According to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR), the fire was detected in the mine's main lift shaft around 9 p.m. local time on Thursday (17 March) when nobody was in the mine. By Friday the DNR had established that the fire was blazing inside the shaft between levels 23 and 25 - just two levels above the physics laboratory, which is located 60 m below on the mine's lowest level.
There were also fears that the lab could suffer flood damage after electrical systems automatically shut down, deactivating pumps that were designed to keep groundwater from entering the mine.
After fire-fighting efforts over the weekend, in which thousands of gallons of foam and water were sprayed into the mine, the Minnesota Interagency Fire Center reported on Sunday that the fire was 99% extinguished. Fire officials will only declare the blaze officially "out" once its source has been located and any smouldering ashes or embers have been extinguished.
A three-man team has already descended down the lift shaft to restart some of the pumps. By Sunday night they had reached the physics lab on level 27, where they encountered a large amount of foam, which seems to have prevented them from entering the lab. The laboratory's back-up systems, however, including infrared sensitive cameras, have so far indicated that the laboratory seems to have escaped the initial fire.

Soudan Mine cage emerges from mine shaft covered in foam.
Riesselmann told physicsworld.com on Monday that if conditions are safe, a crew will enter the underground lab in the next two days. The main question now, he says, is whether the unexpected and long power outage damaged the experiments.
Alfons Weber, a physicist at the University of Oxford, who works on the MINOS experiment, is confident that the laboratory is robust enough to have escaped significant impacts. "There is lot of foam at the lowest level, but there seems to be no flooding," he says. "The lab is sealed from the rest of the mine by heavy iron doors and we don't expect damage."
Fires everywhere from the Sun to Miami to here............