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Anthracite Coal-Mine Fires of Northeastern Pennsylvania
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CHAPTER 25
Anthracite Coal-Mine Fires of Northeastern Pennsylvania
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CHAPTER CONTENTS 25.1 Anthracite Coal Fires of Northeastern Pennsylvania Introduction History of Coal Mining Origin of Coal Fires The Anthracite Fires Mine Fires: ∼1820–1900 Mine Fires: ∼1900–2000 Mine Fires: ∼2000 to Present Discussion Acknowledgments
Shale and burning coal in the 1-m-thick top split of the Pittsburgh coal seam at Boyce Park, Pennsylvania. This split, overlain by shale, was the roof of a former underground coal mine. The burning bottom split, and the pillars in it (not visible here) that supported the top split consisted of about 2 m of coal that was mined. Modern mining operations in Pennsylvania often mine coal in both splits, and a preparation plant then separates the waste rock, such as shale. Photo: courtesy of Steve Jones, Pennsylvania, Department of Environmental Protection, 2003.
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Coal and Peat Fires: A Global Perspective Edited by Glenn B. Stracher, Anupma Prakash and Ellina V. Sokol Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-444-59509-6.00025-9
25.1 Anthracite Coal Fires of Northeastern Pennsylvania Melissa A. Nolter Harold W. Aurand Jr. Daniel H. Vice
Photo: courtesy of Steve Jones, Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, 2003.
Shale and coal (1-m thick) in the burning roof of a former underground coal mine in Boyce Park, Pennsylvania.
Introduction This chapter presents a description of some coal fires in northeastern (NE) Pennsylvania (Figure 25.1.1) that encompass the anthracite region in the Valley and Ridge province of the Appalachian Mountains; Figures 25.1.2– 25.1.9 illustrate these fires. This area is different from the bituminous coal fields of Western Pennsylvania and West Virginia both in geology and in the character of the coal. The anthracite coal beds are found in four main fields, the Southern, Eastern Middle, Western Middle, and Northern, with several smaller pockets of anthracite to
Figure 25.1.1. Map of northeastern Pennsylvania coal fields and cities where mine fires are discussed in this chapter. Photo by Joseph T. Nolter Jr., 2003.
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Figure 25.1.2. Crack on Pennsylvania Route 61 in Centralia Pennsylvania. This section of the road was repaired several times. Due to the mine fire, a permanent detour became necessary. Photo by Melissa A. Nolter, 2002.
Figure 25.1.3. The main front of the Centralia mine fire. Gases spewing from vents and evidence of baked rock are obvious. The height of the trees at the left side of the photo is about 5 m. Photo by Melissa A. Nolter, 2003.
Figure 25.1.4. An active gas vent in Centralia. The maximum horizontal distance across the vent is about 32 cm. Photo by Melissa A. Nolter, 2003.
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Figure 25.1.5. The site of the Olyphant mine fire. Crews were actively working on containing the fire. Steam can be seen and physical changes in the rock in the center of the photograph are noticeable. Note the orange blockades at the top right-hand side to keep trespassers away. Photo by Daniel H. Vice, 2008.
Figure 25.1.6. The location of the former Carbondale mine fire. This mine fire site is now a football field. The only evidence of a mine fire is the plaque that commemorates it. Photo by Daniel H. Vice, 2014.
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Figure 25.1.7. The Laurel Run mine fire. This is an active fire that has been isolated to a small area. A few metal vents are in the area, with a little steam being released. Note the subsidence and vegetation near the center of the photograph. This area contains different plants and lichen than the surrounding area. Photo by Melissa A. Nolter, 2006.
Figure 25.1.8. Vents at the Laurel Run mine fire, fenced in for safety because of curious onlookers. The height of the fence is about 3 m. Photo by Melissa A. Nolter, 2006.
Figure 25.1.9. Natural venting at the Laurel Run mine fire. There is no baked rock, as is evident in Centralia. The maximum horizontal distance across the vent is about 30 cm. Photo by Melissa A. Nolter, 2006.
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semianthracite coal in outlying areas. The general trend of the fields is northeast to southwest (Eggleston et al., 1999). They are complex synclinoria (Eggleston et al., 1999), i.e. each field is one large syncline or basin but each contains numerous secondary synclines or basins separated by anticlines and/or faults. This is illustrated by the fact that the anthracite region covers 1400 square miles (2253.08 km2), but only 439 square miles (706.50 km2) contain coal. A total of 33 minable coal beds occur in the Southern Field with fewer in the Northern Field because the higher beds have been removed by erosion. The coal deposits in NE Pennsylvania are Pennsylvanian in age (Eggleston et al., 1999). Most of the coal beds are within the Llewellyn Formation, although some are present in the upper part of the Pottsville Formation. Anthracite coal may be considered to be a transition stage between bituminous coal and graphite, produced by the more or less complete elimination of the volatile constituents of the former, and it is found most abundantly in areas that have been subjected to considerable earth movements, such as the flanks of great mountain ranges. Anthracite coal is a product of metamorphism and is associated with metamorphic rocks. Anthracite is a higher rank of coal than bituminous coal because most of the volatile material has been driven off, so that it contains between 92% and 98% carbon. Anthracite coal is difficult to ignite but burns hotter and cleaner. The Buck Mountain coal bed forms the boundary between the Llewellyn and Pottsville formations and is late Middle Pennsylvanian in age, which is equivalent to the Monongahela Group of Western Pennsylvania (Eggleston et al., 1999). This suggests that coal deposits in NE Pennsylvania are a remnant of more extensive coal deposits.
