1. PARKS: Abandoned mines pose safety risks for Death Valley visitors (Land Letter, 10/23/2008)

Eric Bontrager, Land Letter reporter

DEATH VALLEY NATIONAL PARK, Calif. -- When federal inspectors and park rangers went to visit the Keane Wonder Mine area here earlier this year, they expected to find abandoned mine shafts and other remnants of the region's mining legacy.

What they didn't expect was a toddler in a mine.

"The kid was playing in the tunnel," ranger David Ek said. "The mother was just standing there."

When Ek, a parent himself, explained the dangers of playing in a mine under a collapsing roof, the mother told him that her son "had a good head on his shoulders."

"People just don't understand the dangers of these mines," Ek lamented.

The abandoned mines and ruins of the Keane Wonder Mine area have been one of the park's most popular destinations, but last month the park closed off the area with fences and barricades, barring the public from not only the series of tunnels and shafts that are more than 100 years old but also the rusted-out remains of the Keane Wonder Mill and tramway.

The incident at the Keane Wonder Mine, where one visitor died in 1984 after falling down a mine shaft, is just one example of the daily struggle park staff face every day trying to mitigate the dangers of abandoned hardrock mines in Death Valley.

The mine's closure came at the suggestion of the Interior Department's Office of Inspector General, whose investigators visited Death Valley and other locations to examine the department's management of abandoned hardrock mines.

The IG's July report painted a grim picture. While finding that the National Park Service has mitigated many of its high-risk, easily accessible abandoned mine sites, the IG said thousands of sites still present a clear and present danger to park visitors.

A Park Service inventory of its abandoned mine lands found that 126 NPS units have 3,098 different abandoned mine sites that contain at least 8,361 different features, including not only mine shafts but decaying buildings and prospecting holes.

Death Valley, a 5,262-square-mile park that has more than 700,000 visitors every year, tops the NPS inventory, with more than 3,000 features. That inventory is still incomplete, the agency notes, with some park officials estimating that the number could be as high as 6,000 features.

Minimizing risks, not fixing problems

Slightly smaller than Connecticut, Death Valley National Park is an arid combination of high peaks, expansive salt flats and almost alien-like rock formations that make this region of the Sierra Nevada look more like the surface of some far-off world than a national park. Several science fiction movies, including "Star Wars," were filmed here.

The first miners of Death Valley came to make their fortunes from easily extractable minerals like salt, talc and borate. Later, settlers sought gold, silver and copper. They created the tunnels, shafts and structures that remain today.

Death Valley ranger David Ek examines the wire netting covering a vertical mine shaft. The ground of the adjacent trail is crumbing, making it less likely the net will be effective in securing the abandoned shaft as time goes on. Photo by Eric Bontrager.

Because the sites are considered historically and biologically significant, the park must go through a careful analysis of each location to ensure that closing a mine will not have any adverse effects. Some of the mines would need additional work to make them stable, leaving some to ask whether it would be better to simply collapse the mines and end the threat.

"It's a difficult argument. Part of what Death Valley was created for was to preserve the history of that region in California, and mining is a part of that history," said Michael Cipra, California desert program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association, an advocacy group. "It needs the money to deal with that."

Any mine closure -- whether short-term, long-term or permanent -- can cost hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars per site. In the meantime, the park's staff has focused its energies on temporary measures intended to keep people out of the mine hazards.

At Skidoo, once the site of a mining town that fed nearby gold and silver operations, chain-link fence threaded with cable lies bolted over a mine opening less than 5 feet from a road used by park visitors. Running more than 60 yards down the road, the lateral gash varies from 10 feet to 50 feet deep, interrupted by aging wooden supports and loose boulders. Adjacent to the opening, a spiderweb-like metal screen covers the vertical mine shaft that likely fed into it.

Ek said these kind of measures help lower the risk of an accident at a fraction of the cost of a standard mine closure but are not impervious to park visitors who might want to explore the mine. "This just keeps the honest ones out," the 26-year NPS veteran said as he pointed out the loose ground around the screen's bolts. "The rest will still find a way in."

As the assistant chief of the park's resource management division, Ek is one of a handful of staff members working on abandoned mines. The park used to have a mining engineer, but budget cuts eliminated that position, making mine closures -- even temporary ones -- a slow and arduous process.

Securing other sites such as old mills is more difficult. For instance, a mill sits atop a tall ridge overlooking the valley beneath Skidoo. Standing three stories tall, the structure is rusted but appears safe. But Ek said the image is deceiving, pointing to wire suspensions park officials used to anchor it to the hill.

The park has followed on the IG report's recommendations and created signs that illustrate the dangers of exploring abandoned mine sites, but Death Valley Superintendent J.T. Reynolds said the sheer size of the park makes enforcement and monitoring all the more difficult and another accident that much more likely.

"It's like Russian roulette," Reynolds said. "You can't be everywhere in a park this size."

Looking for funding, solutions

Finding the money to address abandoned mine hazards or reclaim the lands is a major challenge, however. NPS believes it will take $233 million to address abandoned mine hazards on agency lands, an estimate IG says is too low to be plausible.

"When you have thousands of these things and you don't have the funds to address them, it becomes a big deal," Reynolds said.

The agency's abandoned mine lands program is funded as part of the broader NPS Disturbed Land Restoration Program, which reclaims lands that have been affected by development or agriculture. Historically, abandoned mines have accounted for about a third of the fund that generally amounts to less than $1 million. Since 2000, specific NPS funding for abandoned mines has fluctuated from a high of about $650,000 in fiscal 2001 to a low of $121,000 in fiscal 2003, an inconsistency that the IG concluded has hampered mitigation of the agency's most dangerous hazards.

As part of a six-part plan for responding to the IG report, NPS Director Mary Bomar has highlighted several external funding sources that could be tapped, including the National Association of Abandoned Mine Land Programs and nongovernmental organizations.

Bomar's plan calls first for the designation of state, regional and park abandoned mine land coordinators to identify high-risk mine features that require immediate measures, such as fences, signs and administrative closures like the one at Keane Wonder. By March 20, 2009, parks will be responsible for developing initial cost estimates for mitigating or safeguarding those features.

A model arrangement in Death Valley may soon become a standard for all parks with abandoned mines. The park partnered with Bat Conservation International and Rio Tinto Minerals/U.S. Borax to form the Death Valley Mine Closure Alliance. Modeled after similar arrangements in Nevada, the participants contribute their individual resources to survey mines, prioritize closures and make provisions for bat protection.

"Our partnerships have accounted for about half of the closures in national parks," said John Burghardt, NPS's servicewide abandoned mine land coordinator.

Bomar also pointed to the Centennial Challenge, a billion-dollar initiative to improve national parks through partnerships with nongovernmental organizations, as a potential option for funding work on abandoned mines. Under the program, parks can compete for grants, but they would have to match those grants with their own money.

Congressional proposals have been floated for updating the 1872 hardrock mining law to include funds for cleaning up abandoned mines, but the reform efforts have not led to enactment of a new law.

Ek said the park will continue to work on safeguarding what sites it can, but said he suspects it would take "some sort of calamity" like another accident before adequate attention is focused on addressing the abandoned mine problem. He added, "If you only solve part of the problem, you're not really doing anything."

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