Yesterday President Obama unveiled further budget cuts for the coming fiscal year which included eliminating nearly $17 billion to offset the governments continued spending of billions in bailouts, health care and the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"We can no longer afford to spend as if deficits do not matter and waste is not our problem," said President Obama. "We can no longer afford to leave the hard choices for the next budget, the next administration - or the next generation."
President Obama's promised "line by line" cleaning of the federal budget will start Oct. 1st and will represent proposed cuts that will amount to about 1.4 percent of the $1.2 trillion deficit that is intended for the 2010 fiscal year.
Part of the purposed budget cut backs will include ending a program to clean up abandoned mines at a cost savings of $142 million.
For the last 160 years mines have been created and abandoned throughout the State of California since the Gold Rush of 1849. As a result the state contains tens of thousands of active and abandoned mines.
Mine sites can possess serious physical safety hazards such as open shafts or tunnels and many of the mines have the potential to contaminate surface water, ground water and the air with acid-rock drainage which contains mercury, arsenic, cyanide, asbestos, lead, chromium as well as a host of other contaminates.
One of the many hazards that Property I.D.'s natural hazard disclosure reports include is a detailed section that covers abandoned and active mines.
With the purposed budget cuts that President Obama has planned for the 2010 fiscal year which includes the dismissal of the project that cleans abandoned mines, it is now more imperative than ever that abandoned and active mines should be covered in a hazard disclosure report, as mines do pose a serious threat to the safety of humans, especially children, as well as animals.