History of Coal Mining Pennsylvania’s earliest settlers knew that there was coal in the NE section of the state. Limited amounts were used by local blacksmiths as early as the 1770s. By 1795, an anthracite-fired iron furnace had been built on the Schuylkill River. However, it was only in the 1820s, after Judge Jesse Fell’s open grate provided a means for burning anthracite in a fireplace and canals provided a transportation link between the anthracite mines and the urban centers of Philadelphia and New York City, that large-scale commercial mining began (Lottick, 1992; Aurand, 1971). Mining was first done in small surface pits and then in underground mines. Open pit mining did not become practical until after 1900 with the development of equipment that could move large amounts of overburden. Coal fires have occurred throughout this time period. Early coal companies in NE Pennsylvania were generally small. Although large railroad companies sometimes operated their own mines, most mining companies leased the land from the railroads that owned the land and mineral resources. These mining companies had few assets, and were often short lived (Davies, 1985). One of the biggest uses of anthracite coal has been for home heating. During the 1930s–1950s, the market for anthracite coal gradually declined as people switched to heating oil or to natural gas. During this time, many of the mines went out of business. By the 1960s, even the large mines owned by the railroads were suffering economic duress. Some towns and cities attempted to have the mineral rights to the coal transferred to them when active mining ceased because they feared that someone would rob the pillars under the town, removing the coal that supported old mine overburden, thus causing massive subsidence problems. Some cities succeeded. As an illustration of this, when one of the authors (Vice) purchased a home in Pottsville, he had to sign over any rights to the coal under his property to the city. Although companies such as Reading Anthracite still own a large area of land and mineral rights to the coal, little mining is actually done. The companies maintain skeleton work crews and do not monitor inactive stripping pits. This has led to people dumping trash in stripping pits and on coal company lands. One recent change in regard to Pennsylvanian coal fires concerns how the community views them. For most of Pennsylvania’s history, mine fires, especially if on company land, were seen as an economic problem and threat to jobs. Companies erected temporary barriers and airtight seals to isolate the fire and allowed work to continue in other parts of the mine, but local or state governments, much less private individuals, had little room to intervene. The Pennsylvania State Supreme Court had codified this stance in the case Pennsylvania Coal Company versus Sanderson and wife Eliza McBriar Sanderson sued the coal company for severely polluting a stream, which ran through her property. The high court ruled that coal-mine owners would not be able to do business if they could be held liable for damage caused in the normal course of operations. According to the court, “The
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trifling inconvenience of particular persons must sometimes give way to the necessities of a great community”. This decision was later specifically expanded to damage caused by mine fires. Only in the 1960s did a greater concern for public health and environmental concerns allow mine fires to be seen as legitimate areas of public concern, rather than the private, economic concern of the mining companies (Stranahan, pp. 165–16).
Origin of Coal Fires Three main causes of coal fires are human activity, spontaneous combustion, and surface fires. Human activity can range from careless mistakes to burning trash. This has been the principal cause of coal fires in NE Pennsylvania. Spontaneous combustion is not clearly defined but is understood as the tendency of a coal bed or stockpile to heat to the point where it starts burning (Uludag, 2007; Cao et al., 2007; Nelson and Chen, 2007). Generally, coals that have a tendency to spontaneously combust have a low rank and a high sulfur/sulfide mineral content (Cao et al., 2007). Anthracite in NE Pennsylvania does not have a tendency to spontaneously combust because of its higher rank (92–98% fixed carbon) and low sulfur content (0.3–1.2%) (Eggleston et al., 1999). Surface wild fires, either forest fires or grass fires, or lightning strikes can start coal beds on fire when they come in contact with coal (Whitehouse, 2003; Sternberg and Lippincott, 2004). The oldest known continuously burning underground mine fire is in New South Wales, Australia. It began from a lightning strike and has been burning for over 2000 years (Ellyett and Fleming, 1974). Even though one of the early discoverers of anthracite coal in NE Pennsylvania reportedly made his discovery when his campfire set a coal outcrop on fire, no reports of existing coal fires were made by the early settlers, and none of the coal fires researched for this chapter were started by wild fires.
