ROOM-AND-PILLAR METHOD OF
OPEN-STOPE MINING
Chapter 1. A Classification of the Room-and-Pillar Method
of Open-Stope Mining
OPEN STOPING
An open stope is an underground cavity from which
the initial ore has been mined. Caving of the opening
is prevented (at least temporarily) by support from
the unmined ore or waste left in the stope, in the form
of pillars, and the stope walls (also called ribs or abut-
ments). In addition to this primary support system of
open stoping, some secondary support may also be re-
quired using rockbolts, reinforcing rods, split pipes,
or shotcrete to stabilize the rock surface immediately
adjacent to the opening. The secondary reinforcement
procedure does not preclude the method classified as
open stoping.
There are many forms of open-stope mining used
to extract the initial material from a mine. Having once
established that the mineral and waste rock are com-
petent enough to use an open-stoping method, and
assuming that the reserve is not classified as gassy, the
Form which the method take is primarily deter-
mined the dip and thickness of the reserve. How
these two factors affect the selection of the open-stope
mining is discussed in a later chapter. At this point it
suffice to say that the the Open-
stope mining system which follows is based on whether
dry' broken flows by gravity Or whether it
be moved by nongravit~Itlethods where energy
must be supplied to move the material.
Room-and Pillar-Mining
Room-and-pillar mining is an open-stoping method
where mining progresses in a nearly horizontal or low
angle direction by opening multiple stopes or rooms,
leaving solid material to act as pillars to support the
vertical load. Since the direction of excavation (angle
of dip) is below that which would cause the dry
material to flow by gravity to a drawpoint or gathering
point, the material must be loaded in the room where it
was extracted and transported to a point where it will
flow, either by gravity or mechanical means, to a central
gathering point to be taken out of the mine. This is an
important aspect of room-and-pillar mining which dif-
ferentiates the system from other open-stope mining
methods which rely heavily upon gravity to transport
ore from where it was broken to a lower elevation,
usually through a drawpoint. There are many variations
of the method which go by a number of names in local
districts: breast stoping, breast-and-bench stoping,
board-and-pillar, stall-and-pillar, and panel-and-pillar
are all basically open-stope room-and-pillar mining.
In some instances detailed stope planning is almost
nonexistent; i.e., the operator simply follows the visual
pay values, leaves pillars only where necessary, and
tries to locate them in the zones of lower value.
This method of mining is as old as the beginning of
underground mining itself, dating back thousands of
228
years. Early in the history of mining in this country, the
term "gophering" was used to describe this method
( P e e k 194 11. The term is appropriate, for it brings to
mind the exact results of this type of system-a random
and rOOm-and-~illar mine.
In other instances where the mineral values are con-
sistent both in physical dimensions and quality, the mine
layout can be planned to the last detail, resulting in a
uniform room-and-pillar mine. Coal, trona, gilsonite,
potash, oil shale, salt, limestone, and sandstone mines
can usually follow such a system. Today, most metal
mines using a room-and-pillar operation try to mine as
regular a pattern as possible but deviation in height,
width, thickness, dip, and grade of the ore results in
comparable deviation in the mine plan.
Variations of the Room-and-pillar System
It is necessary to briefly describe some of the many
variations of the room-and-pillar system of mining,
enabling the reader to fully explore the concepts and
become familiar with the terminology used before going
on to the details of mine design.
Full-Face Slicing: If in the process of opening the
rooms the total vertical extent of the mineral values of
the particular seam or strata are extracted from the
advance of one vertical face, the term used to describe
this is full-face slicing. This face is also known as the
"breast."
There is no mineral of economic value intentionally
left either in the floor or the roof (back) to be mined
later. To be able to extract the full-face height in one
pass, the mining equipment must obviously be designed
to reach as high as the back. In an Appalachian coal
mine, this may be all of 660.4 mm (26 in.); for a
future oil shale property it might be 15.24 m (50 f t ) .
Normally, however, in a majority of mines where the
mining face gets over 6.09 to 6.7 m (20 to 22 f t ) ,
the tendency is to divide the face into more than one
pass. Over this height, it becomes difficult to properly
see and remove loose rock from the back with a hand
"mining bar." Where the process of taking down loose
rock has become mechanized, higher full-face mining
can be safely practiced. Most eastern and midwestern
coal seams and western uranium, trona, and potash
seams in the United States are easily reached in a
single face; many limestone, lead, and zinc mines must
resort, at least in part, to "multiple-slicing" to remove
all the minerals of value.
