NY mine where 17 workers got stuck is closed for 2nd day

Mark Klein of Cargill, which operates the mine says they are still assessing what caused the elevator to stop while the miners were descending into the salt mine.

All 17 miners who were stuck hundreds of feet below the surface in an elevator at the deepest salt mine in the Western Hemisphere have been rescued. A rescue cage was lowered…

Seventeen miners spent a frigid night in a broken-down elevator in America’s deepest salt mine, huddling with heat packs and blankets before being rescued early Thursday, a mishap that highlighted the sometimes-risky work of churning out the road salt that keeps traffic moving on ice and snow.

Hours after the last miner was rescued, Klein said it appears a beam that kept an elevator auto aligned in the mine shaft bent or broke before the miners boarded, causing them to get stranded 90 stories underground.

“It went so smooth, it was ideal”, MacIntosh said.

The crane company, located in another park of the Finger Lakes region 30 miles from the mine, received a call around 1:30 a.m. Thursday from emergency officials seeking help, according to owner Steve Bilinski.

The elevator, for reasons not immediately known, stopped short of halfway down the 2,300-foot shaft, Wilczynski said.

With temperatures in the elevator shaft in the teens – the same as the surface – the miners were cold but otherwise unharmed, said Shawn Wilczynski, the mine manager. Klein said they were not in danger, and added the rescue operation could be completed in a few hours.

When the miners reached the surface, they high-fived the crane crew, he said.

The miners became trapped around midnight local time when a lift malfunctioned at the Cargill Salt Mines in Lansing, a town of about 11,000 people near Ithaca, the Tompkins County Department of Emergency Response said.

A crane hoisted the first four to the surface in a basket around 7 am today at the mine in Lansing, about 40 miles outside Syracuse. The company says the mine located on Cayuga Lake’s southern end processes about 2 million tons of road salt per year. Workers were provided with jackets, hand warmers, and other items to make sure they remained warm while trapped.

The rock salt mine is one of three operated by Cargill, with the other two being in Louisiana and Ohio.