Audit hits hard at U.S. federal Abandoned Mine Lands programs safety, environmental hazards

The Department of Interior Inspector General has released a tough abandoned mine lands audit report painting a bleak picture of environmental and safety hazards still festering at sites in California, Nevada and Arizona.

RENO, NV - 

In a recently issued report, the Inspector General for the U.S. Department of the Interior said, "We are gravely concerned that the Department of Interior has put the public's health and safety at risk by not addressing hazards posed by abandoned mines on federal laws."

In a recent audit, the Inspector General Earl Devaney identified "serious environmental and safety hazards where members of the public had been killed, injured or exposed to dangerous environmental contaminants."

The Inspector General's staff visited 45 areas with abandoned mines from March 2007 to April 2008, and interviewed more than 75 employees from 13 Bureau of Land Management offices and five national parks in California, Arizona and Nevada.

"At several BLM sites we visited, we found dangerous levels of environmental contaminants, such as arsenic, lead and mercury-easily accessible to visitors and local residents, often without their knowledge. We also found instances of trespassing at abandoned BLM mine sites, including residential and commercial development on the land," the report said.

Meanwhile, the audit team also fund that, between 2004 and 2007, at least 12 people were killed in accidents at abandoned mines.

"Even more disturbing, we found that BLM supervisors told staff to ignore these problems, and employees were criticized or received threats of retaliation for identifying contaminated sites," the Inspector General claimed. "One employee stated that adding sites to an inventory list and declaring them unsafe was more detrimental to BLM because doing so acknowledged a hazard and a liability."

"While the BLM has the clear majority of abandoned mine sites on DOI lands, we found it has an ineffective program to address them," the report asserted. "BLM's abandoned mines program has long been undermined, neglected and marginalized by poor management practices and insufficient staffing and resources."

While the Inspector General's staff found the National Park Service (NPS) has mitigated many of its high-risk, easily accessible abandoned mine sites, "there are hundreds if not thousands of sites that still need to be addressed. ...While the NPS has a more effective program, current funding for NPS' abandoned mines program is inadequate to address these hazards, and NPS has failed to develop a credible estimate of the total cost of mitigation."

"The findings from this audit paint a picture of compelling urgency, which should trigger a swift call to action by both the Department and the Congress," the Inspector General declared. "We are providing recommendations designed to help develop a comprehensive solution to this multi-faceted problem, not of DOI's making, but now, certainly, in the Department's realm of responsibility."

BLM and the National Park Service have until August 21, 2008 to respond to the Office of Inspector General's audit.

 During a visit to the Rand Mining District near Ridgecrest California, the audit team found that mitigation of environmental and safety hazards in the district could exceed $170 million. "We found that arsenic contamination in the district is widespread over 3,000 acres of mine tailings and 500,000 tons of additional mining-related waste rock. The area's dry climate and winds have routinely exposed residents to arsenic-laden dust."

The team also visited a site in Kingman, Arizona where two sisters drove their all-terrain vehicle into a mineshaft over the Labor Day weekend last September, killing one of them. The team found no signs or warnings of abandoned mines as they drove through BLM's Windy Point Recreation Area where the mineshaft was located.

The Caselton Tailings site, covering about 90 acres in southeast Nevada north of the town of Panaca, contains 3 million cubic yards of mine tailings or mine waste, according to the audit team. The tailings contain "potentially dangerous levels of heavy metals including arsenic, lead and manganese. The team noted that visible mine tailings have migrated down the surface of the Caselton Wash toward the Meadow Valley wash within about three miles of the town of Panaca and local water wells. However, the audit team said, that the "BLM has indicated to us that the risk of groundwater contamination is very small; however, BLM has never sampled ground water at the wells downstream of the tailings."

In the Death Valley National Park, the audit team observed a family camping near and exploring the old Keane Wonder Mine "and at one point we witnessed the family's toddler exiting a collapsing mine opening."

At Oro Fino Site at the Mojave National Preserve, NPS personnel noted that the mine was collapsing, the roof was caving in, and dangerous shafts inside the mine created the risk of people falling. "There was vehicle access near the opening, and there were no signs warning the public of the dangers or fencing to private access," said the audit team.

The audit team found that the NPS had mitigated many of their high-priority abandoned mine sites at Death Valley, Grand Canyon, Joshua Tree and Lake Mead.

In their audits of 107 field office BLM abandoned mine lands programs in Arizona, California and Nevada, the Inspector General found many employees working with the program "have never performed simple duties as posting warnings signs and fences, let alone identifying abandoned mine sites.

