Selects: What happens to abandoned mines?

to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W Chuck Bryant. Damn, that makes it sounds I just had some of my notes mixed up, like criminal records was stuffed in the middle of this one, Like, wouldn't that be funny if I was talking about abandoned minds? And then just like a robot was like, and if you have a d U I, you can call your local police shop and get that expunged. Yeah, I think

that's bad advice. Well, now I'm just saying, do you not ever call the police unless it's an emergency. You're right, Chuck, Yes, Um, how are you doing good? Three today? Huh yeah, before holiday even In fact, the office is closed right now and we're still working. I know. It's like crickets outside. And someone threw a spear at me when I stuck my head out to go to the bathroom. Good that was his assignment. Yeah, so Chuck, yes, if I may take it down, not your two, Okay. Have you ever

heard of a guy named Taylor Crane? A kid? Taylor as a kid who was sixteen years old when he died. He was on a tour of Mexico UM with his parents in New Mexico or mex Mexico, Mexico Old Mexico UM. And he was on a tour I didn't realize he's existed, UM, but a of abandoned haciendas and minds. So it's basically

like an urban exploration tour of old Mexico UM. And they were at an old mind site the tour group was and Taylor was apparently playing tag and um jumped up on a low wall and apparently on the other side of that was a thousand foot mind shaft which fell into a thout ten feet across jess wide open

a thousand feet down. They had a lot of trouble getting to them to recover him because there's so much lead and arsenic at the bottom that it was really difficult to breathe to get down there to get them. So you think, like, wow, it's really crazy that Mexico has these open minds. Mind blowing as it is, Mexico is not the only place. As a matter of fact, here in the States we have something on the scale

of five hundred thousand abandoned minds. That's the high end, but the low end even is still I think like three hundred thousand abandoned minds. Abandoned minds probably two of the most dangerous words you can put together, and they're all over the place. The US is lousy with them. Yeah, and about thirty people die in the United States every year from accidents involving abandoned minds. And I did a little looking Apparently they include uh uh quarries and most

of these are drownings. Um because the quarry either has water or an abandoned mind shaft. You know, they'll pump out water to work in it, and then when they're done, it fills back up with water. So uh, some say crazy scuba divers, we'll try and scuba dive these things. My dad was actually certified in an old marble quarry in Toledo, and the to be certified you had to go down to a school bus at the bottom of this quarry. Um, you had to dive down to go

into the school bus and grab something from it. It was like right inside, and then bring it back up and they'd be like, Okay, you're certifying. Your dad did that. Yeah, that's pretty awesome. I'm trying to picture that. I can't imagine anything more creepy than having to go into a school bus at the bottom of a filled quarry. No, I'm just trying to picture your dad like I'll, you know, scuba diving and it's been like a buzz cut and more like a big watch and everything. Yeah, he was.

I guess anytime you're older and you meet someone father when they're a little older, it's hard to imagine them as young because I didn't know him back then. But I picture him on the couch. Oh no, huh, No, he's a He carried a spear gun everywhere he went with him, did he really? That's awesome. Alright, so, um, sadly, like I said, about thirty people die each year, many

of them are drownings. I think number two on the list as a TV accidents, which doesn't surprise me, is tool along in the a TV on some you know, random thinking. You're in the middle of nowhere place and all of a sudden the bottom falls out. Literally. Um. Yeah, those were the top two far and away that I came across too. But since two thousande apparently two seven people have died in the United States because of accidents involving abandoned minds. I saw one in two thousand and eight.

These two guys were uh, trying to get a former gold mine going again because they thought there was still gold down there, and they were pumping out water with a some sort of machine with a generator, and they died of carbon monoxide poisoning. Yeah, that's that's another one. I think it's way down on the list. It's like a distant third. But but I think it's it's um being overcome unable to breathe, asphyxiation, that's the word I'm

looking for. By bringing in your own thing or just by the toxic chemicals down there toxic chemicals or um, carbon monoxide or oxygen depletion in general from people either try at old ones started up or yea more likely adventuring abandoned mind. Let's go ahead and give a tip to people because we like to encourage the urban explorers, which you know, we've done a podcast on that. But man, you don't need to be hanging around abandoned minds. Now.

