This is Mine Safety Awareness Week in Arizona, and State Mine Inspector Joe Hart made the case to the state legislature about the need for more funding to identify and close abandoned mines.
Legislators gave little likelihood of that, given the state's financial situation.
Joe cautioned that while his office has an internal list of 10,000 abandoned mines, there are no resources to create a digital online listing or detailed map. The current map is too small to be useful.
For a list of abandoned mines to be useful to the public, the locations have to be detailed enough that anyone heading out to hike or offroad, could examine their planned routes to spot potential problems. But does that then create attractions for those who deliberately want to explore these old mines and end up trapped or hurt? My experience is that there are more problems from people who seek to go into mines than those who do so accidentally.
In general, I'm an advocate of providing the information and letting people make their own decisions. Give responsible recreationists information that can save their lives. The ones who misuse it may be our entries for the Darwin Awards.
http://arizonageology.blogspot.com/2009/04/posting-locations-of-abandoned-mines.html
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2 comments:
I concur. It makes sense to make the information available with the appropriate caveats. There is considerable information available on the web, including many site locations. Visit www.abandonemines.gov and follow the links to the GeoCommunicator Site Mapper. The quality of the data and its completeness varies because much of the information was not ground-truthed or validated using GPS.
at least with technology we'll get better and better at locating them
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