Napoleon is not usually associated with building. The lovely modern city of Paris owes much, however, to the great emperor, who by imperial decree put a stop to the mining that had been carried out beneath the streets of Paris since the time of the Romans. Much of the limestone used for the buildings of pre-nineteenth-century Paris and the gypsum necessary for interior plaster finish was obtained from quarrying the horizontal rock strata beneath the city's surface.
The stone and gypsum were simply hoisted to street level through vertical shafts. Land transportation outside the city was then so difficult as to make hauling from any great distance almost impossible.
Cave-ins at the surface had already caused trouble when underground quarrying was stopped. Ten percent of the land area of Paris was underlain by open tunnels. When close to the surface, these were clearly a hazard to further building construction, so that a special organization had to be established to make accurate surveys...
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© 1984 Van Nostrand Reinhold Company Inc.
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Legget, R.F. (1984). Urban geology. In: Finkl, C. (eds) Applied Geology. Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series, vol 3. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-30842-3_73
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