They're very, very dangerous. Yes, I mean, that's just so mind bogglingly dangerous to resist the urge, And like, I have that urge too because I love the urban exploration. If I saw a hole in the ground, I would want to go check it out. But it's not a good place to be, not a good thing to do. So what's crazy is we said, like up to five hundred thousand abandoned minds and these are just the minds,

not mine features. So say every mind has several mind features, Say and add it, which is a vertical shaft or I'm sorry, a horizontal shaft. Um, And you've got a vertical shaft like the one that um, poor Taylor Crane fell into. Um, you have all these different mind features on up to five hundred thousand minds. Crazy thing is is as of February two thousand eleven, the Bureau of Land Management, which is tasked with finding these abandoned minds,

has only found about thirty one thousand of them. That means that there's possibly four hundred and sixty nine thousand abandoned minds in the United States that no one has on any map. True, but like on on the good side, they're trying to find them. Now. In two thousand and eight, they only had eighteen thousand of them. So in that span of three years they found another, uh, thirteen thousand.

I had twelve thousand and two thousand and eight. Oh really, well even better than yeah, um, and I think of those have been remediated, have pending reclamation, or they say aren't a danger and they say so, Um, that's just the physical dangers. Yeah, there's two kinds. There's physical dangers and environmental dangers. And I think and I guess it's of the ones they found they said have physical hazards and five have environmental hazards. There. Yeah, okay, which you know,

it's not a ton, but is pretty dangerous. Well, a physical hazard is insidious for the local just the local people who are walking around it sure like falling in, yeah, or maybe caving in. And by the way, I found out that any mine feature that is like a hole in the ground or even like if there's a depression in the ground because of mine collapse some Yeah, they're called glory holes. Did you know that? That was almost a spit take, wasn't it. Yeah, that's not true. I

swear to god it is. Wow. I saw a sign today of an abandoned mind called the glory whole mine. Well that's that's quite a name. Yeah, good for them. Uh, mine tailings you talk about, and this is some of the environmental hazards, and these can actually be physical hazards

too if you're living nearby. These are the remnants of what was going on there of the mineral, and often it can be very toxic and then that can either be harmful to you or it can run off into the water and be harmful to people, you know, downriver. That was my point is things like um like addits and other mine features. Um, they're dangerous if you're walking around the mine. Environmental hazards of a mind can be very far reaching because, in very much the same way

that acid rain is produced from like smoke stacks. These mines can produce acid rain um and they can also produce acid groundwater. When sulfide sulfide minerals and oxygen combined with water, it produces acidic groundwater that can pollute an entire water system downstream and then also chuck. There's mercury

tailings or a big problem, especially with gold mines. So you know, like if you take mercury and take gold and put them together, mercury absorbs the gold, and you get a rainbow, right, a deadly rain bow, uh, And it makes what's called an amalgam. And then later on so you have like you can take a little gold flex or whatever and now they're like highly portable, stable little things of mercury. And then you take them somewhere else and you can burn the mercury off and the

mercury will vaporize and just the gold is left. Well, the problem is is that mercury then immediately contaminates wherever you just burned it off, and there's the atmosphere and everything. But those kind of tailings are especially problematic and old gold mines too. And does that end up in gold schlager bottles. Probably is that where they get it. I don't know. I hope they're not putting formerly mercury gold amalgam in the gold schlaw. No, the people that gold

Schlager wouldn't do that. Uh So, Josh, if this is such a problem, why wouldn't these companies clean up their mind sites. It seems like a no brainer to me. You're there, you do the work, you close it down, you clean it up, make sure it's safe for everybody. That's how you do it now. Yes, supposedly, Uh it was not the case until nineteen seventy seven. For about

two years. People mind um even more than that. People mind in the United States, willy nilly however they wanted, and they would they would say, well, this mind's used up. I don't need it any longer. I'm walking away. Well, the quick answer to my question answer now is money. That's the real reason, because it's really expensive to clean up your mind site. If you're a mining operation and you can pre what you can just fold up shop and leave, why would you spend money to clean it up?

