FROSTBURG — The Maryland Bureau of Mines is still cleaning up mines in Allegany and Garrett counties that operators walked away from 33 or more years ago.
“And we will be doing that into the foreseeable future,” said Mike Garner, who heads up that effort for the state agency housed in Frostburg. “It’s an ongoing process.”
Tucked up hollows and into hillsides and on ridges in Mountain Maryland are a variety of nasty and potentially nasty remnants of the search for coal.
Until 1977, when federal law made it illegal, coal operators could walk away from failing mines. There were no questions asked. There were no obligations on the shoulders of the diggers.
“We still find old earth-moving equipment, conveyors, buildings, all kinds of items associated with coal mining in the 1970s that were just left there,” Garner said.
Also out there in Maryland’s relatively small slice of the Appalachian Mountains are portals, the openings to the old abandoned deep mines.
“We had a four-year survey done starting in 2000,” Garner said. “Interns with GPS units searched the area and found 798 old portals.”
The good news, according to Garner, is that all but 66 have collapsed, meaning they have closed themselves and prohibited entry.
Of the remaining open portals, some are more dangerous than others because they are vertical, meaning they are holes in the ground into which a fall could be taken.
Some horizontal portals, such as one at a deep mine a couple of miles from Bloomington, are so large that all-terrain vehicles are being driven into them.
“That’s a dangerous situation,” Garner said.
I have never heard of this. Heard of the Centralia some 20 years ago when my parents visited up there. But never with all my connection to Cumberland have I heard of underground burning.
Why don’t they hire some fracking teams to frack the whole region, pulverize the rock under it and just crush the fire out by collapsing all the old mine shafts?
Could air still get in if the shafts were gone?