Multiple Slicing (also known as multiple-pass min-
ing): In many cases it is not practical to carry the full
vertical height of the mining horizon as a full face.
The face is divided into parts known as the breast,
bench, and/or brow. Ideally, if the operator knows the
vertical extent of the mineralized zone, he will drill and
blast the first pass at the top of the zone, thereby
 ROOM-AND-PILLAR METHOD OF OPEN-STOPE MINING
Fig. 1. Open-stope room with regular
pillars (Anon., 1972).
creating the breast stope at the elevation where the
permanent "back" (roof) will be. This allows easy
access to remove any "loose" slabs of rock from the
back while the rock is within easy reach and to secure
the back with reinforcement bolts or pins if necessary.
The process of scaling loose rock from either the roof,
pillars, brow, bench, or breast is in some districts re-
ferred to as "mining loose."
Years ago, breast-and-bench stoping was practiced
in a somewhat different fashion than it is today. The
benches were very narrow [0.91 to 1.52 m ( 3 to 5 ft)],
which allowed most of the fly rock from the breast to
be blasted onto the floor of the stope, leaving very little
rock lying on the benches.
Fig. 1 (Anon., 1972) illustrates a more typical stope
for today's trackless mining where again the breast
"heading" is carried at the top of the mineral zone but
the benches are wide and, in effect, can serve as simul-
taneous levels of mining activity. The floor of each
bench may reflect the bottom of the mineralized zone
of a dipping ore body, or the lower benches may be
advanced through the upper floors reflecting a thick,
flat ore body. Working such an ore body in horizontal
slices in a downward direction is known as "underhand
stoping."
Roof scaling and reinforcement (rock bolting) would
normally take place from the breast heading as it ad-
vances. Where the breast height does not reach the top
of the mineralized zone, an inverted bench can be
carried in the roof (Fig. 2, Casteel, 1973). Thus,
"taking down back" is a form of overhand stoping
where horizontal slices are removed in an upward
direction. In benching, the point where the upper
floor meets the vertical bench is called the "bluffline"
or "bluff;" in taking down back, where the roof of the
previous slice meets the vertical face of the inverted
Fig. 2. Cross section at bottom of
stope showing initial cut at bottom
of ore with remaining ore being re-
moved by back-slabbing (casteel.
1973).
Fig. 3. Open-stope rooms with ran-
dom pillar supports (Anon., 1972).
bench, it is called a "brow line" or "brow." Many times
in irregularly shaped ore bodies, it becomes necessary
to leave the broken rock on the stope floor so as to
provide a means of gaining access to the height needed
to drill and blast successive slices of the back. The
broken "back r o c k can provide an excellent surge
capacity in times of slack mine production once the
top of the ore zone has been reached and the back made
secure. But until that time is reached, it also repre-
sents inaccessible ore except for any excess ore that
must be removed to make room for more broken ore.
The mine in Fig. 3 (Anon., 1972) has been worked
in the same fashion illustrated in Fig. 1. There is some
degree of uniformity in the size and spacing of pillars,
but the uniformity often yields to the necessity of main-
taining ore grade control. Consequently, the overall
shape of the mineral zone dictates the irregular shape of
the existing mine. The large "bars" were left either
because of low-grade ore or because they were needed
for ground stability.
Other Concepts of Room-and-Pillar Mines: There
are several concepts suggested in room-and-pillar mining
which call for leaving long "bar pillars" on a regular
basis for various reasons. This is common practice in
softer and weaker materials such as coal, potash, or
shale, but it has not been widely adopted in the United
States for use in hard rock mines. Such a system, but
designed for an entirely different reason, is shown in
Fig. 4. This scheme might be needed where there is a
Fig. 4. A special arrangement of isolated oanels contain-
ing rooms-and pillars developed for u t i l i i t i o n of indus-
trial space (Christiansen and Scott, 1975).
230 UNDERGROUND MINING METHODS HANDBOOK
Fig. 5. Stope and pillar mining used in the early mining
at Elliott Lake (Airth and Olson, 1959).
need for the underground space to be utilized in an
industrial development (Christiansen and Scott, 1975).
