America's Underground Lab overhauls its WWII era wooden mine shaft

Associated Press

18-03-2025

Lead, SD, March 18, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in the Black Hills of South Dakota is America's Underground Lab – with cutting-edge experiments in biology, geothermal energy, engineering, and physics.
Experiments at SURF include the world's leading dark matter detector, LUX ZEPLIN, and the on-going construction of the massive Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE).
The facility's high-tech science experiments are kept inside a massive historic structure of 370 miles of tunnels and shafts that was once North America's deepest gold mine. The Yates Shaft is one of two mineshafts used to access the underground laboratory space. The Yates is a World War II era shaft that reaches nearly a mile to the main laboratory site 4850 feet below the surface.
The Yates Shaft is lined all the way down with a complex lacing of timber framed wood beams. Over the last three years, an intrepid crew of technicians replaced the large timbers and added or replaced rock bolts and steel mesh along the shaft walls from the top to the bottom of the shaft.
The crews essentially built a wooden timber framed structure a mile deep—with all the added complications of working underground inside a mine shaft.
'I don't think there's any word that could describe the pride in the four crews that we have working on this project,' said Wendy Straub, Chief Operating Officer at SURF. 'This is something that doesn't come with a set of instructions. It was really engineering on the fly. I think today they are stronger and better for everything that they've achieved. Blood, sweat and tears, we've seen it all, and it's been worth it.'
Straub gives extra praise to four crews, a total of 16 technicians, alongside two logistics coordinators, three superintendents, and eight hoist operators, who completed the work to the highest standards while prioritizing safety.
'The hardest part was definitely at the beginning; we had to figure out how to approach this whole thing,' said Will Hover, infrastructure technician at SURF. 'There aren't a lot of people even left alive that have worked timber inside a mine shaft like this. We had to learn for ourselves how to rebuild it from the top down.'
One of the big challenges crews encountered were areas of instability of the rock wall behind the timber framed shaft. In some locations, large boulders broke off the shaft wall and pressed against the timbers. 'We would go in and use the jackleg, which is like a jackhammer, or handheld hammers and break down those boulders to manageable sizes. Then we would use winches and pulls to move those boulders into the skip conveyance and get them moved out of the way,' said Russ Bauer who leads one of the four-person shaft crews that worked both day and night shifts on the maintenance project for the past two years. 'The boulders were among the bigger challenges we encountered, and it's definitely great to have three other heads on the crew to help figure out obstacles like this,' Bauer said.
The long-list of daily protective equipment Bauer and his crew wear each day includes safety harnesses, carabiners, and slings that keep them from falling 5,000 feet to the 300-foot pool of water at the bottom of the pitch-dark shaft.
'We're extremely safety focused, always looking out for each other,' Hover said. 'It's a pretty hazardous area down there, and we're constantly working to identify and mitigate danger.'
Safety is first among SURF's cores values, and the facility maintains an excellent overall safety record. The safety of those who use the shaft for the daily commute underground is one of the reasons this top-down maintenance was completed.
'There was a stop work issued in July of 2021. I was fortunate enough to have people above me, including the management team at SURF, to back the decision to go in and do full, heavy top-down maintenance to make sure that the shaft is safe to operate going forward,' Straub said.
The Yates Shaft was first constructed during the lead-up to WW II, when the country's need for steel necessitated the use of timbers to support the walls of the structure, rather than steel. After more than 70 years of use in both the former gold mine and the more recent underground laboratory, the timbers needed replacement. Shaft workers marvel at the work of the miners who completed the timber lined shaft by hand so many years ago. Bauer and Hover are among many current employees at SURF who have deep family connections at the facility.
'My grandpa was a hoist operator. My dad was a hoist operator who just retired, and I got a couple uncles that are still hoist operators up here. I'm incredibly proud of my family history on this site,' Bauer said. 'My grandfather was a miner, my dad was a motorman for the mine, and then he was the head of the emergency response team here at SURF until he retired a couple years ago. Getting to see and experience this whole facility, where two generations of my family have dug into the Black Hills, is awesome,' Hover added.
'The incredible work of this team, who spent the past three and a half years refurbishing the timber in this shaft, is a testament to their own perseverance and grit, and an extension of the long history and deep skillsets that made America's Underground Lab possible. I'm so proud of our Yates team in reaching this milestone with strong safety performance,' said Mike Headley, executive director of the South Dakota Science and Technology Authority and laboratory director at SURF.
Headley points out that SURF is home to experiments with lifespans that could carry research here well into the 21st century, so it's possible, Hover, Bauer, and others at SURF could see their own children take up this work where they leave off—continuing this legacy—with a new purpose.
'I grew up in the mining community and been around mining all my life. So, when someone asks what I do inside this shaft all day, I pretty much just tell them, we're mining for science,'' Hover said.
The expertise these crews have built in refurbishing this shaft for science will remain valuable in coming years. SURF is planning to reline the Yates Shaft with steel, in a similar overhaul completed on the Ross Shaft in the ramp up to the DUNE project. Regardless of the composition of the shafts, the maintenance required to keep them safe and operational will keep crews of workers gainfully employed at SURF for decades to come.