Abandoned coal mine shafts rarely cause problems
By Susan Nienow STAFF WRITER

Grove Shaft in Mid-Lothian Mines Park is just one of the many deserted mines left behind from Chesterfield's coal mining days.

No one really knows where all of the coal mine shafts are in Chesterfield, but the Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy (DMME) has spent $379,796 on reclamation of abandoned coal mine land (AML) in the county.

"DMME believes it has abated the extreme danger [of] priority one AML features in Chesterfield County. Our projects there over the past 12 years have been emergency projects," said Minerals Specialist Richard Davis.

The projects involved fixing or filling in soil that has collapsed, exposing the opening of a coal shaft.

County property owners still sometimes call the DMME when they discover an unexplained hole on their land. But mining isn't the only cause of cave-ins or depressions in the soil. Rotting tree trunks, old wells or even basements of buildings that have burned or rotted can create problems.

However, when a homeowner calls DMME about a hole or depression, it is taken very seriously though "nine times out of 10, it's something else," observed DMME geologist Jerry Wilkes. The department uses an auger to check out the site and has found such things as "a shoestring, the heel of a boot [and] a bread bag," said Wilkes.

"We have been proactive on several mine sites," he continued. "At Stonehenge, we used a steel mesh cap on several mines, so that they could pump water out to water the golf course. We turned it from a problem to an asset."

About 10 years ago, a mine was capped in Salisbury. Three shafts were capped where Wal-Mart was eventually built on Midlothian Turnpike.

Dick McElfish from the county's department of environmental engineering recalls a shaft being capped off before construction began on the Sycamore Village subdivision in 1993 or 1994. "It was fairly deep and could have been an old well." he said.