Video Report - Salt mining in west lancashire

[Lancashire lad]

Cheers for that....

I have had a lot of help on here about what/how to post good content if you think people are over critical its because they want you to do better its nothing personal but they wont overly admit that you have to work it out its how we test the good explorers from the bad ones who cant take the critism tend to leave so just bare in mind there not giving you greif for the sake of it ,they hope you will take the attitude to do better

 

[Dave Reeves]

It's like the salt mines up here in Teesside they 'mine' the salt by drilling down (like an oil well) then they pump water in and brine comes out, hence they 'mine' the salt. So nothing subsurface to explore. Though would have been handy if the op had put some history in the actual post and pointed this out. Another note, some of the ones here on Teesside are used as handy storage cavities for hydrocarbons (about 1km deep and millions of gallons). That's enough of my geeky facts for the day, I need to head out and film some pipes.

Yes, I should have replied to this guy, I just didn't get around to it. You're right about the usage of these pumps, They were used to extract the salt in the manner you describe. I think it's called solution mining, Although the history of salt extraction in this area goes right back to the days when surface evaporation was the standard way to obtain salt. Later the salt was mined in the traditional manner and two huge underground caverns were created but these have long since disappeared due to subsidence and only a couple of large fishing lakes can be seen today. In the final days of salt extraction in this area it was removed in the fashion you described, I think until the mid 1990s. In these final days the salt was used to produce PVC and vinyl at the ICI factory across the river at Fleetwood.