 "BLM's abandoned mine lands program have been chronically and drastically under-funded. In its abandoned mine lands strategic plan, BLM identified funding needs of about $130 million through fiscal year 2013 for high priority sites," the report said. "Even the identified needs are drastically under-estimated.  ...Currently, BLM's abandoned mine lands program receives less than $10 million in annual funding from various sources including appropriates for soil, water and air; hazard management; and resource restoration."

"Significant progress to permanently address physical safety and environmental hazards at BLM abandoned mine sites will not be achieved unless substantial additional resources are made available," the Inspector General declared.

Nevertheless, the audit team praised the Desert Manager's Group, a regional interagency partnership, that manages 20 million acres of California's desert region, including three national parks, 72 wilderness areas, and six military bases, and "has  large portion of the abandoned mine sites that are located in the Southwest."

The group's goals include forming partnerships to leverage funding, developing a central database of abandoned mines sites within the region, and mitigating the highest priority environmental and physical safety sites. Partnership members include the BLM, NPS, the Department of Defense, and the State of California.

In Nevada, the BLM and the Nevada Division of Minerals use college students to identify and inventory abandoned mines. The audit team noted that the "BLM has also developed a grassroots effort to mitigate physical hazards using volunteer labor and donated fuel, heavy equipment, and materials."

The BLM has a national inventory of roughly 12,000 abandoned mine sites. Much of this data is now more than a decade old and has never been validated by field surveys, according to the report.

Worse, the audit team found that the BLM's abandoned mind lands program does not "identify, inventory, and mitigate hazards at sites abandoned after 1980. BLM's abandoned mine handbook defines abandoned mine sites as those abandoned prior to the implementation of the surface management regulations on January 1, 1981. This definition may unduly limit site identification in that all dangerous abandoned mine sites requiring mitigation may not be identified."

RECOMMENDATIONS

The report makes eight recommendations that the audit team feels should have the federal agencies address abandoned mines issues.

The Inspector General recommends that the BLM Director do the following:

1.       Issue a clear policy statement that:

·         Supports the abandoned mine lands program and its goals.

·         Forbids retaliation against employees for identifying or reporting abandoned mine sites,

·         Requires field-office management and staff to comply with abandoned mine lands policies and procedures.

2.       Employ experienced, trained full-time staff dedicated to the abandoned mine lands program at state and field offices in California, Arizona, and Nevada and other states where appropriate.

3.       Establish a specific line item budget for abandoned mine land programs and request funding to accomplish project goals identified in the abandoned mine strategic plan.

4.       Identify and resolve trespassing on abandoned mine sites and assess and mitigate hazards associated with those sites.

5.       Validate existing data and develop procedures for ongoing data collection to ensure that data in the inventory is complete, accurate and consistent.

The Inspector General recommends  the NPS Director do the following:

6.       Request adequate funding to support program goals and to mitigate abandoned mine lands sites.

The Inspector General recommends that the BLM Director and NPS Director do the following:

7.       Implement immediately temporary or permanent measures to mitigate known dangerous sites.

8.       Explore and exploit opportunities for sharing resources, expertise, and best practices between the agencies to strengthen their abandoned mine lands programs.

BLM RESPONSE

The BLM said that it accepted all of the recommendations and would work diligently to implement them.

Nevertheless, the agency said it did not agree with the Inspector General's conclusion that the abandoned mine lands program has put the public health and safety at risk. BLM also took exception to the statement that comprehensive records of abandoned mine accidents are not maintained. BLM said that it is not always immediately notified when a death or injury takes place on public land.

The BLM also noted that it had worked to remove all hazardous materials and resolve all chemical and physical safety issues at the operations area of the Caselton Tailings piles in Nevada. The agency said its scientists had concluded "that the risk of groundwater contamination was very small." The BLM has suggested that having a third party reprocess the tailings piles would significantly reduce the cost to the U.S. government, now estimated at between $8 million to $14 million.

BLM officials said that "threats and intimidation of its employees will not be condoned or tolerated and when it is made aware of these allegations, it will act to investigate and address the matter." The agency is prepared to use full-time, dedicated staff to deal with abandoned mined lands.

The BLM admitted that current funding sources, even in the aggregate, are insufficient to address the mega-AML sites identified in the Inspector General's Report. However, the agency also noted that it utilized multiple funding sources for abandoned mines mitigation including: soil, water and air; hazard management and resource restoration; a Central Hazardous Materials Fund; Natural Resource Damage Assessment and Restoration; and the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act .

NPS RESPONSE

The National Park Service said it accepted the findings and recommendation in the Inspector General's report.

However, the NPS disagreed with the report conclusion that the agency lacked a current estimate of total costs needed to mitigate its abandoned mine hazards. NPS referred to an April 2008 estimate that quotes total needs of $233 million with immediate needs of $60 million.

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