Mining engineers calculate how the walls and paths need to be sloped, shored up, and shaped to prevent collapse. This channel on YouTube has a lot of good content about stuff like this, but this video is about hole collapses and how they’re prevented. Reminds me of the old engineering adage- “anyone can build a bridge, but it takes an engineer to just barely build a bridge.” Same goes for anything we do. You can do a lot by over-building and just accepting inefficiencies, but in a case like this you want to excavate as much of the ground as possible so you want the slopes to be as steep as possible. Anyone can dig a stable hole that’s like a pyramid where the slopes are very shallow, but engineers find exactly how steep you can safely get away with.
I’m always fascinated by how they can excavate that deep and the sides do not collapse
Sometimes they do https://news.sky.com/video/deadly-collapse-of-open-pit-mine-in-inner-mongolia-china-with-dozens-of-workers-missing-12817613
Mining engineers calculate how the walls and paths need to be sloped, shored up, and shaped to prevent collapse. This channel on YouTube has a lot of good content about stuff like this, but this video is about hole collapses and how they’re prevented. Reminds me of the old engineering adage- “anyone can build a bridge, but it takes an engineer to just barely build a bridge.” Same goes for anything we do. You can do a lot by over-building and just accepting inefficiencies, but in a case like this you want to excavate as much of the ground as possible so you want the slopes to be as steep as possible. Anyone can dig a stable hole that’s like a pyramid where the slopes are very shallow, but engineers find exactly how steep you can safely get away with.