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MAGALIA, Calif. –
When Molly, a 4-year-old Australian
shepherd mix, disappeared last April 15,
Hildy Langewis was baffled. Running away
was out of character for her dog.
“She had never jumped
the fence before, except once to make
sure a bear that had come around had
gone away,” Langewis said. “I put out
flyers and looked all around. It was a
real mystery.”
Langewis never
suspected that Molly was within 100
yards of her house – 50 feet down at the
bottom of a nine-foot diameter mineshaft
that Langewis had walked past countless
times without ever noticing.
Fortunately, a
neighbor who knew of the shaft, Tammie
Shields, decided to show a friend the
dangerous relic of a mine that ceased
operations 70 years ago. Shields and
Howard Farber shined a flashlight into
the shaft and saw Molly. Farber and his
son, Joshua, rescued the lucky pup on
June 10. Molly had survived for eight
weeks by drinking rainwater. She was
healthy, but had lost 17 pounds – a
third of her body weight.
“I don’t think a
person would have survived that,”
Langewis said. “It was deep, dark, cold
and who knows what would have been
crawling all over you. I didn’t even
know the shaft was there. It was right
off the path where I walk Molly, very
close to my property line. Other people
knew about it, but nobody ever reported
it.”
Molly’s rescue is the
story’s first happy ending. There is
another. Upon hearing about Molly’s
mishap, representatives of the Office of
Mine Reclamation – part of the
California Department of Conservation –
contacted Langewis and the Paradise
Irrigation District (PID), which owns
the land. PID had placed orange plastic
fencing around the shaft, and requested
the assistance of the Office of Mine
Reclamation to achieve a more enduring
solution.
Today, the opening
will be permanently sealed. OMR and PID
have hired Frontier Environmental
Solutions to install a foam plug, which
will then be covered with dirt and
vegetation. OMR has been cataloguing the
tens of thousands of abandoned mines in
the state since 1997 but only received
funding to do remediation work last
year.
“Abandoned mines have
the potential to be a major public
safety issue as the population pushes
farther out into areas that were
intensely mined during the Gold Rush
era,” DOC Director Darryl Young said.
“We’ve only recently gotten a realistic
picture of how many dangerous old mines
are out there, and, unfortunately,
sometimes we don’t find out about them
until there’s a tragedy. Not all
encounters with old mines end as well as
Molly’s did.”
In mid-October, Dale
Cleveland, 45, of Gasquet died while
off-roading in Altaville, a former
mining community in the Smith River
National Recreation area in Northern
California. Cleveland drove his 1970
Toyota Land Cruiser into a 70-foot deep
shaft. His son, Tyson, received moderate
injuries.
In June of 2002,
brothers Glenn and Nicholas Anderson
from Orange County died exploring a
flooded silver mine in the Cleveland
National Forest in Southern California.
Near Grass Valley, a
Bay Area family built its dream home
over a mineshaft that had been covered
with topsoil. The ground in front of the
house collapsed, exposing a 30-foot deep
pit below the home’s front steps.
A report issued in
2000 following a nearly three-year study
by DOC’s Office of Mine Reclamation
concluded that there are at least 39,000
abandoned mine sites in the state. After
further field investigations, the
estimate was increased to 46,900. Prior
to the report, the estimated number of
abandoned mines in California was based
on old data and ranged from a low of
7,000 to a high of 20,000.
Of the 46,900
abandoned mines, it is estimated that
about 84 percent present physical safety
hazards. Many have several openings such
as the one Molly found. Other hazards
include unstable highwalls or structures
such as mine buildings that could
collapse at a touch; tunnels in which
the unwary could become hopelessly lost;
internal shafts (winzes) that pose fall
hazards; and disease-carrying, predatory
or poisonous animals that sometimes live
in old mines.
The DOC also
estimates that approximately 5,200 (11
percent) of California's abandoned mine
sites present environmental or chemical
hazards. These include acute
environmental hazards such as old
explosives, drums of chemicals or direct
exposure to toxic mine tailings.
There are also subtle
hazards inside abandoned mines --
poisonous gases or low oxygen levels.
More often, there are chronic
environmental hazards. For example,
contaminated runoff from abandoned mines
affects land, groundwater, streams,
rivers and lakes in many areas
throughout the state.
Today, there is one
less hazard. No trace will remain of
“Molly’s shaft” -- but it is perhaps
just one of many air vents dug to
service the Perschbaker-Lucretia gold
mine. The mine opened in 1855 and
operated until the 1930s. It produced
about $120 million worth of gold, with
peak production in the 1890s.
“We’re pleased to be
able to mitigate this hazard with the
help of the Department of Conservation,”
PID General Manager Ray Auerbach said.
“We were fortunate to find out about
this danger to the community before a
tragedy occurred.”
Added Langewis: “I’m
relieved. It could easily have been a
child that fell in.”
Working with more
than a dozen state and federal partners,
the Office of Mine Reclamation
remediated 57 abandoned mine features in
eight counties in the past year.
Projects included bat-compatible
closures at seven mine features, fencing
around 25 features, PUF (polyurethane
foam) closures of 13 shafts and adits
(tunnels), dynamiting one adit,
backfilling seven shafts, and
demolishing and removing debris from
four unstable mine structures.
OMR asks citizens to
report abandoned mine sites by calling
1-877-OLD-MINE.
“In the days when
`Molly’s shaft’ was dug, the mining
industry was less sophisticated and less
environmentally conscious than it is
today,” DOC Director Young said. “Many
of these abandoned mine sites are the
legacy of the Gold Rush, and the
responsible individuals or companies are
long gone. Mining helped make California
great, but we must continue to address
this unfortunate byproduct of an
important industry.”
In addition to
ensuring the reclamation of land used
for mining, the Department of
Conservation studies and maps
earthquakes and other geologic
phenomena; regulates oil, gas and
geothermal wells; maps and classifies
areas containing mineral deposits;
administers agricultural and open-space
land conservation programs; and promotes
beverage container recycling.
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