This method of mining creates a series of parallel rooms
almost completely separated from each other by continu-
ous "rib pillars." Where large areas are mined for
industrial stone, and it is unlikely that one occupant
could utilize the entire area, then this method has the
advantage of creating rooms without the necessity of
constructing partitions after mining.
Still another mining plan, shown in Fig. 5 and
known as "stope-and-pillar," was used at Elliot Lake
(Hedley, 1972). Here, the panels were laid out in a
series of 30.48-m (100-ft) stopes and 30.48-m (100-ft)
pillars. These pillars were left by mining the stopes out
15.24 m (50 ft) on each side of a predevelopment
inclined drift.
Finally, we come to the most common of all room-
and-pillar mining systems and that which is basic to most
coal mining in the United States. There are many differ-
ent development plans used throughout the country,
differing primarily in pillar size and shape, entry size,
shape, and number of parallel entries that must be
developed simultaneously through the mine. Figs. 6
and 7 are typical (Paulick, 1963). They show not only
Fig. 7. Room-and-pillar mining
typical of underground coal min-
ing a 1.52 to 1.82-m (5 to 6-ft)
seam, 91.44 to 182.88 m (300 to
6 0 0 ft) deep (Paulick, 1963).
Fig. 6. Room-and-pillar mining typical of underground
coal mining a 1.82-m ( 6 3 ) seam, 182.88 to 243.84 m
(600 to 8 0 0 ft) deep (Paulick, 1963).
different schemes of seam development, but also a dif-
ference in the method used for mining the pillars while
retreating from the mining area.
Structural Character of Deposits Minable by
Room-and-Pillar
If most mining engineers were asked to describe
ore bodies applicable to room-and-pillar mining, their
first response would probably be to describe them as any
ore body which is large, flat, and in competent rock.
Certainly, these are some of the ideal conditions which
make room-and-pillar mining relatively efficient; how-
ever, they are by no means the limiting criteria from
which room-and-pillar mining should be selected.
The discussion of the physical properties of ore and
waste given subsequently is intended to make clear to
the reader why room-and-pillar mining has such a broad
application. Any criteria considered in determining the
type of mining method used must, in the final analysis,
ir~cludeall of the following factors: safety; optimal
mineral recovery; a mining environment consistent with
current social, political, and legal requirements; and an
operation which returns the highest economic gain.
 ROOM-AND-PILLAR METHOD OF OPEN-STOPE IVllNlNG
Strength of Rock Mass: While the subject of rock
mechanics is covered in great detail in Section 7 of this
text, some aspects of it will be briefly mentioned here
as the subject relates to open-stope mining.
The earth's composition consists of a number of
materials, each having its own physical properties.
These materials are arranged in the earth's crust in
various forms: solid or broken mass, homogeneous or
nonhomogeneous, rock mass subjected to tectonic stress
or rock free from tectonic stress, etc. However, as rock
is normally encountered in mining, it is in equilibrium
with the other forces of nature. The mine engineer
contemplating the design of an open-stope system must
assess the general magnitude of these forces, as well
as the strength of the mass of material that will be
exposed by the opening. Accordingly, he will design
his extraction opening in such a way as to preserve the
structure of the opening long enough to successfully
complete the extraction. This, by our original descrip-
tion of an open stope, as well as mine practice and
mining regulations, may or may not include roof and
pillar reinforcement. Also, it may or may not include
yielding rock structures that are gradually failing at a
carefully monitored rate. In fact, when one looks at
the broad spectrum of materials that are commonly
mined by room-and-pillar methods, from all types of
"host" rocks ranging in strength of 275.7 to 344.7 MPa
(40,000 to 50,000 psi) down to 27.5 to 34.4 MPa
(4000 to 5000 psi), and at mining depths varying from
around 15 m (50 ft) down to over 914 m (3000 f t ) ,
one begins to realize that with today's methods of rein-
forcing the rock mass--or by using the design tools of
rock mechanics in developing such systems as the pres-
sure arch panel and pillar systems, or the use of a yield-
ing structure or mechanical systems which at a pre-
determined rate eventually fail-it seems that nearly
any rock that will sustain a development opening with-
out immediate major support could probably be mined
by some form of room-and-pillar mining. This is not
to say that it would always be wise to do so-indeed, it
becomes a matter of sufficient total recovery of the
mineral as well as selecting the method which will yield
the greatest financial gain. Yet, there is sufficient evi-
dence of the use of room-and-pillar mining methods in
fairly weak materials that leads one to conclude that
the rock need not be entirely competent. Examples of
this are seen in many of the deep salt mines, the sand-
stone mining of New Mexico's and Wyoming's uranium
districts, some of the brecciated riff zone structures of
the New Lead Belt in Missouri, the mining at depth of
the Nonesuch shale at White Pine, and the potash beds
of Saskatchewan. Later in this section, methods of
reinforcing rock and details of room-and-pillar layouts
as well as the percent of allowable extraction of the
reserve, will be covered.
