City Council Minutes 1976 08 10 - Laserfiche WebLink

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COLO. TECH. CENTER CONT'D DR. ROBINSON there would not be a significant damage of properties in results of subsidence and this was on our original study of the Sproul homes. Now since that time we have done studies in Lafayette, in and around the city of Lafayette, and all of our work has come to the same conclusion, that if you have mines that are over 250 feet in depth you are not going to have damage to structures that our built on the surface of the ground or failure. We know what happens, we have a good basis of 18 holes of what the conditions are underground and why you are not going to have subsidence. This is because we have drilled holes, we have logged the core and we have reached these conclusions. Unfortunately, the CGS is not in a position to have made these type of investigations. All of the in- formation they have and data they have is a result of somebody elses work. They themselves do not go out and make an in- vestigation. They only review the investi- gations that other made. They do not have on their staff an engineer, particularly one in mining engineering familiar with rock mechanics, they do not have a geo- logist who has ever logged a single foot of core related to mine subsidence, so they have to base their conclusion, and I have sympathy for them, only on what they have read in the literature, what they have been told in conferences by the Bureau of Mines. They do not have any actual ex- perience in working in this field and having to arrive at a decision. There decision, I mean you are never wrong if you say no, I don't know if you have ever been in the oil or mining business, but you know some of the most successful mining engineers are the ones who never drove the drift or never built the mind because they have never been wrong and they didn't drive in there, spend $100,000 of someones money and not find the ore, or drill a dry hole in an oil well. So, if you say no you are always right. You might be wrong if you take a position and say yes, I think that this will work, so I feel that in that responsibility as a state agency, there responsibility to the people in the state, they have to say no in many cases where they have not confidence, where 6.