Mining Incidents
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in West Virginia

West Virginia has 13,624 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1899–2001, including 4,153 mine openings (shafts, adits and air shafts), across 55 counties. OSMRE's abandoned mine land inventory lists 9,663 problems in the state, 5,461 of them not yet reclaimed. MSHA's register carries 6,688 West Virginia mines with status Abandoned or Abandoned and Sealed.

Every mine and prospect feature the USGS digitized from historical topographic maps of West Virginia, every OSMRE abandoned mine land problem, and every MSHA-registered mine with status Abandoned, by county. Each county page lists the named features and links every MSHA mine to its own record.

Mapped mine features (USGS)
13,624
Mine openings
4,153
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
5,461
MSHA mines marked abandoned
6,688
55 counties with mapped features344 features carry a name26 prospect pitsmaps published 1899–2001 9,663 OSMRE problems, 4,202 reclaimed5,480 problem areas (PADs), 3,384 with work left 2,387 MSHA mines abandoned and sealed
By countyranked by mapped USGS features
County USGS features Openings OSMRE problems MSHA abandoned
McDowell County
1,279 542 590 837
Kanawha County
1,138 362 581 349
Fayette County
1,082 175 507 363
Preston County
877 246 847 223
Monongalia County
875 522 719 173
Raleigh County
812 237 381 396
Logan County
796 382 606 608
Harrison County
670 211 1,294 239
Wyoming County
623 195 283 458
Boone County
586 182 289 491
Mingo County
474 192 371 520
Nicholas County
455 56 116 492
Greenbrier County
441 34 96 222
Lewis County
349 6 196 72
Barbour County
334 124 390 165
Webster County
271 84 90 230
Mercer County
261 23 109 45
Randolph County
252 28 280 178
Upshur County
206 45 287 115
Marion County
180 85 451 88
Taylor County
154 60 151 43
Mason County
146 98 67 15
Mineral County
140 10 56 23
Clay County
115 7 57 106
Grant County
105 11 40 34
Brooke County
93 10 165 22
Tucker County
82 13 134 11
Wayne County
82 52 71 36
Lincoln County
78 30 43 19
Gilmer County
76 18 95 20
Braxton County
75 33 54 34
Putnam County
71 48 43 6
Cabell County
64 0 2 2
Hancock County
52 5 44 5
Ohio County
48 9 72 12
Berkeley County
41 0 0 2
Pocahontas County
40 1 27 6
Marshall County
34 9 36 2
Jefferson County
32 1 0 2
Jackson County
20 0 2 0
Pleasants County
17 3 3 3
Wood County
13 0 3 3
Doddridge County
12 3 2 1
Summers County
11 0 4 6
Morgan County
11 0 0 0
Wetzel County
10 0 3 6
Tyler County
9 0 1 0
Pendleton County
8 1 4 0
Roane County
5 0 0 2
Ritchie County
5 0 0 1
Hampshire County
4 0 0 1
Hardy County
4 0 0 0
Wirt County
3 0 0 1
Monroe County
3 0 0 0
Calhoun County
0 0 1 0
What the features are
  1. Mine openings
    shafts, adits, air shafts, portals and vertical openings: the ways into underground workings
    5,889 25.3%
  2. Prospect pits and trenches
    shallow exploration diggings that never became a mine
    26 0.1%
  3. Mines and surface workings
    labelled mines, open pits, strip mines, placer and hydraulic workings
    8,329 35.8%
  4. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    410 1.8%
  5. Dumps, tailings, spoil and gob
    what mining left above ground
    1,516 6.5%
  6. Mills, tipples and facilities
    processing plants and hazardous structures
    858 3.7%
  7. Other reclamation problems
    highwalls, subsidence, polluted or clogged water, fires, slides and gases in OSMRE's inventory
    6,250 26.8%
  8. Other
    symbols outside the classes above
    9 0.0%
By source vocabularythe publishers' own terms
Feature type Features
Strip Mine 6,542
Adit 3,976
Open Pit Mine or Quarry 1,230
P2 Dangerous Highwalls 1,059
P2 Portals 1,042
P2 Dangerous Impoundments 821
P1 Subsidence 748
P3 High Wall 686
P2 Dangerous Piles & Embankments 568
P2 Hazardous Equip & Facilities 499
Disturbed Surface 452
P1 Portals 398
P3 Water Problems 381
P1 Dangerous Slides 315
P3 Gobs 302
Tipple 290
P2 Clogged Streams 287
Mine Dump 261
P2 Dangerous Slides 240
P1 Dangerous Impoundments 208
P1 Surface Burning 174
P2 Polluted Water: Agricultural & Industrial 162
P2 Subsidence 157
Gravel/Borrow Pit - Undifferentiated 154
P1 Vertical Openings 150
P2 Polluted Water: Human Consumption 147
P2 Vertical Openings 146
P1 Dangerous Piles & Embankments 119
Air Shaft 116
P3 Spoil Area 111
Quarry 109
P3 Mine Opening 98
P1 Clogged Streams 92
Tailings - Pond 82
P3 Other 79
P3 Equipment Facility 75
P1 Hazardous Equip & Facilities 69
P2 Hazardous Water Bodies 66
P2 Surface Burning 62
Mine Shaft 61
How to read these numbers