Effect of Size, Shape, and Thickness of Mass:
According to an industry study (Dravo, 1974), 15 of
the 23 largest noncoal mines in the United States use
room-and-pillar mining. Obviously, it is adaptable to
very large mineral reserves. One has the means of
opening many production areas by merely extending
the lateral extent of the mine without the necessity of
deepening the shaft and rebuilding the ore handling and
hoisting systems in the process.
While many of the large mines use room-and-pillar
methods, a large percentage of very small mines also
use them. In fact, while the size of the mass to be
mined does affect the size of the operating mine, it has
no effect on whether or not it is advisable to use room-
and-pillar mining. Many a small room-and-pillar zinc
mine has been operated in the Illinois-Wisconsin area,
as well as in the old Tri-State district of Missouri, Okla-
homa, and Kansas. Yet, the same basic system is oper-
ating at White Pine where as much as 20407.5 t/d
(22,500 stpd) has been produced.
If the mineral to be mined is dipping steeply enough
that the material will flow by gravity, and at the same
time is very thick or very thin (narrow), the reserve is
not one which should be mined by room-and-pillar
methods. Other than these limitations related to the
shape of the deposit and where single entries can be
used, room-and-pillar mining is flexible enough in both
the horizontal and vertical directions to follow the out-
lines of all other mineral reserves. To the extent that
the extracted material can be loaded and moved from
where it is broken by mechanical equipment and where
competent pillars can be formed (or reinforced), the
shape of the mineral body to be mined will not pre-
clude the selection of room-and-pillar mining. There
are a few examples which will illustrate this flexibility.
To mine the zinc reserves of eastern Tennessee, the
room-and-pillar mining system must be flexible enough
to follow the narrow ore stringers formed by fracture
filling, which often lead to collapsed dome structures.
To mine these massive structures, the stoping has to
expand horizontally and vertically in order to extract
the full height and width of the mineralized zone. In
a similar mining situation in portions of the Bonne
Terre mine of the Old Lead Belt of Missouri, vertical
pillars as high as 60.96 m (200 ft) were left after many
mining slices were removed (Wykoff, 1950). At the
Iron Mountain mine near Pilot Knob, MO, an ore body
the shape of the periphery of an inverted bowl was
successfully mined by room-and-pillar methods (Pettit,
1957).
As to the thickness of the mineralized zone and how
this affects the selection of the room-and-pillar mining
method, it has already been pointed out that extremely
thick zones can be mined but in most cases, pillar
deterioration becomes the critical problem. In the
thicker mining zones either pillar diameter must be
increased or pillars must be reinforced-or both. This
depends on many factors within the mining scheme, the
inherent fractures in the rock, and the strength-to-load
ratio of the pillar design.
Deteriorating pillar problems will certainly be en-
countered in trying to mine some of the thick coal
seams of the western United States by conventional
room-and-pillar methods. Still, thick seam extraction,
leaving tall pillars, can be mined successfully; but it
becomes a matter of permissible extraction ratio and/or
pillar reinforcement. There are reported examples of
successfully mined dipping beds of up to 0.52 rad (30")
and up to 91.44 m (300 ft) thick by a room-and-pillar
system. Horizontal rooms in both the strike and dip
directions are driven, forming superimposed and
matched pillars at varying elevations (Dravo, 1974).
At the other extreme, the very thin seams offer
special problems to any conventional mining system;
however, mining seams as low as 711.2 mm (28 in.)
