How Not To Hide a Mine Shaft
On a recent evening, our daughter and her friend Michelle Musick were walking along the shoulder of an Ester road when Michelle almost stepped into a hole hidden by the weeds. It was at once apparent that this was no "ordinary" hole, because they couldn't see the bottom. They came to our house to get a flashlight and we all trooped down to have a look.
It gives a positively eerie sensation to stick your head down into a hole maybe a foot and a half across, and not be able to see anything, even with a flashlight.
What could be determined (once a stronger flashlight was obtained) was that there was a cavern extending underneath the road. The roof seemed to be about two feet thick, and a rock on the end of a fishline revealed that the hole was about 25 feet deep. In any event, it looked large enough to gobble up any of the heavy service vehicles that use the road.
Jim Gilmore of the Ester road service commission wasted no time in blocking off the road and arranging to have the hole filled.
Elsewhere in the world, when the ground collapses or a sinkhole opens suddenly, it's usually because water-soluble rock has been leached away beneath the surface soil. (Florida, built on limestone and phosphate rock, is famous for these sudden events.) But here, the source wasn't natural. It was ascertained that the cavern was an old exploratory mine shaft that had drifts radiating out from around the bottom. The miners had sealed it off with timbers which have rotted since those days in the early part of this century. In fact, the Ester area seems to be riddled with old mine workings and it is not unusual to have holes open which, on occasion, have provided some residents with handy trash disposal facilities.
It's scary to think that Michelle might have actually stepped into the hole, but even scarier is what could have happened to Pete Coughlin, the landowner.
The initial opening was caused by rainwater running down the side of a post that he had buried in the road shoulder. When Pete put that post in, he hadn't realized that he had nearly penetrated the roof of the cavern. As he recalls now, when he stood in the bottom of the hole tamping the post into place, he didn't realize that he was only about six inches from a 25-foot tamp.
