As an intern at Lowham and Walsh, James St. Clair, a graduate
student in the geology and geophysics department at the University
of Wyoming, had the chance to visit and conduct research on
abandoned land mines throughout the state of Wyoming.
James was responsible for analyzing and monitoring the safety
of abandoned mines in Wyoming. This type of research is crucial to the state of
Wyoming for several reasons.
“We want to know if these mines could possibly present some hazards
in the future,” James says. “Whether those problems are related to groundwater,
or future subsidence, or in some cases, they can actually open up at the
surface. That’s dangerous, because people can get in there and it could
collapse.”
James performed different tests at these sites to determine
their safety and what was happening beneath the surface.
“I took electrical resistivity equipment up there and I made
images of the underground mines trying to assess the hazards that they might
present,” he says.
Because of the large number of abandoned mines in Wyoming,
entities in the state have set up ways to study these mines.
“The Abandoned Land Mine Division of the Wyoming Department
of Environmental Quality has inventoried a substantial number of
these land mines and prioritized them according to what’s there and how
important it is that they get reclaimed,” James says. “My job was to go and visit
several of these sites,” he says. “They had already been visited 10 years
ago, so we wanted to see how they've changed since then.”
Most of the sites James visited were located in northeastern
Wyoming. The location was James’ favorite part of his internship.
“I really liked getting to spend some time in Northeastern
Wyoming,” he says. “It’s a really nice area.”
By Robin E. Rasmussen
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