Death Toll Rises but Money in Mine Fund Goes Unspent 

September 26, 2002

By Joel Brinkley

The New York Times

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Washington, D.C. - This spring, an 8-year-old boy in western Pennsylvania died when he tumbled down a 60-foot sheer rock embankment, a dangerous vestige of an abandoned coal mine.

Dozens of people die at abandoned mines each year in accidents that are supposed to be prevented by a government program intended to clean up such dangerous sites, subsidized by a tax that coal companies have paid since 1977.

These tax revenues have collected in a government trust fund that now holds $1.54 billion. But the federal government refuses to spend most of the money, holding it back to help offset the budget deficit, raising continuing complaints from state officials as more people die.

The federal government has recorded 78 deaths in abandoned or inactive mines since January 2000, including 26 this year. The numbers are incomplete, and the actual death count is probably higher, the government concedes.

In St. Joseph County, Ind., last June, a 41-year-old man was killed when he slipped and fell into a gravel pit at an abandoned mine and drowned in four feet of water. Near Wickenburg, Ariz., in April, a hiker died when he toppled down an abandoned vertical mine shaft that was hidden in the wilderness.

"With all these deaths and injuries, I would think that is all the proof you would need to free up this money," said Mike Kastl, director of the abandoned mines program in Oklahoma, where 25 people -- 14 children and 11 adults -- have died in old mine accidents in recent times.

The government taxes coal companies 10 cents to 35 cents a ton for the cleanup fund, and that money is added to the Abandoned Mine Lands Trust Fund, which holds enough money to clean up almost half of the most dangerous abandoned mines nationwide.

But this year, like every year since the fund's inception in 1977, the money is caught up in the federal budget battle, though by law it cannot be spent on anything other than mine cleanup projects.

"We'd like to use more of the money," said Danny M. Lytton, a senior official in the Interior Department's Office of Surface Mining, which administers the fund. "Most years we aren't able to spend even as much as we collect."

This is a result of a peculiar federal budget idiosyncrasy. When the abandoned mine trust fund was authorized, it was designated "on budget," as are most government trust funds. That means the money is held in the government's general treasury pool, although it cannot be spent on anything else.

When the Interior Department asks to spend part of the fund, the request must compete with those from every other program in the department. Any increase in spending must be offset by a decrease somewhere else. A result, federal officials acknowledge, is that that the money is held back to help lower the budget deficit.

"The fund is being used as a budget balancing tool," complained Gary Conrad, director of the Interstate Mining Compact Commission, a multistate government agency.

"As with any appropriation bill," said James H. Zoia, Democratic staff director for the House Natural Resources Committee, "if you doubled the abandoned mine lands budget, you'd have to cut that money from someplace else." The appropriation from the abandoned mine fund is routinely cut, "to try to balance things out," Mr. Zoia said.

In the current fiscal year, $204 million was spent from the fund. For the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, the Bush administration is proposing to cut spending to $174 million. In each year, the taxes and interest paid into the fund should exceed $350 million.

All of this is bewildering to the officials whose job it is to save lives by cleaning up the abandoned mines in 23 states. "At this rate it will take 100 years to clean up these mines," said John McCormick, the Washington coordinator for the Citizens Coal Council, an advocacy group.

Starting in the late 1970s, federal law required mining companies to clean up and restore property they had mined. But that left thousands of sites nationwide that had been mined and then abandoned in the previous 100 years. Federal and state estimates indicate that there may be more than 12,000 such mines. Even as the government cleans up several dozen sites each year, the number of mines in the government's inventory keeps growing as more abandoned mines are discovered.

While 23 states and three Indian tribes have problems, the greatest number of abandoned mines runs in a belt through the coal fields of western Pennsylvania, eastern Kentucky and central West Virginia, where mines tunnel underground in all directions. The miners left behind a variety of hazards.

Open, vertical mine shafts can be hundreds of feet deep. Near Globe, Ariz., last year, a 40-year-old man who was out hiking died after tumbling 350 feet to the bottom of an abandoned shaft. In Utah, a 26-year-old man in an all-terrain vehicle drove over a hidden mine shaft and fell 50 feet to his death.

Surface miners often scrape away the sides of hills, leaving sheer walls, some of them hundreds of feet high. People and cars topple down them. Some deep mine shafts hold toxic residues that deplete the air of oxygen, killing children or others who crawl inside to explore them.

But most victims drown. Water collects in mine shafts and in open pits left by miners. People fall into them and drown. Others choose the open pits as swimming holes but find that once they are in the water, they cannot get out because the walls are sheer rock.

In June, an 18-year-old drowned in an abandoned mine pit near Momence, Ill., when he got cramps and could not climb out. Because abandoned mines are generally much deeper than normal swimming holes, the water is colder, and that can lead to crippling cramps, Mr. Kastl noted. That appeared to be the case in Lancaster County, Pa., last month, when two 22-year-old men, swimming in an abandoned quarry, drowned at almost the same time in 41-degree water.

Cleaning up abandoned mines is generally not complicated and is not always expensive. Vertical mine shafts can be fenced, covered or filled with dirt or foam.

The Interior Department keeps a detailed inventory of dangerous abandoned mine sites. It estimates that all of them could be repaired for $2.96 billion.

Using the $1.54 billion in the abandoned mine fund and new receipts, the government could in theory accrue enough money to clear up all those problems in five or six years. But at the current rate of appropriation, Mr. Lytton of the Interior Department acknowledged, the work is likely to take considerably longer.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/26/politics/26MINE.html