Weaver also found old vehicles in the cave. Older residents in the county have told him the area was a dump or a landfill at some point.
Christopher Pelczarski is a caver, and he’s seen a lot of underground passageways. But he’s never seen anything like the abandoned gypsum mine that was exposed by sinkholes this week in Black Hawk.
For one thing, he never expected to find a car down there.
“There was one place where there is actually literally a car coming out of a hole from the surface, an old car. It’s like a 1951 Ford,” Pelczarski said. “Yeah, it’s half sticking out of the ceiling, basically.”
He figures there used to be a scrapyard or garbage dump on the surface, and the car somehow sank down from there.
…The cavers mapped 2,300 linear feet of passages, Pelczarski said. There were additional tunnels they couldn’t access because they were flooded or collapsed. Some of the tunnels were big – 12 feet high and 40 feet wide.
Huntrods said construction on the subdivision began in 1992 and was finished in a few years. He provided the name of the developer but the Journal couldn't find any information about the company online. It was in operation from 1910 to 1926 though, according to this
The mine is150 feet wide in the biggest cavern and at least 600 feet long. He said the mine may be longer, but there are collapsed and unstable areas too dangerous to explore.
Home owner John Trudo said he wants to know if developers or a government agency knew the community was being built on top of an old mine. “Did they know they should not have built on this and somebody turned a blind eye so somebody could make a dollar?”
https://rapidcityjournal.com/news/local/12-blackhawk-families-displaced-after-sinkhole-exposes-abandoned-gypsum-mine/article_c48e901e-9ba9-546c-a1ac-c6d66af9e6b8.html
http://dakotafreepress.com/2020/05/03/black-hawk-down-old-gypsum-mine-avenges-inattentive-housing-development/
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/gcquma/an_amazing_sinkhole_opens_up_into_an_abandoned/
More like a 1954 Ford-and by the looks of it a convertible. Makes you wonder if it was sitting in a salvage pile, and was swallowed up, or if it was someone's pride and joy. Of course the developers knew these gypsum mines were present, and developed the area anyway, there's no way they couldn't have known. We have the same problem in my area, where developers do fill and build subdivisions in flood plains, and then ten years down the road the city needs FEMA grants to tear them all down.
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