A USGS feature is a symbol on a historical topographic map, there when the map was surveyed; it may since have been sealed, reclaimed, built over or reopened, and the map does not say which. An OSMRE row is a problem the abandoned mine land program tracks, not a mine, and several problems make one problem area (PAD), which is the unit a state program counts and reports; the public extract can also hold more problem areas than a state's live inventory, because areas since merged or ruled ineligible stay in the published file, so a state figure that differs from this one is not a contradiction. An MSHA mine is a registered operation whose operator reported abandonment, a record that starts in the 1970s; that is a regulatory status rather than a physical one, and it also holds operations merely between jobs, portable crushers above all, which is why over a thousand mines carrying it have been inspected in the last two years. The three overlap and are never added together. Counties are assigned from each feature's coordinates against the Census 2023 county boundaries. The full method and every source are on the national page.

Sources
  1. USGS, Consolidated Prospect- and Mine-Related Features from 7.5- and 15-Minute Topographic Quadrangle Maps of the United States (USMIN)
    597,612 point and area features digitized from about 106,350 historical topographic maps published 1886–2006; public domain (CC0). A feature is a map symbol, not a field-verified site, and the map does not say whether it was still worked.
  2. USGS Fact Sheet 2025–3003, The Abandoned Mine Inventory of the United States
    States that as of 2025 there is no comprehensive national inventory of abandoned mine features, and that the detailed national database now being built will not be published.
  3. OSMRE, Abandoned Mine Land Inventory System (e-AMLIS), public Problems layer
    One row per abandoned mine land problem in a problem area, with its type, funding program and reclamation status; mostly coal mined before the 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act. Coordinates are the problem area's.
  4. MSHA, Mines dataset (Mine Data Retrieval System)
    Every mine registered with MSHA since the 1970s; a mine reads Abandoned or Abandoned and Sealed when its operator reported that status. Refreshed weekly.
  5. US Census Bureau, 2023 cartographic county boundaries (1:500,000)
    Each feature's county is assigned by its coordinates against these boundaries, not copied from the source file.
  6. GAO-20-238, Abandoned Hardrock Mines (March 2020)
    Federal agencies had identified at least 140,000 abandoned hardrock mine features on federal land and estimated more than 390,000 more not yet captured in their databases.
  7. Abandoned Hardrock Mine Reclamation (AHMR) Program, US Department of the Interior
    The program the USGS inventory is compiled for. Its appropriations and the 674,000 field-confirmed feature count on this page were provided by the program manager, Office of Environmental Policy and Compliance, and are cited with permission (2026-09-08).
  8. IMCC-NAAMLP Hardrock AML Report
    Page 48 carries the two figures this page leans on: USGS estimates 633,181 of the 725,690 mine features it recorded from historic topographic maps, 87 percent, are hardrock; and state and federal agencies have submitted more than 724,000 AML features to the national database being built, already more than the historic maps hold. Year-by-year AHMR funding is on page 35.