By Chris McCrory | Cronkite News
WICKENBURG – Jerry Tyra started working underground in 1960, drilling ore samples to help mine companies figure out whether to develop a mine site.
Since 2007, the 75-year-old has been doing a different kind of exploration: scouring the state for the thousands of abandoned mines some of his former employers may have left scattered throughout the Arizona desert. When he finds one, Tyra uses wire and metal posts to fence it off, placing warning signs on the wire.
“I get my map programs out, and I just pick a township,” he said, standing near the edge of a 900-foot-deep mine shaft east of Wickenburg. “I take every little trail they’ve got. If I don’t find anything, I’ll go to the next one.”
In a hole, part one:
Arizona officials lack funds to find, secure at least 100,000 abandoned mines
Tyra is one of only two abandoned-mine supervisors in Arizona. The pair face an uphill battle trying to identify the estimated 100,000 abandoned mines in the state and render them safe, or at least safer.
The Arizona State Mine Inspector’s Office has repeatedly asked for funds to hire more inspectors and permanently close more mines, but the state’s abandoned-mine program hasn’t seen a significant budget increase in more than a decade. State officials fear it’s just a matter of time before somebody else gets injured or dies at one of the thousands of abandoned hard rock mines the state hasn’t mapped and secured.
“There’s two of us who are doing it,” Tyra said. “That’s a lot of territory to cover.”
Arizona has about 14,500 square miles of land, and abandoned-mine supervisors have the legal authority to search all of it, from federally managed public land to private property.
Tyra and fellow supervisor Tom White close between 400 and 500 abandoned mines every year.
“He goes that way. I go this way,” Tyra said, smoking a cigarette as he leaned against the creaking, rusted metal of an old mining rig designed to pull minecarts up from a silver mine. “So we’re all by ourselves. It ain’t safe.”
A lack of funding shuttered the Arizona State Mine Inspector’s abandoned-mine program in the 1990s. Since the program was restarted in 2007, when the office hired Tyra and White, the two have found roughly 5,600 mines.
But over the 11 years they’ve been searching – often in opposite ends of the state – they have put only a small dent in the problem.