If you were a company without me like an cole compass in a moral compass, because you know it's gonna hit your bottom line. So screw it, let's just leave it. You know, I can't help but feel like you set me up by asking me that question and expecting the short answer, because I've never given a short answer. Well, that is a short answer. UM two thousand and six congressional testimony said it would cost seventy two billion dollars to clean up only the hard rock minds, like at

the hard rock cafes. Right, that's seventy two billion dollars. Well, the Bureau of Land Management, which we said is UM responsible for finding these minds and for reclaiming them. Basically, UM, they divide minds that they have to deal with in the three categories. There's hard rock, which is like gold, silver minerals, iron maybe yeah, I don't think they deal with iron um. And then there's coal mines and then

uranium mines. Got it. Well, I saw on the East coast they had a map of where a lot of these abandoned minds are, and there's a lot of them on the East coast, and there were I think a lot of the coal mines. Oh yeah. Like there's Centraliy of Pennsylvania, which we talked about before, is an abandoned town with a coal steam burning underneath. Oh yeah, that's right. Creepy um. So they abandoned the mines. Over time, land

records and lease records were lost. Basically take a reverse foreclosure. Yeah, pretty much. And so in the end like no one's on the hook. No one knows many times who these minds originally like, who was responsible for this to begin with? And even if they do know, the minors gonna be like the do you have documentation that's other on that mine?

And the government goes no, and the mine owners says, see you, or the other little loophole you wrote this right, yeah, that you pointed out, which was if you have gone through bankruptcy, then you can't be held liable. That is

no longer true. Oh is that not true? Yeah? Yeah, I was happy to find in that there's there's You now have to post a bond basically as a mining company from what I understand from research I did very recently, that you have to post a bond kind of like a fidelity bond that as money you pay in upfront that you get back if your mining operation successfully reclaims the land. If you don't reclaim it, if reclamation isn't like the end of your um mind or you go bankrupt,

that money is still there to pay for reclamation. So you're gonna correct the article. I think I should. I think you should. People need to know that. UM. Here's a little thing too, called the Clean Water Act, which UM, obviously you're going to be violating that if you're letting your toxins from your mind leak out into the groundwater,

big penalties. But um, as you pointed out that in two thousand and six, that was legislation to exempt people from prosecution who were actually trying to clean up their minds, Like I want to go clean up my mind, and we're gonna exempt you, Uh, as long as you weren't the people who started the mind to begin with. From I guess exempt from the Clean Water Act? Yes, from polluting because with tailings a lot of in a lot of cases, UM, just removing them is going to some's

gonna slip into the watershed. And if it's from say a uranium, mind, well that's it's radioactive, and then your water is radioactive and you're in you have to pay a huge fine. Is it better to leave it? I wonder it's better to not get any into the water shed? Well, but can you clean it up without doing that? Yes, I feel like what the government has been doing. The Beer of Land Management does, and they have a division

called the Abandoned mine Lands UM. They basically just build a structure around it, kind of like what they did with Chernobyl, but on a much smaller scale, where it's basically like this is gonna stay here for a little while, we'll just put this around it until it's not radioactive anylong. Okay, that's the pressure I have what they're doing, at least with radioactive stuff. Well, that legislation did not pass though, No, it didn't, which seems like it would discourage people from

trying to clean these things up, right. Yeah, but I also read testimony from UM this group called Earthworks, and they were lobbying against that loophole, saying it was overly broad Really that basically like if you just picked up a little bit of litter whatever, you were automatically exempt from the Clean Water Act, so it could be used to nefarious ends by a moral people. Well, you mentioned

the Abandoned mind Lands program under the Bureau of Land Management. UM, they get funding roughly in the neighborhood of twelve to fifteen million dollars a year, and you know we said earlier it takes seventy billion to clean up I think just a hard rock site. So they're doing the best they can. UM. Over an eight year period they cleaned up more than three thousand minds, which is awesome, But when you've got potentially five dred thousand out there, it's

