Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Uncovering ghosts of the region’s mining era
ASHLEY, PA. >> From the tall windows of the former Huber Breaker office, Michael Hewitt can see the mine-scarred lands from a bygone era.
The view from just about any point inside the headquarters of the Eastern Pennsylvania Coalition for Abandoned Mine Reclamation reminds his team of the ghosts lingering from Pennsylvania’s anthracite era, the same ghosts they’re uncovering for all to see.
Decades ago, mining companies extracted billions of tons of coal with impunity, but not without recording it on thousands of detailed maps.
In the last three years, staffers at EPCAMR have scanned historic maps on a mass scale and published them online, exposing thousands of underground voids throughout the region.
They publish scanned maps to the Penn State University Pennsylvania Spatial Data Access Program’s Mine Map Atlas, w w w.minemaps.psu.edu, a platform funded by the state, superimposing the map image on top of interactive U.S. Geological Survey maps.
“The mine maps, the repository, they were all these yucky old paper documents. Some of these maps are 50, 75 or 100-plus years old and the paper it almost disintegrates when you touch it,” said Bernie McGurl, chairman of the EPCAMR board and director of the Lackawanna River Conservation Association. “So getting it electronically is a big step for Pennsylvania.”
The maps can inform unaware homeowners that their houses might sit atop cavernous voids and whether to buy subsidence insurance.
“A lot of people don’t even know that they’re above mines, and they’ve had their houses for years,” said Kelsey Biondo, the mine map program coordinator.
Northern coalfields
To date, EPCAMR’s staff has scanned more than 10,000 maps.
“We’re mainly sticking to the northern coalfields, which goes from the Forest City area down to Shickshinny. That’s our main emphasis,” Biondo said.
Their work, however, reaches west and south, and on one recent morning, she was digitizing maps from the western middlefields, around Mahanoy City.
Nine universities throughout the state scan maps for the state’s Department of Environmental Protection program.
After scanning a map, a team of two full-time and two part-time employees place the digital image on top of existing maps to create a digital, searchable representation of where mining operators hollowed out the underground.
The DEP funds the project through its Bureau of Abandoned Mine Reclamation. The Wilkes-Barre bureau office started scanning and digitizing maps in 1998, using interns and available staff when time allowed, DEP spokeswoman Colleen Connolly said. However, with too few staff dedicated to the job, the department opted to contract out the work to get it done faster, she said.
Scanning history
On a recent morning, six long boxes containing maps had just arrived from the DEP. They waited under the work table to be fed into either one of a pair of large document scanners.
Maps arrive from a number of sources, like environmental nonprofits, developers and people who discover them in attics or basements.
The old documents reveal that coal mining, in its heyday, was ubiquitous.
On the map atlas screen, crisscrossing maps outlined in pink turn the Wyoming and Lackawanna valleys into a giant, neon smudge.
Coal operators followed some best practices to define their mine workings, but each had their own systems, so there’s inconsistency in how they drew their maps.
Some stretch across the room, printed on stiff, waxcoated linen held down by iron relics of the mining days given new life as paperweights.
On topographical maps, jagged in-and-out markings show coal miners’ methodical tactics for scavenging all the available coal. The maps reveal that huge swaths of communities — beneath, for example, Pittston or West Scranton — have been extensively mined.
“Their engineer will tell them how many pillars they can rob, but a lot of times they go beyond that,” Hewitt said.
Some images indicate where voids have been refilled with slurry. Others do not, though the voids actually may have been filled and the maps simply are outdated.
Massive water basins
Using 3-D modeling, EPCAMR used the data to show how much water lies in the canoe-like void below the Lackawanna Valley.
Two basins make up what McGurl calls the canoe. The first one, from Old Forge to Archbald, holds about 140 billion gallons, he said. That is twice the volume of Lake Wallenpaupack. The second one, from Jermyn to Carbondale, holds about 70 billion gallons.
“It would take a lot before you could say it would be drinkable,” McGurl said, adding that with a little treatment it could have industrial use. “If we could get it cleaned, that could be an incredible water resource.”
Beyond scanning and overlaying the images, EPCAMR is digitizing the maps making additional data searchable. Tens of thousands more maps remain to be scanned and processed — those are just the ones the state knows about.
“This work’s going to last 15 to 20 years,” Hewitt said.