Henry Mora’s gold mine shut down
Thursday, June 22nd, 2006
Henry Mora, 63, began digging two weeks ago after his gold detector picked up a signal near his front patio.
“I figured, well, maybe there’s something down there — you would logically conclude, right? So I started digging,” the semiretired musician said Wednesday.
Mora said he only intended to go down 3 or 4 feet, but he started finding gold dust in the dirt and the detector kept hinting that he was getting closer. He ended up digging a 60-foot-deep hole, authorities said.
“It was still beeping, and that just gave me the idea to keep digging,” he said. “I think it’s a normal human reaction, especially when you think there might be gold down there.”
“We told him, ‘You’re done,’” Montclair fire Capt. Rich Baldwin said. “It’s amazing no one got killed.”
Authorities fenced off Mora’s property and ordered him to hire an engineer to safely pack the dirt back into the ground.
Wanting to get into treasure hunting, he bought the metal detector a White’s TM 808 off the Internet for about $600. The machine is geared to find items larger than a coffee can and is specifically designed for gold, Mora said. The company Web site boasts of its ability to track down deeply buried finds: “treasure chests, coin caches, hoards of gold.”
Realizing he’d need some help, he enlisted the help of two workers from the Pomona Day Labor Center.
Day after day, one worker would hack away at the bottom of the hole while another used a bucket and pulley to empty out the loose dirt. Mora kept watch.
As the anticipation built, one of the men told Mora that he and his father had done this before in Mexico. Once the hole reached about 25 feet, Mora’s ladder wouldn’t extend any deeper. The men dug sideways a bit, then down again, making a shelf for the first ladder, and room for another to lead them deeper still.
Just recently, he saw a story on the Internet about a robot tracking down an underwater cache of gold coins and jewelry in South America.
“When you see stuff like that, you go, `Hey, I may have something. Maybe I’ve got a few gold bars,’ ” Mora said. “I took a chance.”
