When an abandoned mineshaft beneath Interstate 80 in Morris County collapsed the morning after Christmas , closing the eastbound side of the highway for four days, everyone took notice. No vehicles crashed and no one was injured when the remains of the long-abandoned mine crumbled. But, for many, the sinkhole provided a sudden, alarming awareness that New Jersey is home to long-closed mines that can, and sometimes do, instantly collapse into a crater without warning.
New Jersey has nearly abandoned mines, according to state officials. See an interactive map of abandoned mine locations below. Other mines around the state are more hidden. There are approximately mines beneath the surface in nine northern counties, mostly in a band across hilly northwestern New Jersey.
They include the old mine that caused the I sinkhole last month in Wharton, according to a map provided by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. Click here. Others date to before the Revolutionary War, including a mine in New Brunswick identified only as a French mine that opened in Most were last in use more than a century ago.
The Bolmer mine, one of the four mines in Bridgewater in Somerset County, was decommissioned in Occasionally, a sinkhole forms when a mineshaft collapses, which is what happened when a foot-deep hole opened up on the eastbound I highway shoulder in Wharton on Dec.
While a tragedy that day was averted, sinkholes attributed to abandoned mines have occasionally proven deadly for generations, in New Jersey and elsewhere. In November , a year-old boy was playing with two friends in Ringwood in Passaic County when he fell an estimated feet into an abandoned iron mine and was buried under a series of cave-ins that lasted for an hour, The Star-Ledger reported at the time. More recently, in western Pennsylvania on Dec.
