ABSTRACT
Throughout Croatia one can find a lot of buildings which testify a long tradition of a stone application in civil engineering and architecture. Dimension stone was extracted mostly by surface and only rarely by underground methods. Lately, underground methods have been used more frequently in the world, because of environmental, organisational and economical reasons. In the Kanfanar quarry in the region of Istrian peninsula an existing active surface exploitation had to be transferred underground because of economical and environmental constraints. Regular room and pillar method was chosen for the trial underground exploitation. In the paper the conventional pillar design procedure is presented and compared to the numerical results made by the usage of finite difference code FLAC. It was concluded that in a complex geological environment, numerical analyses can better describe the behaviour of a rock mass. Therefore, the parameters for the trial underground exploitation were chosen according to the numerical results.
