State cuts DNR mine reclamation program; old Rich Hill mines are now regulated by federal authorities

Wednesday evening representatives from the Missouri Department of Natural Resources and the Department of the Interior Office of Surface Mining gathered, with interested parties, in Nevada to discuss how State of Missouri budget cutbacks are going to impact the Abandoned Mine Land Unit of the DNR.

According to DNR records in 2003 the AML budget was cut 64 percent, effectively budgeting it out of existence. This has caused the Office of Surface Mining to drop the $1.5 to $2 million it normally gave to the program because it is no longer viable.

Stuart Miller, Missouri Department of Natural Resources land reclamation specialist, reported that since 1980 the AML has closed 164 dangerous coal mine shafts and reclaimed several thousand acres of land environmentally impacted by mining. ?We have been very successful. We restored a lot of barren wasteland into productive agricultural and recreational usage throughout the state,? he said.

Miller said that one of the most important programs that AML took care of was the emergency mine reclamations. He said that it was not uncommon, in areas where coal was mined underground and have been since abandoned, to have forgotten shafts crop up as sinkholes, sometimes overnight. ?We have closed quite a few shafts in the Rich Hill area, we have closed shafts down in Mindenmines area. We?ve got some problems that we have dealt with,? said Miller.

Without the AML there will be no state program to reclaim areas polluted by coal mining. However, emergency mine shaft reclamation will still be undertook by the federal Office of Surface Mining but they will have to compete with places like Pennsylvania and West Virginia for urgency. ?We still have a lot of work to do here. It is unfortunate we are having a funding problem, said Lynn Meyer of the Office of Surface Mining. How is this going to affect the citizens of Vernon County? Luckily for us, much of the coal mining that was done around here was done after 1977. Since then mining companies have been required to set up a bond that is supposed to go to cleaning up the mining sites. ?The newer sites were bonded and if a mining company walks away from them, like Midwest Coal did, we call that a bond forfeiture site,? Larry Coen, director of the Department of Natural Resources Land Reclamation Program.

However, just because the DNR does not know of any dangerous abandoned mine shafts in Vernon County does not mean that there are not any. Clint Bishop, Construction Manager for the AML, said, ?If anyone knows of one we would want to know about it.?