Death Valley struggles to make abandoned mines safe
They are hard to find and costly to fix. They also can be deadly.
Reporting from Death Valley National Park — Here in ghostly Skidoo, the holes and tunnels are everywhere, nearly a thousand of them puncturing mountains and cratering the desert. Cold winds blow through darkened shafts. Bats flutter in and out at twilight.
Linda Manning, an expert on abandoned mines at Death Valley National Park, peered into a tunnel braced by beams near the old mining camp.
"It kind of gives me the creeps," she said as dank air rushed over her. "These timbers are probably over 100 years old. You never know when they've reached their tipping point."
No other park in the nation has as many abandoned mines as Death Valley. Officials put the number between 10,000 and 50,000, or about a third of all hazardous mines within the national park system.
Now Death Valley and other parks are under increasing pressure to reduce the risks of those mines, risks that include falling, drowning, explosion and asphyxiation. At least 33 people have died between 1999 and 2007 in accidents in abandoned mines on federal and private land, experts say.
Many of the openings are all but invisible.
"We are gravely concerned that the Department of the Interior has put the public's health and safety at risk by not addressing hazards posed by abandoned mines on federal lands," said a report by the department's inspector general last July. "We identified serious environmental and safety hazards where members of the public have been killed, injured or exposed to dangerous environmental contaminants."
California parks have the highest number of abandoned mines, with Death Valley followed by Mojave National Preserve and Joshua Tree National Park.
In September, Death Valley closed the defunct Keane Wonder Mine after the report cited a family with a toddler playing near a collapsing opening. In 1984, a visitor fell 30 feet down a shaft in the mine and died.
The park, the largest in the nation, warns visitors about the dangers, but the message isn't always clear.
At the entrance to a mine shaft here large enough to stand in, signs bearing skull and crossbones warn of death from falling, suffocating and explosion, but a trail leads visitors to the opening. Mines, in fact, are often highlighted on park maps.
"I share the concern about mixed messages, of doing tours of mines and then telling people they cannot go into them," said Manning, a wildlife biologist who helps identify and mitigate mines in the park. "The signs say 'stay out,' but you can see the trails go right to it."
