Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, September 12, 1993                   TAG: 9309120022
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: D-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

IT'S BIG, UGLY AND NEEDS A GOOD FENCE

When the miners left, the hole stayed, a pit in Suck Mountain - one ridge over from the Peaks of Otter in Bedford County.

There were better places to dig feldspar, a common mineral used to make pottery and glass and some paper coatings.

"Most of your Bedford County feldspar is not high quality," said Allen Bishop.

Them would ordinarily be fighting words. Nobody talks about Bedford feldspar that way.

But Bishop lives in Bedford County, which entitles him to talk nasty about the minerals there.

When the miners quit Suck Mountain, they left behind the gaping hole from which they'd hauled away feldspar in dump trucks.

It's filled now with water 10 yards deep.

That's small as quarries go, but still an attractive nuisance to kids. There's a trailer home just a hundred feet or so away, and children living there. The place is a tragedy waiting to happen.

It is Allen Bishop's job for the Virginia Division of Mineral Mining to find places like the Suck Mountain feldspar pit and to recommend ways to make them safer.

He has a lot to do; there are an estimated 3,000 abandoned mines in Virginia - 57 of them have been filled in, fenced off, or seeded over to stop their soil erosion. Active mine operators pay into the orphaned land program. The interest from that fund is used to seal off abandoned mines.

Most of the mines that Bishop investigates are the subject of complaints from residents. He chases as many as 30 calls a year, qualifying Virginia as one of the most pockmarked states in the union.

From arsenic to zinc, metals and minerals have been muscled from the crust beneath Virginia for nearly 250 years now. When they finished, most of the miners didn't bother to fill in their handiwork. They just followed the grub stake somewhere else.

From iron mines in Pulaski County to the old gold mines in Fairfax, Allen Bishop has probably peered down into them, or paid someone to fence them off.

The Suck Mountain feldspar mine is only about two acres, and the wire mesh fencing is a small job. Twice Bishop has asked for bids on the job. Twice he's come up empty. What fencing contractor needs a small job on the side of a remote mountain?

Not one to surrender to the unappealing nature of the Suck Mountain feldspar job, Bishop is asking again now.

"We'll get a fence up there yet," he said Friday, his the confident air of a man who knows how to seal off a feldspar quarry. "It won't be for looks, it'll be for safety."

And it'll have two gates - a small one for rescue workers; a broad one for an ambulance.

Just in case the wrong person tries for a closer look at that hole of Virginia mineral history.