Morton Salt Mine - Grand Saline, TX, US
N 32° 39.478 W 095° 42.466
15S E 246040 N 3616609
The Morton Salt Mine in Grand Saline is one of three rock-salt mines Morton operates in the U.S. The salt deposit is 250 million years old.
Waymark Code: WMTEQE
Location: Texas, United States
Date Posted: 11/13/2016
Views: 7
The top of the salt dome is located some 213 feet below the current ground surface and averages 75 +/- 1 degree though out the year. The current mining operations are 750 feet below the ground surface. That is 310 feet below sea level. The salt is 98.5% pure sodium chloride and is exceptionally hard and stable.
The Morton’s salt mine here is a large-scale operation, generating 450,000 pounds of salt for a wide assortment of products each year.
Everything that goes into the mine, including trucks, equipment, explosives and people, has to fit through a 5-by-6-foot elevator. Trucks are taken apart and put back together inside the mine, and any repairs are done underground. Gasoline is piped to underground storage tanks for daily use.
With no moisture inside the mine, the salt acts much like dirt and there is very little rusting to equipment, but once the metal is brought above to moist ground, the equipment rusts almost instantly, Parmer said.
The mine has two shafts, a main one and an emergency exit. The main shaft was built in 1928 with the emergency one installed a short time later. The plant, which is the second largest salt producer in North America, opened in 1930.
The elevator works on a double pulley system, and as it brings people and equipment down, it pulls the salt up to the surface, Parmer said. Each trip brings about six tons of salt to the surface for processing.
Underground, the first room of the mine is the oldest and was hand-carved in the early days of mining. When the room was being mined out, the hauling labor was done by donkeys.
The atmosphere feels like a cave and is about 25 feet high and 75 feet wide. A conveyor system lets out near the opening and fills a 6-ton bucket.
Extending from the original 25-foot rooms, workers mined out the ceiling and floor of the rooms, creating caverns of about 88 feet. The original mine stays in the middle, so the salt always travels to the middle of the conveyor system.
Driving down the roadways, salt kicks up much like dirt on a country road, and the roads are lined with piles of waste salt between the thick walls of hard rock.
The air is not stuffy or stale because large fans push the air to the deepest parts of the mine. Large tarps cover some caverns, or rooms, to allow for the desired flow of air.
Under the roadways, about 30 feet of salt remains uncarved to provide support for the structure and prevent cave-ins. There are about 100 miles of roadways and caverns underground.
The salt in the mine has very few impurities and is one of the purest in the United States.
The level of purity is so high that large grain pretzel salt comes straight from the mine and is sold with little processing. If you have eaten a pretzel in the United States, odds are the salt on it came from Grand Saline.
There are varying levels of required purity for the products made out of the halite rock, and generally the salt is boiled using water in a closed system to purify the crystals.
Kind: Salt Mine
Is the place still active?: yes
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