 UNDERGROUND MINING METHODS HANDBOOK
are common in room-and-pillar coal mines throughout
Appalachia. It was not long ago that seams as low as
304.8 mm (12 in.) were mined in Holland by utilizing
scrapers to move the coal to the haulage entry. But by
today's standards-working conditions and high labor
costs-there is definitely an economic limit as to how
low one can successfully carry on room-and-pillar
mining.
Dip of Mass to be Mined: The dip of the mineral-
ized mass to be mined very strongly affects whether or
not the mining method would be classified as a room-
and-pillar system. For further information, i.e., in
determining what the mining method would be when
the dip is steep enough for the broken material to move
by gravity from the point where it is broken, and
whether the breast, back. and floor are competent
enough to stand in an open-stope mining method, see
the chapter on open stoping in this section.
The so-called "cascade mining" used at Mufulira
(Anon., 1966), the panel-and-pillar method used be-
tween sublevels of the Soumont mine in Normandy
(Anon., 1975), the pillar-and-chambering system used
at the Konrad mine in West Germany (Anon., 1975),
and the flat hole benching method drilled from Alimak
climbers at the Denison mine in Canada (Anon., 1974),
are all examples of open stoping of steeply dipping ore
bodies which result in a combination of open rooms or
chambers and pillars. However, the cascade mining at
Mufulira also removes the pillar almost immediately in
a second cycle of mining which then allows the hanging
wall to cave as the mining retreats along the strike. If
the dip is not steep enough for the broken rock to move
by gravity, mechanical methods must be employed to
move the ore from the room where it was extracted.
This results in men and/or machinery reentering the
stopes after blasting and remaining there at least until
the material is removed. This aspect of room-and-pillar
mining differentiates it from other open-stope methods.
Because of this, safety precautions must be taken in the
pillar design, ventilation requirements, the roof control
plan, and the necessity of roof and pillar scaling. In
other open-stope methods the material can flow out of
the stoping area by gravity. and men and equipment
do not have to be exposed to the open stopes.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Room-and-Pillar
Mining
Before proceeding to the details of mine planning,
it is important to understand the advantages and disad-
vantages of room-and-pillar open-stope mining. Ideally,
the mine engineer will plan an operation which will
maximize and/or assure the continuation of the system's
advantages while minimizing or eliminating the known
disadvantages.
Major Advantages: These include a high degree of
flexibility (adapting to rapid changes) inherent in the
mining plan of a room-and-pillar system, which can
be utilized if necessary. However, until such a change
is indicated, the system also has the advantage that
many aspects of the mining cycle are repetitious. Tllus,
the system lends itself to mechanization which can be
easily learned and steadily improved.
The system can be applied as a very selective min-
ing system, leaving waste in pillars, or if the seam thins
by lowering and raising the back o r floor, depending
on the amount of dilution allowed. Yet the same system
can become a bulk mining system, taking everything
at a given horizon and thickness and leaving only the
remnants of uniform pillars.
The system can be applied to multiple levels simul-
taneously, in a manner that the operation of one min-
ing level will not affect the structural conditions of the
other mining level.
Where the mineral reserve is large and applicable
to room-and-pillar mining, it is usually very easy to
develop a rather large number of operating production
areas. Furthermore, where the development effort is in
the same horizon as the mineral to be mined, some
mineral production will result from the development.
Likewise, if the mine has nongassy classification, the
amount of development which will open sufficient
working areas can be held to a minimum prior to pro-
duction.
Equipment replacement in the stoping area is easily
accomplished as more efficient or dependable equipment
becomes available. Also, by comparison to other stoping
methods, equipment maintenance is easier since usually
all of the equipment is mobile enough to leave the stop-
ing area and travel to a maintenance area. In some
cases, because the materials moving problem is very
similar to the same problems encountered in surface op-
erations, the exact equipment can be utilized-minimiz-
ing the need for designing and building special under-
ground mining equipment at a higher cost. Equipment
can easily be moved from stope to stope thereby main-
taining maximum equipment utilization and output. This
is in contrast to mining methods where equipment is iso-
lated on one level of mining and cannot be easily moved.
