Holey logic

Dear reader,

I'm living in the ruhr area, which means it's an area shaped by mining. What wasn't much thought of at the time of coal mining back then, is the fact that by drilling shafts underground, the ground level will be changed and moving, too. There is especially a danger of old shafts collapsing and leaving deep holes in the ground. You can see that in my parents' home, when you look around for example in the living-room. There and in the other rooms, you'll see smaller or longer cracks in the walls. You shouldn't think about it too much. Otherwise your mind might create images of suddenly tumbling walls or the ground would open up and swallow it up! There's also an interesting crack in the parquet floor between the living-room and dining-room. Now in winter the crack is almost invisible and closed. In the summer it's clearly visible and has the thickness of a finger. Once I heard my mother say that we'll have to leave the house in any case in about 10 years or so, when the house will be collapsing or breaking apart from the mining. A scary though, that the house will suddenly just collapse or break apart like that and be impossible to live in.

As a fan of Mark Gatiss, I know he was born in county durham. So when in the end of august this year, one of my mails from the guardian had the article headline of “30 metre wide sinkhole appears in Durham”, I was all ears, of course. Sam Hillyard had been for a walk with her dog when she noticed the hole, which has even grown wider now. The bottom can't be seen. It's assumed that if someone falls in there, it would be impossible to get the person out again. Which is why there are warnings now to keep your distance. It's assumed that it comes from mining in that area.


I was practically speechless when I read the following article headline though: “Kiruna: the town being moved 3km east so it doesn't fall into a mine”. The swedish town lives from iron-ore mining. Now the mining resulted in so much damage in the city, that the citizens have to move. Typical for the civilised people to often start thinking about their actions and results of that, when their own life is at risk because of it. Maybe futuristic films like Twelve Monkeys aren't that unrealistic after all and the surface of the earth is contaminated with something or otherwise condemned as uninhabitable. Or everything is sunken in from the many drillings and mining of things inside the earth, that there simply isn't a surface anymore as we know it now.

Until next blog,

sarah