Risking the lives of coal miners: the miracle in the mine at Quecreek was a feel-good story, but one that also raises serious questions about the lack of accountability of coal-mining operations

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Sept 9, 2002 | by Sheila R. Cherry

On Sept. 11, 2001, fire and emergency-response crews in Somerset County, Pa., were called to the crash site of United Airlines Flight 93. Almost a year later, on July 25, 2002, the Sipesville Fire Department and others in this quiet region 55 miles southeast of Pittsburgh were called to the nearby Quecreek Mine in Lincoln Township, where nine men were trapped 300 feet underground. Now, as on Sept. 11, many questions have been left unanswered.

According to state officials the men were trapped in an air bubble after mining uphill and through the wall of the adjacent and long-abandoned Saxman Mine, which was filled with water. An underground torrent of water immediately rushed into the Quecreek tunnels. Even as they were being entombed by the deluge in the cold and watery air pocket that saved their lives the trapped miners had the presence of mind to warn coworkers who were following them. The second team barely had time to escape with their lives as the torrent rushed toward them through the mine cavity.

Even the cagiest of commentators described the Quecreek rescue on July 27 as a "miracle." Blaine Mayhugh, John Phillippi, Mark Poppernack, Randy Fogle, Dennis Hall, Ronald Hileman, Robert Pugh, Thomas Foy and John Unger had spent three days in the Black Wolf Coal Co. mine with a corned-beef sandwich and a few sodas between them. But even as the rescuers raced time to dig out their neighbors, others were asking "How did this happen? How could they not have known the other mine was so dangerously close?"

According to a source at the scene, "The maps are going to be one of the things.... You are going to be seeing a lot more about that. There's going to have to be some type of accountability where every coal operator, not just in Pennsylvania but throughout this entire country, has to actually be able to verify the accuracy [of their maps]. If you are saying that this mine is 300 feet away from where you are going to be mining coal, you damn well better be correct, and that means drilling core samples down or getting seismographic machines that use sound waves to tell you what you have--or satellite imaging."

But Black Wolf spokesman John Weir says, "Everybody can dig up all the negative stuff and all the stuff that they want to. No one can say what happened and how it happened, where the mine maps were. I've heard every one of them so far. I've heard them all. I've heard that one guy predicted this and one person said that. One guy said that at the end, when he worked in the Saxman Mine, they took out an area as big as a ball field; they robbed it. But, you know, if I don't see it with my own eyes, hear it with my own ears and the engineers can't prove it, I don't know that it is there."

If there was coal robbing, said Weir, "They sure as hell didn't report that to anybody--because they weren't supposed to be in there in the first place."

And it could happen anywhere. Abandoned mines snake all over Pennsylvania, many of them ancient, and it is rare to find one that is completely dry, a veteran miner tells INSIGHT. Without the pumps of an active mining operation continuously keeping water out of the underground veins as the bituminous coal is mined, many shafts now being worked might fill with water in hours.

Weir, who was pressed into service as Black Wolf's de facto spokesman (see sidebar, p. 29), puts the time for a mine to flu up with water closer to two or three years. Nevertheless, Saxman was last mined in the 1960s--the era when the

Quecreek maps were drafted--and Weir says, "There are people living up there that have had their wells in the old mines for years."

But, he added, those wells are way, way up past the 200-foot "bumper zone" the zone between the coal company's mining-permit boundary and--supposedly--where the old mine stopped. "Even the people who had their own wells were a quarter-of-a-mile away from where the bumper zone was," Weir asserts.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) says an investigation has begun and could last three to six months. The agency also is starting a national project to identify old mines, review available maps and introduce technological innovations and regulations and practices to prevent such incidents in the future.

"Actually the people near Quecreek were using [the water table around the] Saxman Mine as a reservoir. So everybody there knew the damn thing was filled with water!" a local miner says. According to this source, who comes from a coal-mining family, many in the community had private wells, knew where the water table was and had maps of the old Saxman Mine. "They even told the company officials at Black Wolf that if they thought they were 300 feet away from the abandoned mine, they were wrong; that they were a hell of a lot closer. They told them `You'd better take extra care and precautions.'"

MSHA spokesman Rodney Brown tells INSIGHT, "That part of the country, geographically, is a low-lying area. So they pretty much expected that the Saxman Mine, which was below the water table, would be full of water."