Arizona lacks funds to find and secure 100,000 abandoned mines

[TexasTowelie]

PHOENIX — After he started hallucinating, John Waddell began to believe he would die. He had fallen 100 feet to the bottom of an abandoned gold mine in western Maricopa County, leaving him with a broken leg and rope-burned hands.

“It’s like a black cloud that’s a little stringy, and these figures were coming out of this little cloud. It almost looked like animals,” he recalled during an October news conference at Banner-University Medical Center in Phoenix. “They were going around and around inside the mine.

“That was kind of freaky. If I stayed down there, I knew I was going to die.”

Waddell, 60, survived three days in El Tigre mine, fighting off rattlesnakes and praying somebody would look for him. He had explored the mine, which is on his property near Aguila, for decades, hoping to find gold still glittering in the dark tunnels.

Read more: http://www.mohavedailynews.com/news/arizona-lacks-funds-to-find-and-secure-abandoned-mines/article_dc2c0092-ff5c-11e8-9e32-87c804932f78.html

[Wellstone ruled]

1. This is a major problem

in Nevada,Utah,Arizona as well as California. Cost of closing mine entrances can run in the thousands. And most of these are so over grown with vegetation,one can fall in with out even knowing they are under foot. Of course you can not fix the Stupid when it comes to these open sites.

[ret5hd]

2. A few hundred dollars material (plus labor) per mine:

https://www.nps.gov/subjects/abandonedminerallands/upload/puf.pdf

[3Hotdogs]

3. My great grandmother died after falling into an abandoned mine. That was in a New Jersey zinc mine.