a little scared to think about. So to to remediate a mind, you have to address the physical stuff and the environmental stuff. You have to take care of the tailings piles, you have to UM prevent any more acid groundwater from being produced. You have to disassemble and carry off any old machinery, any old buildings, maybe UM, and you have to cover up entrances. But covering up a mind shaft a glory hole as it's called in the industry UM is not quite as cut and dry as

you think. You just put a huge, heavy metal slab over it. The problem is is when you build a mind, in a lot of cases, you've disturbed bat population. When you UM abandon the mine, you basically are leaving this bat population with a an awesome little place to live, a playground. If you will exactly UM now bats are really really essential to our comfort and happiness, and that the average bat can kill something like six mosquitoes an hour when it really wants to if it's frisky. So

we want to keep bats around. They're already being decimated by a white nose fungus. Right, So people who are reclaiming abandoned mind have figured out that there's ways that you can keep humans out but let bats in and out. And so they put on like bat couple of vertical shafts, which is basically just like a little roof that has

slats to let the bats fly in and out. Yeah, that makes sense, And a bat gate is virtually the same thing, except it goes into like an addit bat gate that couple of I think it's a great idea because then like, you're not gonna find a kid down in there. No, you're not disturbing the population of the bat unless the kid is the size of a bat. And even still, why is he not like bat boy?

That's his problem? Well, bat Boy's fine. Yeah. Um, So the E p A UH started something called the super fund UM, which basically means mining companies now pay into this UH huge bank account to cover costs of future cleanups. But that's not enough to meet the needs, so taxpayers end up paying for the discrepancies. Not on mind my

tax money going towards that. So apparently nowadays since um, part of the Abandoned Mind Reclamation Fund UM is that if you're a mining company, you're putting in your paying at tax basically for every uh thirty one for every ton of surface coal that you mine and every ton of underground coal, you're paying um thirty one point five cents for surface coal and thirteen point five cents a ton for underground mind stuff, and all that goes into

the super fun to reclaim it. That's not bad. Well this this October, I think it's going to go down to twelve cents and twenty eight cents attacks. Yeah. Um. Things times are tough all over for everybody. Yeah, they are. UM. In nineteen eight six, Josh, as you point out, the Department of Interior created an award for mining excellence. It's like Yard of the Month for abandoned mond and reclamaining.

I think it's called the Mining Award and um all joking aside, it's very cool that they do this because um, a lot of you know, people are more responsible these days with their mining operations. They're not all bad. Mining is a vital thing. We're not trying to poop poo that. And then we did like with the mountaintop removal. Coal

mining came down pretty hard. But um, a lot of miners these days are pretty responsible and they are reclaiming this land and uh going back in and planning vegetation and trying to preserve old buildings and make those into live work space condos exactly what they're doing. Yeah, so that's great. Yeah, keep it up is what I say. I agree, and be careful out there a TV people in rock Cory swimmers. Yeah there. Um, if you see a mind, stay away. I believe that's the name of

the program. Really yeah, stay away. Yeah. It's like you know those cartoony posters with exclamation points and stuff like that. Um P S A S that's what they're called. Uh. I think if you do see a mind, go on the internet and look up reporting abandoned minds and you will find a way to do it, and that will be helpful. You'll save some money, save some taxpayer money if you report a mind yourself, agreed. Uh. If you want to know more about abandoned minds and reclamation and

all that stuff. You can type it into the search bar at how stuff works dot com. And I said, search bars means it's a time for That's right, Josh. This closes out the trilogy. I'll go and start out with Donna Fessler. My husband always wants to call my beef vegetable soup as stew, but it is broth based. I don't argue um, and basically she's asking about this. My recommendation, Donna is to go check out the podcast Judge John Hodgment because he has a full podcast on

