ST. PAUL, Minn. - A labyrinth of caves left by 1800s sandstone miners along the Mississippi River has long been a forbidden and sometimes deadly thrill for teenagers, who ignore the keep-out signs and thwart the city's best efforts to seal off the passages.
On Tuesday the caves again proved lethal: Three teens died, apparently of carbon monoxide poisoning, perhaps from a fire smoldering inside the caverns.
Killed were Nicholas Lee Larson, Natalie Lorraine Vanvorst and Patrick Gerard Dague, all 17. A 17-year-old boy was rescued, and his condition was upgraded yesterday from critical to serious. A fourth boy escaped and alerted authorities.
Fire Chief Douglas Holton said the teens entered through a small opening, about 3 by 5 feet. Once inside, they could stand up, he said. The dead were found about 600 feet in.
At least five other people have died in the caves in the past two decades.
The passages stretch for miles along the river and are known as the Wabasha Street caves. A brewery once dug some of the caverns to create earthen warehouses, and a mushroom-growing operation flourished in the moist, dark caves for decades.
Over the years, the city has tried to keep people out by posting warning signs, boarding up openings with plywood, piling up sand in the entrances and dumping thousands of tons of construction debris from razed buildings in the passages to fill them up.
But people shimmy through the openings or chip away at the soft sandstone at the blockades.
You can just imagine
you close up some hole - cement it shut - then they just seem to dig around it Mayor Randy Kelly said.
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