About two dozen volunteers on Saturday hammered metal fence posts into the rocky ground surrounding a 20-foot-deep abandoned mine, then hung a sign up that warned in orange and black: ‘‘Stay Out, Stay Alive.”

Since 1992, that has been the slogan of the Nevada Division of Mineral’s Abandoned Mine Lands Program, which was created to address the dangerous remnants of the state’s prospecting past.

According to state estimates, Nevada is home to about 200,000 abandoned mine openings. More than 11,500 sites have been inventoried as hazardous and some 9,200 of them have been fenced or filled in to date.

‘‘I suspect when all is said and done we’ll find 2,000 in Clark County alone,” said Bill Durbin, the division’s chief of Southern Nevada operations.

Four old shafts were fenced near Searchlight on Saturday as part of 17-year-old Joshua O’Barr’s Eagle Scout project.

The senior at Silverado High School said he chose the project because ‘‘mines are really interesting, and it’s good to keep people safe.”

Most of the old shafts are concentrated around what were the major mining districts in the county, namely Goodsprings, Nelson and Searchlight.

‘‘We have inventoried 1,638 individual shafts, and all of them are within about an hour of Las Vegas,” Durbin said.

The first step in securing a dangerous opening involves a trip to the local county courthouse, where ownership of an old shaft often can be traced.

If the mine has an owner, the state will send that person a letter with instructions on how to secure the site and a list of contractors willing to do the work.

If no owner can be found, the mine is declared an ‘‘orphan” and added to the list of sites that need to be secured by Durbin and company.

Sometimes the best way to secure an old shaft is to fill it with rocks and dirt. First, though, the site must be examined for historical relics or evidence that it is being used by bats or other wildlife, Durbin said.

‘‘You don’t want to bury a bat colony when there are other ways of making (a mine opening) people-unfriendly but bat-friendly.”

His program relies on volunteers for about 20 percent of the work it does. The state’s accident statistics suggest the program’s efforts are paying off.

‘‘The incident rate has actually gone down over the years, even though Nevada has grown,” Durbin said.

Since 1971, the division has logged 14 deaths and 15 significant injuries as a result of falls and other incidents at abandoned mine sites.

In March 1975, two boys fell to their deaths when they rode their motorcycles over a mine shaft near Searchlight. In October 1999, an 11-year-old girl wandered away from her family during an off-road race near Beatty and was killed in a fall down a 130-foot mine shaft.

‘‘You think it would be mostly teenagers, but the average age of our abandoned mine victims is 36,” Durbin said.

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