Giant holes are devouring a Russian city. Mines underneath Berezniki are collapsing, ripping holes in the surface as water surges through old tunnels.
Some are pretty big holes, too. The hugest, nicknamed "The Grandfather,"
is now 340 yards wide and 430 yards long, and it plunges right to the salt strata underneath the city — 780 feet, or the equivalent of 50 stories, straight down.
The story also has some powerful Cold War Gothic:
Berezniki, a city of 154,000 that began as a labor camp, was built directly over the mine — a legacy of the Soviet policy of placing camps within marching distance of work areas...
the local government has moved some residents to new buildings constructed on top of the cemetery of the old gulag without moving the bones and that it is not paying fair compensation for condemned apartments.
Labor campus on top of mines. Housing built on gulag dead. What a grim symbol for multilayered horror and memory.
(thanks to Tanya, Jesse, and all other story-pointing friends of Infocult; images via BLDBLG and English Russia)
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