The state Department of Environmental Protection is urging people to stay out of abandoned mines, mine lands and quarries, where 249 individuals have died in the United States since 2000, 31 of them in Pennsylvania.

That's the message in a public information program, "Stay Out -- Stay Alive," launched this week by DEP, in partnership with the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration, other mining states and mining companies.

The DEP is spending $109,000 to air 30-second radio and television messages statewide. The department will also conduct informational programs at high schools and junior high schools and distribute information through the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources and the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission.

"Mines are not safe places for swimming, exploring or off-road riding," DEP Secretary Kathleen McGinty said at an abandoned mine site just off the popular Panhandle Trail in Smith Township, Washington County. "When you venture into these sites, you put your life and the lives of emergency personnel who conduct the search and rescue operations at risk."

Already this year one person has died and another was seriously injured in separate accidents on abandoned mine lands in Schuylkill County. The injured person fell 500 feet down a mine shaft.

The strip mine visited by Ms. McGinty is classified as a Priority I site, among the most dangerous in the state, because its sheer "highwalls" -- steep cliffs where the coal stripping operation ended -- are just 40 feet from the edge of the hiking and bicycling trail.

She said restoration of the site is in the design stage, with work scheduled to be finished in the next two years using federal money from the Abandoned Mine Lands Fund . The fund, reauthorized in December 2006, collects a royalty on each ton of mined coal and allocates the money to states for reclamation of the most dangerous Priority I and II abandoned mines.

Pennsylvania has the largest abandoned mine lands problem in the nation, with 250,000 acres of mining-damaged land. In Allegheny County, there are 263 identified abandoned mine sites affecting 4,514 acres.

At least 44 of the state's 67 counties have such sites, and approximately 1 million people live within one mile of a dangerous abandoned mine.