quickly - a small 500-meter railway loop around the perimeter of the danger zone. The branch was built in December 2006. Until the summer of next year it stood idle, but then it came in handy.

What about passenger traffic? At the time of the flooding, several electric trains ran from Berezniki - to Yayva, Kizel and Ugleuralskaya, from Solikamsk - one pair of electric trains to Chusovskaya and a pair of electric trains to Yekaterinburg. Immediately after the contours of the danger zone were clarified, the traffic police and trains were moved to the Berezniki-Sortirovochnaya station. In the diagram above you can easily find it; it is located twenty kilometers from the city. In the old days, the train took half an hour to get to Sortirovka. The specially launched buses needed an hour. In fact, Sortirovka was not a single alternative solution - it was possible to organize communication from the Kaliynaya station, which is located much closer to Berezniki than Sortirovka. But by 2006, Potassium, due to prolonged exposure, or rather inaction, turned out to be completely unprepared to receive a large flow of passengers - the pedestrian bridge fell into disrepair and was destroyed, the station was closed, and the approach from the bus stop was blocked by a fence. If desired, all these problems could have been solved, but in the end no action was taken to put Kaliyanaya in order either in 2006 or in all subsequent years.
So, neither in 2006 nor at the beginning of the next year, 2007, did any incidents occur in the danger zone at the mine. The railway regularly handled freight trains, the bypass was inactive, and the mine was slowly filling with water. Thunder struck on July 28, 2007 - a failure formed in the danger zone, 50x70 meters and a depth of 15. According to the general indexing of the Berezniki failures, it receives number 2 after the 1986 failure. The hole doesn’t seem that big in the photo, but take a closer look - the building next to it, the administrative and administrative building of the industrial salt factory, is a three-story building.

Gas release from failure-2.

Since the summer, despite the failure, they began to let passenger elements from Berezniki to Solikamsk. What was wrong here? Summer 2007 - RA1, 2008 - TEM2 with pass. carriage, 2009 - VL11 with the same, 2010 - ED4, RA1. In the summer of 2010, RA2 took place for a short time. After the Kid, pass. traffic to Solikamsk was abolished.
Although in general the development of the failure proceeded within the framework of the forecast, it still becomes scary to keep a message on a thin thread just a hundred meters from a hole beyond any control. In September, next to the old bypass, they begin to build a new one, already two kilometers long; on my diagrams it is designated as bypass-2. It is noticeable that the new bypass has moved only thirty meters away from the old one at the narrowest point - the thermal power plant 10 and the brine preparation factory still operating at the mine’s industrial site are preventing it from moving further. Since both the thermal power plant and the factory are planning to close in the future, the construction of a larger bypass is being pushed into the future - if necessary, the closure of facilities can be forced. By December, bypass-2 was put into operation.

The decision to design and build the 53-kilometer Yayva-Chashkino bypass line, the bypass that I call NUBAM, should also be attributed to the late autumn of 2007. Many, including me, then considered this project excessive - to bypass a local problem, a huge and expensive bypass loop was built just a couple of hundred meters wide, with at first glance an excessive supply. However, subsequent events showed that the bet on NUBAM was the right and timely decision, but more on that later. I will only say about the NUBAM route - such a long distance was required in order to bypass not only the flooded mine, but also all the existing and future mining allotments of potash mines, that is, salt will never be mined under NUBAM. This means that any problems related to the geology of the subsoil are excluded for the road. Very serious problems that are almost unsolvable by traditional means.
The gap, meanwhile, continues to grow. November 1, 2007.

November 23, 2007. In the far part of the hole you can see a “roller coaster” - the whip of the Nart branch. Unlike the main paths, they were not dismantled; they were simply cut off from different sides of the danger zone.

January 20, 2008. The old park is already completely cut off by a failure. The supports of both failed branches are visible; for some time they worked in parallel, then failed-1 was dismantled.

