Kids being kids?
Be careful out there, kids and adults.
Condolences and prayers to the family and friends of the 13-year-old and the injured 10-year-old.
“Chloride”???
WHERE WERE THE SUPERVISING PARENTS?!
Poor kids.
Prayers up for all involved, especially the 10-year old.....
Something doesn’t make sense with this story. They were 100 feet down a vertical mine shaft. If one were to fall into a hole, wouldn’t the other one stop, if they were off the ATV? None of the articles have said the ATV was in the mine. Too much is missing from this story.
At one time there were open, abandoned shafts all over Arizona (as well as other states). I recall that in the 1970's there was an effort to cap them after several instances like this. When I was growing up in Superior, AZ, open shafts, along with rattlesnakes, blasting caps, cholla, and poisonous insects, were all hazards we were lectured about. It never kept us from playing in the desert -- we were lucky.
What a terrible tragedy.
Horrible. It’s a horrible Wile E. Coyote freak accident.
I almost wish I’d never heard it. Good God help those people now.
Prayers going up.
To the parents: Shame on you! 13 and 10. Unsupervised. How terrible you must feel right now.
It’s amazing that they found them at all in a mine shaft.
PHOENIX, Ariz. (AP) -- A 13-year-old girl who fell into a brush-covered mine shaft while riding an all-terrain vehicle was found dead at the bottom Sunday, and her 10-year old sister was rescued with serious injuries, authorities said.
The girls, 13-year-old Rikki Howard and 10-year-old Casie Hicks, were out for a holiday weekend ride around 7 p.m. Saturday when their father, who was riding ahead of them on a dirt bike, noticed the girls were missing.
“They were driving along and they went into the mine. It was a total accident,” Mohave County Sheriff’s Department spokeswoman Sandy Edwards said.
Sheriff’s personnel tracked the ATV to the 125-foot mine shaft at 6:20 a.m. Sunday, and one of the girls responded when her father called out, officials said. Crews later rappelled into the mine and found the girls and the vehicle at the bottom.
The mine, believed to be inactive, is located in Chloride, about 17 miles north of Kingman. It was next to a dirt road, concealed by brush and had no signs or barriers.
The 10-year-old girl was transported to University Medical Center in Las Vegas, Edwards said. She was in critical condition Sunday afternoon, a hospital spokesman said. The family declined to comment through the hospital.
Seth Johnson, a neighbor of the girls and their family’s landlord, said the two were half-sisters. Their family was at the Las Vegas hospital, he said.
“It’s an awful shock,” Johnson said. “Their parents are very distraught.”
Cathy Kelso, a bus driver, said she has been driving the two girls to school for a year and a half. “They’re little sweetheart girls,” she said. “I just keep hoping it’s not true, but it’s horrible.”
Laurie Swartzbaugh, deputy director of the Arizona State Mine Inspector’s office, said that the mine had not been used for some time, and that the office was investigating. She said abandoned mines are common in the state, and that since Jan. 1, the office has secured 108 of them.
“There’s a significant amount of abandoned mines out there that are hazardous to the public’s health,” she said. “Most of those mines are from old prospectors who would go in and they would mine and they’d just pick up leave.”
It was not immediately clear who owned the mine. Swartzbaugh said many abandoned mines date back to the early 1900s and that sometimes it’s not possible to track down who owns them.