Abandoned shafts study (Charters Towers): a spatial solution

The cessation of many mine operations in the Charters Towers goldfield has left a significant number of long forgotten, abandoned mine shafts. The presence of these abandoned mine structures, many of which were backfilled a long time ago has in recent times received increasing government and public concerns because of the potential risk to humans and property. Remediation can be an expensive exercise especially when difficulties with site discovery are considered. Much of the abandoned mine shaft discovery has been focused on the information maintained in the shaft repair inventory, developed in 1997 by NR&M. The issues related to accuracy and validation of site data, have been poorly addressed from a historic perspective with little effort made to quantify the affect of spatially correcting the dataset using a Geographic Information System (GIS)