Room and pillar mining involves removing portions of land to extract materials while leaving nearby portions in place to form natural pillars. This technique works best for materials on the same horizontal plane. Historically, random mining led to unsafe conditions, but today, grid systems are carefully planned with barrier pillars to maximize safety. Room and pillar mining is fast and simple but requires balancing safety with productivity and profit. Determining the size of pillars is a challenge.
The room and pillar is one of the oldest and most basic types of mining techniques. In this type of mining activity, portions of land are removed from the ground to form environments, while other nearby portions are left in place to form natural pillars. This allows miners to extract materials such as coal or metal from the soil removed from the rooms, but leaves pillars to support the soil above. This extraction technique works best for materials located along the same horizontal plane, or layer. In some areas, room and pillar mining may also be known as edge and column mining.
Throughout history, miners have used a random mining strategy of rooms and pillars to extract minerals from the earth. Workers would simply mine in certain areas and leave other areas untouched, with little planning or motive involved in the process. This has led to unsafe conditions, mainly in the form of collapses or subsidence.
In a compression failure, a single pillar is squeezed between the earth above and below until it breaks. This puts excess weight on nearby pillars, which can cause them to fail as well. Once a single pillar breaks in the mine system, it is often very difficult to keep the mine operational, even with modern shoring techniques. Random mining of rooms and pillars also leads to poor ventilation, making working conditions unsafe.
Today, the mining of rooms and pillars is based on carefully planned grid systems. Mining professionals take soil samples and study site conditions to determine the best layout and location for each room and pillar. A large site is often broken up into sections or panels. Each panel has its own grid system and is separated from the other panels by very large barrier pillars. Barrier pillars act as dividers between each section and are designed to stabilize the earth to maximize mining safety.
Miners choose room and pillar mining because it is fast, simple, and requires very little equipment. Despite these advantages, this mining technique also poses several challenges for miners. One of the biggest problems is determining the size of the pillars. If the pillars are too small, the system will fail. If they are too large, however, minerals or precious metals may remain. This leads to the need to balance safety with productivity and profit, which can contribute to conflicts of interest between workers and mine owners.
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