ABSTRACT
Rock engineering in Finland has a long history with the first undergroundmining going as far back as the sixteenth century (Rönkä & Ritola, 1997). Civil engineering work began with the construction of railway tunnels – excavation of the first one began in 1896. Construction of the infrastructure began in the 1920s with the excavation of the main water tunnels. Good description of the current rock engineering projects in Finland is found in Särkkä & Aho (2011). Rock mechanics as a science can be considered to start in Finland at the turn of the
1950s and 1960s. Underground constructionwas also initiated in the early 1960s in the Helsinki region with the requirement by Finnish legislation to construct more civil defense rock shelters for citizens. The birth of the Finnish rock mechanics community took place in early 1967 when a
sub-committee under the Finnish Mining and Metallurgical Society was established. The first annual Finnish Rock Mechanics Symposium was held in 1967. The Finnish Rock Mechanics Symposia have been held annually since then. The Finnish Rock Mechanics Society was established in 1971 with 51 members and later that same year it was accepted as a member of ISRM (International Society for RockMechanics). One of the first pioneer rock mechanic projects was the Tytyri limestone mine that
was presented in our first Rock Mechanics Symposium in 1967 (Finnish Mining and Metallurgical Society, 1967). Since 1964 several stress measurements mainly using Hast’s overcoring method had been conducted in the mine. Understanding the stress state there markedly changed the shapes and volumes of stopes and pillars in the mine resulting in larger open rooms andmore effective mining. This was first time horizontal in situ stresses were utilized in the mine planning.
