Mine failure associated with a pressurized brine horizon; Retsof salt mine, western New York

2000 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel W. Gowan ◽  
Steven M. Trader

Abstract The eventual loss of the Retsof Salt Mine from flooding was initiated on March 12, 1994 with a magnitude 3.6 earthquake, the collapse of a small-pillar panel, an initial inrush of brine and gas to the mine and a sustained inflow of fresh water. An examination of closure data for two mine panels involved in the inflow suggested an anomalous buildup of fluid pressure above the panels in the period leading up to their collapse. The initial brine and gas inflow immediately following the collapse coincided with the apparent relief of the excess pressure. The potential existence of a pre-collapse, pressurized, brine and gas pool above the panels was investigated through an analysis of nineteenth century solution mining data, a review of recent salt mine data, and an interpretation of geologic and geophysical data from post-collapse investigations. Published reports from the nineteenth century reveal that natural brine and gas pools existed in the region prior to mining. Correlation of gamma ray logs with geologic logs from contemporary drill holes and core holes provided a mechanism for interpreting the distribution of those natural brine pools. Our investigation indicated that natural gas and brine pools existed within Unit D of the Syracuse Formation approximately 160 ft above the mining horizon. Such brine accumulation apparently formed from the circulation of meteoric water through vertical discontinuities that were connected to overlying fresh water aquifers long before mining began in the valley in the late nineteenth century.

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.


This chapter reviews the book Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America: Identity Transitions in the New Odessa Jewish Commune, Odessa, Oregon, New York, 1881–1891 (2014), by Theodore H. Friedgut, together with Israel Mandelkern, Recollections of a Communist (edited and annotated by Theodore H. Friedgut). Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America is a two-in-one volume that explores an obscure episode in the history of the Jews in the late nineteenth century while at the same time connecting much of its content to the author’s own life experience as a son of western Canada’s Jewish farming colonies and, later, as an ideologically driven halutz on an Israeli kibbutz. Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America retells one branch of the mostly forgotten history of the Am Olam agricultural movement and brings a new layer into the discussion of global Jewish agrarianism, while Recollections of a Communist offers an edited and annotated version of a memoir written by Mandelkern.


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