I Believe Chili Chili's Chowders, stews and soups and the differences. Right, the first one, it was pretty early on. Judge John will break it all down for you. Nice plug, Chuck, Thank you. Ryan Taylor. Question, what time is it a hammertime? Be time to make the donuts or see bure o'clock time to make the donuts beer o'clock? We've going from Jeremy Glover. Did either of you grew up watching Andy Griffiths Show? I think he means the Andy Griffiths Show. Yeah,

I certainly did. I did too, and reruns. Is there anybody yes, same here. Is there anybody who is alive today? They didn't grow up watching yet? Yeah, well he's asking that because any Griffith did today? Oh really? Yeah, I didn't know he's still alive he was till today. Wow, that's that's well. He had quite a run. Yeah, he was eighty six years old. Good full life, as as Sheriff Andy Taylor Matlock And uh was that it? Those there's two big characters. Didn't you have a third? Those

were the two big ones? Does any like the landlord on threes company for a little while? No, I don't think so. Tanya Chobez, it is my anniversary. Can you do a quick shout out to my very patient husband, Abe Franklin. It would be a fun surprise, all right, Tania, I think it's Tania. Happy anniversary to you and Abe. Happy anniversary Tanya and Abe. Oh here's a good one. Brandon Nichols, Who would you most like to punch in the face? That's sort of like the fight club question?

Who would you fight? Would I most like to punch in the face? Would it be a good one? I think myself many times. Yeah, that's very much like fight club. Actually I got someone else, but I can't say. I think you know who it is. Oh yeah, I'd like to punch him in the face. Yeah you got anyone. I'm not saying anything. I guess anything. So that was kind of a cop out. Uh. Vitality says, would you rather fight one hundred duck size horses or one horsed

sized duck? I love these questions one horse sized duck. I don't go for the one horse sized duck because you get like a sharpened stick in its neck. It's over and done with. It's kind of like that um garage full of guided missiles up in space. Yeah, you take one out, you take ten out. If you've got like a hundred duck sized horses coming at you, they're going to get the best of you. Yeah. Plus, that's just creepy, man. Can you imagine a hundred like one

ft tall horses coming after you? I find the horse sized duck creepier. I don't. I don't mind that. That's some good eating too. Oh yeah, uh Micah Mia Mia Mea. Paul Cannell says. However, Maya Maya says, how is Atlanta really quality of life? Would you recommend it? I would? I love Atlanta I'm from here, and I moved back here for a reason. Josh, do you like Atlanta? Sure, Atlanta's great. Atlanta is great, Robert Casey, Is Jerry as smoking hot as we think she is? And more? My friend,

That's all I'm gonna say about that. Have you ever gotten a threatening uh listener mail from Nathaniel Yeager? No? Nothing threatening? Really like physically threatening? Um? Uh? No? Menacing? How about that? I've gotten a couple of little crazy ones, but never menacing. Care to share? No, okay, I want to set anybody off. How about one more? Okay, let's see. Um. Why is cilantro so divisive? From Heidi Wells? Good question,

Heidi Wells, that is a good one. Cilantro, the herb also known as coriander or um Chinese salary I believe in some quarters or clan. Yeah, um, that's pretty good, thank you. H is divisive because it strikes different people's tongues differently. It's really big time right some people, cilantro is a glorious herb, including and me. I love solant

me too. To other people, it tastes very much like soap. Yeah, my friend says that, and there is actually if you're interested a video on web md that addresses this question, and if you watch very closely, the filmmaker, who is a friend of mine who I know through Humi, put in a moment where he takes a thing of Paul malive and puts it over a taco and it happens just for a second, but it's pretty brilliant. Want to it was just funny. Look at Yeah, it's like, did

you just put soap on a taco? Yeah? There you go. Well, here's what I have to say. I feel sorry for people who have that taste reaction too, because cilantro to me is one of the great great things in UH. On food and some drinks. Yes, I put a little cilantro Margarita's from time to time, so good. It's really nice. And a couple of slices of Hall of Peno. Yeah all right, I'm hungry, thirsty. I am too, man, Let's

go with some guacamole. Uh. If you have questions for Chuck and I, you can tweet to us at s y ESK podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com Slice stuff you should know where you can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff works dot com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.