The physiological conditions for the noncoal room-
and-pillar miners are usually better than for most of the
other noncoal mining systems because good ventilation is
relatively easy to install and maintain and, with an
abundance of equipment in the mine, the places where
the equipment operates are normally well lighted. Also
nearly all jobs, even roof scaling and boulder breaking,
can be mechanized if it is economical to do so, and
this leaves very little strenuous work for the miner.
Major Disadvantages: Among the disadvantages is
maintenance of the roof of the active areas over pro-
longed periods of time. Because so much roof is ex-
posed as the mine is developed, the maintenance can
be a problem of safety as well as of cost.
Some "free running" or swelling ground simply will
not stand open for any length of time. Therefore, at-
tempting to mine very incompetent rock by open-stope
methods is at best extrernelv costlv and at the worst. a
-~ - ~ - -
- 2
complete failure.
Because of the increased load on the support pillars
with depth, the normal practice is to decrease the
extraction ratio by increasing the size of pillars, or
decreasing the room size, or both, resulting in less
return to the operation in both product and income.
There are various methods of overcoming or minimizing
this disadvantage, which will be discussed later.
The operation of an efficient room-and-pillar mine
today requires a very large capital expenditure outlay
for equipment. It seems to be more "capital intensive"
for operating equipment than for the other mining
methods, since nearly every job is mechanized. HOW-
ever, a factor which helps to reduce the capital expendi-
 ROOM-AND-PILLAR METHOD OF OPEN-STOPE MINING
ture is the versatility of underground equipment. Also,
the higher capital cost is normally compensated for by
lower %perating cost per ton of mineral produced.
Because in some mines the rooms become very high,
the back can become difficult to maintain. Special
equipment which has some form of a high lift must be
used to inspect and maintain such areas. T h e higher
the rooin, the greater will be the force of the impact
of a piece of falling rock and the greater will be the
damage to anything that it hits. This point is a n obvious
fact of physics, but is often forgotten by those who
promote a false sense of security by using o r requiring
canopies in "high back" stopes. Keeping the back
secure is the correct solution to prevent injury and
damage.
REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anon., 1966, "Cascade Mining," World Mining, June, pp.
22-23.
Anon., 1972, Underground Mining, Chas. D. Martens &
Assoc., Joy Manufacturing Co., Pittsburgh, p. 82.
Anon., 1974, "Three Approaches to Room-and-Pillar Mining
at Denison," The Northern Miner, May 2, pp. 14-15.
Anon., 1975, "Trackless Iron Ore Mining at the Konrad
Mine," Mining Magazine, Mar., pp. 232.
Anon., 1975, "French Trackless Iron Mines," Mining Maga-
zine, Aug., p. 144.
Casteel, L.W., 1973, "Open Stopes-Horizontal Deposits,"
233
SME Mining Engineering Handbook, A.B. Cummings,
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pp. 12-123-12-135.
Christiansen, C.R., and Scott, J.J., 1975, "Techniques of
Mining for Secondary Use," Proceedings, Symposium on
the Development and Utilization of Underground Space,
Stauffer, Vineyard, eds., National Science Foundation,
pp. 83-90.
Dravo Corp., 1974, "Analysis of Large-Scale Noncoal Under-
ground Mining Methods," US Bureau of Mines Contract
Report SO 122059, Jan., p. 9.
Hedley, D.G.F., and Grant, F., 1972, "Stope and Pillar
Design for the Elliot Lake Uranium Mines," CIM Bul-
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McClelland, J.F., 1941, "Prospecting, Development, and
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New York, p. 133.
Paulick, P.R., 1963, Atlas of Mining Methods, Vol. 1 ,
Sheet No. 4, Verlagsdruckerre, C. Th. Kartenburg,
Westfalen, Germany.
Paulick, P.R., 1963, Atlas of Mining Methods, Vol. 1,
Sheet No. 8, Verlagsdruckerre, C. Th. Kartenburg,
Westfalen, Germany.
Pettitt, R.F., Calhoun, W.A., and Reyonlds, B.M., 1957,
"Mining and Milling Methods and Cost, Ozark Ore
Co., Iron Mountain Iron Ore Mine, St. Francois County,
Mo.," US Bureau of Mines Information Circular 7807,
pp. 13, 16.
Wykoff, B.T., 1950, "Wrapping Pillars With Old Hoist
Rope," Trans. AIME, Vol. 187, pp. 898-902.