BLM warns of possible mine hazards

Agency mailed letters to mining claim holders, but BLM can actually deal with just a small percentage of the problems each year

The Bureau of Land Management has mailed letters to about 4,000 miners, including 155 in Oregon, alerting them to possible abandoned shafts or other hazards on their mining claims on BLM land.
The letters are part of a BLM campaign to reduce or eliminate dangers associated with old mines.

“We’re taking a proactive approach to warning active mining claimants whose mining claims include hazardous sites,” BLM Director Bob Abbey said in a press release.

The letters, which were mailed within the past week, went only to miners with claims on BLM land.

In the Baker-Grant county region, the most productive gold-mining area in Oregon late in the 19th century and early in the 20th, the majority of the current active mining claims are on public land managed by the Forest Service rather than the BLM.

The campaign came about after the Inspector General for the Department of the Interior (which oversees BLM) conducted an audit last year and recommended the BLM try to notify all miners whose claims might include shafts or other hazards, said Adam Merrill, who works at the agency’s Washington, D.C., office.
He emphasized, though, that BLM can afford to deal with only a tiny fraction of the hazards on mining claims in a given year, so even those miners who received a letter probably won’t get a follow-up visit

 from BLM employees any time soon.

“As much as we’d like to be able to remove every hazard on public land, we simply don’t have the ability to do that all at once,” Merrill said.

In Oregon and Washington, BLM’s Abandoned Mine Lands program has nine sites where work has been done within the past decade or so to reduce hazards.

One of those is in Baker County. That’s the Poorman/Balm Creek mine site near Balm Creek Reservoir, about 20 air miles northeast of Baker City.

Hazards at that abandoned copper mine, also known as the Mother Lode Mine, include a shaft, and tailings contaminated by heavy metals, according to BLM.

In October 2001 the agency built a small dirt diversion to prevent water from eroding the polluted tailing piles.

BLM focuses its limited resources on mining hazards that pose the greatest risk to the largest number of people, Merrill said — mines near population centers, for instance.

Some of those sites — including the Balm Creek mine in Baker County — are not active mining claims.

The purpose of the letters mailed this month, he said, is to explain to each miner his or her rights and potential responsibilities if, in the future, the BLM decides to try to alleviate a hazard on the miner’s claim.

The likelihood of that happening, though, is pretty low, given the number of hazards, and that some of those hazards are not on active claims, Merrill said.

In many cases where the hazard is within the boundaries of an active claim, the current miner is not legally responsible for the hazard — an abandoned shaft that was dug 100 years ago, for instance.

The BLM, however, might still try to eliminate that hazard by filling in the shaft, or at least reduce the risk by erecting a fence and posting warning signs, Merrill said.

Sometimes, though, miners object to BLM closing a shaft even if they’re not actually mining there, he said.

“There’s a reluctance to fill in shafts, the idea being that work could be done there later,” Merrill said.

If a miner did oppose closing a shaft, the BLM could require the miner to put up a fence or warning signs, in exchange for leaving the shaft accessible, Merrill said.