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[GoldenShadow]

My current fortress is 10 years old. I built up a big enough stockpiles of cool stuff and over 200 population.
 I recently found a pretty nice cave system with a magma pool really deep down in the ground. I know from before not to connect the caves directly to the fort, else I get swarmed by cave creatures. So I made the exploratory mines outside of my fortress walls. Everything was good. I started my first magma smelters and I cleared out a huge adjacent area for ore and bar storage. I made sure the floor above was attached to the rock above it aswell, so the little detached bits of cave wall wouldn't crush my diggers.  I completed the storage area and started to put up some walls to isolate the storage and smelters from the main caves for creature control.

My embark is halfway on an aquifer, so half the land has a slightly different biomes, the water stays frozen a few days longer on the southern side of the map. and thats where an aquifer is.
Anyway.  I order a mass move of goods and ore to be processed to the new magma smelter storage. I realized my dwarfs are walking a long way to get there and I scout the layers and find a spot of nearly solid stone straight to the surface. I'm going to build an express stairwell for mass transit, 3x3 of up/down stairs along about 50 Z-levels. So I designate the entire thing and go do something else why they dig and move stuff. I come back and see they found damp stone just a few levels below the surface. Its that aquifer. I sigh and move on to some other matter that grabs my attention. A short while after I get a message about a cave-in. WTF? whats going on I think. I check the magma forge level to find hundreds of thousands of gallons of water draining from that aquifer onto my storage area. The same one that All of my iron ore, and metal bars have mostly been moved to already. The water flows into the magma and starts to solidify it. All of my stuff is flooded. I have no more bars of any kind unless I can unflood that area.

I don't know how or why that aquifer caved in with just a 3x3 vertical stairway. I scouted the supposed cave-in spot and I can't see any open space above the stairs that have been dug. and none of the stairs are collapsed or destroyed. I assumed my guys were going to dig upwards and once I hit the aquifer I could dig around it.

Also the water will flow out onto the magma surface on a diagonal, creating obsidian which constantly collapses to the magma bed, which is about 90 levels deep. This keeps interupting me every few seconds.

[Namfuak]

The cave in was probably from magma being obsidianized in the middle of the pool, which counts as a cave in.  Also, dwarves will dig upwards with no heed to hot or cold stone because they can't see the stone above them (as opposed to going down, where they reveal the stone below without actually digging it).  An upward staircase is enough to breach an aquifer, you don't need to build a down stair in the stone.

Since you have magma, the most likely solution is to pump it to the surface and finish the staircase from the top, and then obsidianize the spot where the water is pouring in.  Whatever you had down there material wise is pretty much forfeit, but at least you'll salvage the area (after you dig it out).  If you want to go through the aquifer, dig out a square around the area obsidianized and obsidianize that as well, so that the aquifer doesn't go into your staircase.

[GoldenShadow]

I could try that, but lucky break. Winter has come and the aquifer has frozen.

[Hivemind]

Dig it out, plug everything with walls and floor. I don't know if ice destroys items when it solidifies or not.