Frostburg — FROSTBURG — The Maryland Bureau of Mines is still cleaning up mines in Allegany and Garrett counties that operators walked away from 33 or more years ago.

“And we will be doing that into the foreseeable future,” said Mike Garner, who heads up that effort for the state agency housed in Frostburg. “It’s an ongoing process.”

Tucked up hollows and into hillsides and on ridges in Mountain Maryland are a variety of nasty and potentially nasty remnants of the search for coal.

Until 1977, when federal law made it illegal, coal operators could walk away from failing mines. There were no questions asked. There were no obligations on the shoulders of the diggers.

“We still find old earth-moving equipment, conveyors, buildings, all kinds of items associated with coal mining in the 1970s that were just left there,” Garner said.

Also out there in Maryland’s relatively small slice of the Appalachian Mountains are portals, the openings to the old abandoned deep mines.

“We had a four-year survey done starting in 2000,” Garner said. “Interns with GPS units searched the area and found 798 old portals.”

The good news, according to Garner, is that all but 66 have collapsed, meaning they have closed themselves and prohibited entry.

Of the remaining open portals, some are more dangerous than others because they are vertical, meaning they are holes in the ground into which a fall could be taken.

Some horizontal portals, such as one at a deep mine a couple of miles from Bloomington, are so large that all-terrain vehicles are being driven into them.

“That’s a dangerous situation,” Garner said.

Another separate survey identified the old mines in which bats had taken up residence. When those openings are closed to human entry, a bat gate is put in place so that just enough room is available for the bats to fly in and out.

One of Garner’s annual jobs is to coordinate the effort to bring approximately $3 million to his agency to take care of these problems.

“The money comes through the federal Office of Surface Mining, that gets the money by taxing coal operators,” Garner said. Mining companies pay 31.5 cents per ton for surface coal that is mined and 13.5 cents per ton for coal that comes from deep mines.

As part of the effort to obtain the funds, a public hearing is scheduled so that people may comment about the upcoming projects. Such a meeting will take place Thursday at 7 p.m. in the mining agency office at 160 S. Water St., in Frostburg, better known as the Frostburg Armory.

“One of the things we always hope to accomplish at the hearing is to learn about abandoned mines of which we were not aware,” Garner said. To inquire about the hearing or to make the agency aware of abandoned mines, call 301-689-1459.

At least a half-million dollars of the federal money will be used to continue a program that doses limestone into acidic streams in Western Maryland, bringing water quality back to the level where it will support game fish such as trout. Garner said 10 dosers are in place on streams such as the North Branch of the Potomac in Garrett County near Kitzmiller and Mill Run in Allegany County near Barton.

A 1973 study showed that Western Maryland had 99,500 surface acres of abandoned mines and 450 miles of streams impaired by acid drainage.

Since 1982, the agency has worked on 225 projects, reclaiming 2,200 acres of land and restoring or improving 86 miles of stream.

“We have also extended public water supply by putting in water lines that connect to existing systems,” Garner said. The Lonaconing public water system, for example, has been extended by the mining agency three times, including to Warnick Road and Kyle Hill.

One closed portal or one new lime doser at a time, the Maryland Bureau of Mines is slowly improving ruined pieces of the mountain landscape left on the agency’s lap by operators who mined and walked before federal law made such behavior illegal. Those efforts won’t end any time soon.

“We have $30 million of reclamation projects on inventory just waiting to be dealt with,” Garner said.

Contact Michael A. Sawyers at msawyers@times-news.com.