I was on a job evaluating an old gold mining district in Venezuela, El Callao. The district was up a tributary of the Orinoco River in head hunter country. (The head hunters were not much of a problem, though, after a century of state-sponsored genocide.) The mines had been officially shut down for years. It was my first time going down in a mine. Three gringo geologists were in the elevator cage. The only light was the eerie yellow glow from our three helmet lamps. The mine leaked water at the rate of 600 gallons per minute, so there was a thunder of raindrops on the tin elevator roof. About half way down the elevator hit a snag of some sort, bounced, and then continued down.
We didn’t think much of it at the time. But when we took the elevator up to exit the mine we hit the same snag going up. In that moment the three of us realized several things. Mines tend to close up, so they need to be periodically re-timbered. (Wood is used because it will start splintering long before it breaks from stress, but steel will show no symptoms before it breaks.) When the mine shut down, the elevator shaft was in the process of being re-timbered and the new timbers were slightly out of line with the old timbers where they had stopped, which produced the snag. Another thing that occurred to us was that US law requires that the elevator cables must be replaced every six months, but the cables on our elevator had not been replaced for over a decade.
Going down the snag was not a problem because the cage just bounced off. Going up, though, the cage caught on the snag and the cable continued trying to haul the cage up, stretching the cable until the cage tilted enough to slide off the snag — hopefully before the cable snapped. The expressions on our faces in that eerie yellow glow with the rain thundering on the tin roof was something to behold when we hit the snag going up and realized what was happening. I can still picture the expressions clearly. Now here’s the crazy part: We made many trips down into that and several other mines in the area.