The beginning of NUBAM. In March 2008, a construction base was established in Yaiva; design work was carried out simultaneously with the start of earthworks to speed things up. The one and a half year construction of the 53 km bypass begins.

Big changes in the pass. no traffic occurs. They are running a summer one-car train to Solikamsk again. Electric trains are quietly transferred to the Kaliynaya station for storage - in Shishi there is simply nowhere to turn two electric trains at once. Electric trains run from Kaliyanaya to this day. Neither the station nor the platform are left there anymore; the crossing bridge was demolished in 2007, so you have to take a detour along the tracks to get to the train. But it’s still more convenient than getting in Shisha.
June 8, 2008. Panoramic view of the collapse area, in the center of the picture is the dismantled bypass route-1

And the water continues to rise.

December 27, 2008. View from Zyryanka, southern approach to failure-2. The dead-end path goes straight ahead to the dismantled bypass-1, on the right is bypass-2.

January 2009. Panoramic views from the north of the perimeter of failure-2. The water is already quite high.

July 20, 2009. The water-filled hole could be mistaken for a natural lake, if not for the ruins of a factory nearby.

NUBAM is launched in December 2009, according to the already established tradition in Berezniki - ahead of schedule, on the eve of the New Year - on the 20th. On January 11, 2010, the Sverdlovsk PDS was transferred to NUBAM from Sortirovochnaya. As before 2006, it will depart from Berezniki station, although it will go north rather than south. Also, as an experiment, a pair of Kizel-Solikamsk electric trains are running through NUBAM. In January 2010, I visited the Solikamsk junction, and then took a ride on the train. The NUBAM electric train did not last long - it ran almost empty to Solikamsk, and was canceled in the spring.
On April 5, the unexpected happens - at NUBAM, due to a track overshoot, a back-to-back car derails. The wild acceleration of construction is making itself felt. The entire NUBAM is closed for maintenance work. But what to do with the Sverdlovsk PDS? There is only one solution left - the train is allowed to quietly follow the old track - to Kaliynaya, past the failure along the 2nd bypass. The difficult situation with NUBAM helped overcome many years of caution. Trains ran past the hole for a whole week, then traffic along the large bypass was restored.
Proval-2 April 29, 2010.

May 2, 2010. As in the old antediluvian times, in the passenger park st. Berezniki is located on the Sverdlovsk subway station and the Solikamsk electric train.

View from the passenger platform towards failure-2. Even in this photograph you can see the decrease in relief - the paths clearly go down. But there is a sorting hump ahead, there should be no reductions. Here, near the hump control room, there had been accelerated drawdowns for several years before, which for the time being no one paid attention to.

Again, for the umpteenth time, it seemed that everything had settled down, settled down. At the very least, the trains are running, the railway is working, there are almost no sinkholes and it looks like a harmless lake. The quiet life ended in late autumn. Early in the morning of November 25, 2010, eight hundred meters from failure-2, a small hole appeared directly under the main path. The new failure, the third in a row, popularly called the Little One, was really small at first - only one hopper from the train passing along the tracks could fit into it. But that was only the beginning.

The kid almost finished off the station. The Sverdlovsk PDS returns to Shishi again (only in May 2011 it was transferred to Solikamsk - a logical decision that could have been made immediately), suburban turntables to Solikamsk are cancelled. The station is being “cut off” again - the new cutting line runs 700 meters north of the old one, all tracks at the station become dead ends. The through passage to Kaliyanaya ceases to exist, it becomes clear how NUBAM was built on time; in those conditions it simply saved the situation. Moreover, knowledgeable people warned about the possibility of new sinkholes next to the old one back in 2006. Groundwater, which over the course of three years flowed through a break in the waterproof layer into the mine, washed out cavities in the cover salt; in general, the entire underground hydrology near the sinkhole changed, turning the surrounding area into a very unstable and dangerous territory.
November 30, 2010, failure-3.

January 21, 2011. Column of dead ends on cut line-2.