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Last June, while he was sitting at the window of his kitchen, Peter Lucon felt the earth move.
A mine pit from the old Carrie mine was open behind his house, causing a 30-foot gulf.
Lucon, a mechanical engineering professor at Montana Tech, has a 6-year-old child, a 4-year-old, and an 18-month-old teenager.
His children were safe upstairs, but earlier this summer, Lucon set up a paddling pool for his three children at the very spot where the mine shaft was open.
"We felt the ground shake, we heard it," he said.
He and his family felt upset because of the close call. In March, they demolished a room that was there because the room had begun to come off the wall of the house. Not realizing the danger, Lucon used equipment to move the earth and planted grass where the bedroom was. Then he placed the wading pool over the place itself.
Signs indicating that something was wrong were evident just before the opening of the pit. The soil collapsed three feet deep, then 12 feet earlier in June. The county came and put some ground to plug this.
But after the well dropped 30 feet, the Lucons moved in with a family member for a few weeks.
The foundation of their home, located in block 400 of West Broadway, has not been damaged. But if they had not demolished the room just months before the sink hole opened, "it could have done much more damage," said Bill Snoddy, head of the state's Abandoned Mine program. .
The state has spent $ 100,000 to repair the chasm under the Abandoned Mine Lands program. The money for this program, a division of the department of environmental quality, comes from a royalty on the local production of coal mines of the state.
Workers are finishing the Lucon Chasm this month.
Dolphins are not uncommon in Butte. Tom Malloy, sanitation specialist at Butte-Silver Bow, said the county had learned of a hole in the 120 block of West Pacific Street in Centerville on Monday, which had put 67 trucks loaded with dirt – about 670 cubic yards – to fill.
"He went down at least 100 feet," Malloy said of Centerville's plate. "We could not see the bottom."
Malloy said that a neighbor of this land, county property, had alerted Malloy to the Centerville Chasm because children were throwing stones into the hole.
"Then I went there and threw stones in the hole. You can hear them fall, "said Malloy.
The county was able to fill Centerville's hole in a day and a half, but the pit in Lucons' back yard "has frightened me terribly," Malloy said.
It took months to fix it and the work is about to be completed.
With the well wedged between a historic brick house, a historic brick garage and a neighbor's house directly to the east, it took a team of engineers, geologists and workers to solve the problem.
The workers washed it, sending "thousands of gallons of water into the hole." They wanted it to fail further, so that it would not happen again. Based on maps, the county believes the mine shaft is 150 feet underground.
The workers then poured 48 cubic meters of concrete to fill the plug and put a reinforced concrete plug. If the plug slides, the cap will remain stable, Snoddy said.
"It was a really dangerous site," Snoddy said.
Snoddy said that home insurance in Montana does not protect in case of sudden opening of a mine shaft in the owner's yard. Insurance in other states, he says.
This puts the burden on the county or on the state. But the county received a grant of $ 300,000 from the state 14 years ago to deal with such problems.
This fund has never been replenished with additional money, Malloy said. Malloy said the county did not have enough money to repair the pit of Lucon's court. That's why the county turned to state aid.
"We are almost at zero," Malloy said.
Snoddy said he believed the state could help the county get new funding through grants so the county's gulf funds would not disappear completely.
Malloy said that he knew as soon as he saw the chasm of the Lucon's back yard that it was an old mine. He saw some wood in the hole.
The Carrie Mine was a silver mine dug around 1885. The Lucon House was built about ten years later.
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