THE SYRACUSE NEWSPAPERS/ Neighbors - Cayuga

February 15, 2001

Down Time can be Busy

Salt miner John Shaw plies his trade

more than 2,000 feet underground

By Pam Greene

Staff writer

While hanging out a half-mile beneath the surface of Cayuga Lake, it takes more than eight hours for tasteable layer of salt to attach it- self to Cargill Salt Miner John Shaw's 42-year-old skin.

"Sometimes, if I've worked a long day, I can taste the salt on my skin when I leave," he said, licking the back of his hand. "I can't quite taste it yet, in a few more hours, maybe."

Shaw, who moonlights as a farmer in King Feny, strolled around the underground world of crystallized gray salt in a world of his own, his mouth open like an eight-year-old on a snowy day. Salt flakes detached from the 11-foot-high ceiling float through the artificially ventilated

air and land on Shaw' s out-stretched tongue.

He continued to wander around aimlessly, gently kicking salt piles, waiting for a giant chainsaw-like scaler to finish scraping loose salt chucks from the ceiling. When the process is completed, Shaw screws five-foot bolts into the ceiling to secure the area recently blasted and

harvested for road de-icing salt.

Until then, though, he can either wander around the four-mile maze of salt corridors or stab at loose salt bits on the ceiling with a 13-foot spear.

"He doesn't like to stay still,"said John Reeves, fellow miner. "He just wants to wander."

The 210 employees of Cargill in Lansing mine 9,000 tons of salt a day from an underground bed stretching from New England through New York, Ohio and Michigan.

As the deepest rock salt mine in North America, the facility, which opened in 1920, operates perpetually. The mine, owned by the Cargill family, is active directly beneath the center of Cayuga Lake.

"I don't think you could run out of salt," said Cargill Mine Manager Bob Supko. "There's an inexhaustible source."

In the Cargill mine alone, there's at least a 20-year reserve, he said.

The salt bed, millions of years old, is the result of evaporating seas. Two elevator shafts bring miners down 2,300 feet and bring salt up to the surface to be sold to companies and municipalities for de-icing purposes (the salt is only 98 percent pure, whereas table salt is 99.9 percent). The design of the mine al- lows fresh air to be pumped in and used air to be released.

Serious injuries are few and far between, since the surrounding conditions are constantly monitored. The workers just cel- ebrated 500,000 work hours without anyone losing work time for injury. Employees were given lasagna with salad and garlic bread - a treat for Shaw, who brings a peanut butter and jelly sandwich to work every day.

The last minor injury happened in December. An employee slipped on ice in the parking lot.

"I swear, it was the only patch of ice out there," Supko said.

Shaw's day begins at 10 a.m. and ends at 6 p.m. in the Cargill office on the Lansing shore of Cayuga Lake. Equipped with a helmet over his straggly gray hair, a mounted flashlight fastened to the visor above his blue eyes and emergency safety breathing apparatus (in case of fire) attached to the tool belt around his 30-inch waste, Shaw accompanies his nine-member all-male team of miners into the elevator on shore.

They descend in total darkness for six minutes, talking to each other about booze, women and sports over the sound of rushing air. When the doors open, the men are in a different, constantly 75 degree world.

The walls are glistening gray and match the floor and ceiling. Everything is made of salt, in- cluding the pillars that support about 20 feet of salt above the ceiling. The other 2,280 feet are supported by the crafty engineering and design of the mines. The corridors are 11 feet high and 30 feet wide.

The days of the "Tommy Knocker" troll people scrunched in dimly-lit mines are over. The space is high, wide, open and is equipped with a full-size auto body shop, trucks, bathrooms and a computer-run office powered by generators.

The team's supervisor, 5-foot-7 Eric Shell, is known to the crew as "Peanut." He meets with the crew every day at the start of the shift and goes over the day's game plan.

The miners make about $35,000 year - which beats farming, Shaw said.

"If you see something you don't like down here, you can just go away. It's not like a mean bull on a farm. I knew a guy mauled by a bull on a farm... Plus the weather's better down here," Shaw said. "It's always comfortable. I had to prove to myself that you could live here and not get cold in the winter. Once in a while I miss the out- doors, but it ain't bad."

Forty hours a week for three years, Shaw has had the same scenery and weather day in and day out.

His idea of variety is alternating five jobs by the month.

In January he was a bolter, in February he'll drill.

In March, he could either be an undercutter, creating spaces for exploding salt to expand, or he could be a scaler and remove unsafe salt chunks from the ceiling with machinery.

Or he could carry explosives to a site. Then the cycle continues. But today he bolts and clears salt for eight straight hours.

And tomorrow he'll do the same.

"Today I felt like coming to work," he said. "And tomorrow I won't. It just depends on what side of the bed I wake up on."

PICTURE

JOHN SHAW (center) talks with Steve Home (left), a mine manager from Newfield, and Neil Planty II, a miner from Burdett, after adding roof bolts in the Cargill mine.