The Anthracite Fires The anthracite region is similar to other coal regions in that it has had an extensive history of coal fires. However, the anthracite region is different from many other coal regions in that all of its coal fires appear to have started from human activity. Learning how to fight the coal fires was a trial and error process as illustrated by some of the early coal fires. The state Department of Environmental Protection only tracks those fires that it is charged with fighting. According to Steve Jones (Retired Chief, Division of Mine Hazards, Bureau of Abandoned Mine Reclamation, Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection) Pennsylvania has 39 active mine fires, more than anywhere in the nation. Of the fires that are being tracked by the Division of Mine Hazards, 14 occur in NE Pennsylvania. These numbers may or may not include recent fires. This number also does not include older fires that have been put out or are believed to be dormant. As an example of the difficulty of compiling a complete list of the mine fires in Pennsylvania, the 1993 US Bureau of Mines Information Circular 9352 listed 25 coal fire projects active in Pennsylvania (Kim and Chaiken, 1993, Table 2). Comparing their list with the one provided by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection shows that while some fires are on both lists, others are not. Therefore, there is no definitive list and certainly no historic database of dormant or eradicated fires. Selected coal fires have been described below to illustrate the mode of ignition, methods of fighting, and responses of the affected communities. Some fires, such as the Cameron Colliery at Shamokin occurred during the early days, while other fires like Mildred are more recent. Some of these fires occurred through mining accidents or human carelessness like at Laurel Run. Some fires have been fought, others were controlled but let burn, and still others were allowed to burn uncontrollably.
Mine Fires: ∼1820–1900 One early fire in the Tamaqua area started in 1852, which is in the central part of the Southern Field. The Little Schuylkill Company had allowed the underprivileged of the community to work one coal outcrop on the “E” vein, which occurred between the High Mine and the Greenwood Colliery. In the fall of 1852, while scavenging, they
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built a fire near an airshaft, and let it burn during the night. Some of the burning coals fell into the airshaft and lodged near some pillars in the Greenwood Colliery, starting them on fire (Detterline, 1968). The company attempted to extinguish the fire. At first, the company trenched around the fire, and this was unsuccessful. Next, they installed some large fans to pump carbonic acid in and smother the fire. Flaming sulfur protruded out of the airshaft 30 ft (9.14 m) high, creating a short-lived tourist attraction. The company hired a local faith healer, called a “pow-wow” to extinguish the fire, which was also ineffective (Detterline, 1968). By 1855, gas from the fire made working in the mine difficult and some miners were overcome and later revived when brought to the surface. Eventually, miners refused to mine and work was abandoned. Two attempts were made to determine if the fire could be controlled or extinguished. One occurred several months after the abandonment, when the boss and two miners went to see if they could starve the fire of oxygen or block areas so that other areas could be mined. When they did not return, a search party found all three dead. The second attempt occurred in 1858 when the General Superintendent of the Little Schuylkill Company and the General Agent entered the mine to see if the fire could be extinguished. Both perished. Finally, in 1859, the Greenwood Colliery was flooded ( Detterline, 1968). Blasé (1997) described a coal fire in the Heckscherville Anchor Colliery. This fire was on the northern limb of the Southern Field. It was first discovered on September 20, 1869, but no cause is given. The colliery was shut down, but another operator reopened the mine and worked the third or lower level, which was below the fire. The Philadelphia & Reading Coal & Iron Company took over operation of the mine in 1875 and continued working until 1877 when it was discovered that the fire had reached that area. The mine was flooded and abandoned. Attempts were made to reopen the colliery in 1896 by exploring the old workings. No evidence was found of a coal fire, but Dyer’s Creek was turned into the old workings in 1901 as a precaution. No evidence was found of the fire in 1906 (Blasé, 1997). The Cameron Colliery fire at Shamokin is in the Western Middle Field. This fire began on February 25, 1890, in the underground operations and defied early efforts to fight it (Lindermuth, 2008). It was decided to flood the colliery, and so the waters of Shamokin Creek were diverted into the mine. The water was finally pumped out of the mine on September 5, 1890, and work started on restoring the colliery to production (Lindermuth, 2008).
Mine Fires: ∼1900–2000 Laurel Run Laurel Run (Figures 25.1.1, 25.1.7–25.1.9) is a small town in the Northern Field adjacent to Wilkes-Barre. The Laurel Run fire occurred on the south limb of the Northern Field, that was approximately 6.4 km (4 miles) wide at that point. There is a broad, shallow dipping shelf with no subbasins. Three coal beds are burning at Laurel Run: Ross, Top Red Ash, and Bottom Red Ash (Dierks et al., 1971). The Red Ash coal bed is stratigraphically equivalent to the Buck Mountain bed in Centralia (Eggleston et al., 1999). The Llewellyn Formation occurs above the Red Ash and the Pottsville Conglomerate below it in the Northern Field. Based on a cross-section in Dierks et al. (1971, p. 13), the coal beds dip between 10° and 15° to the north in the area of the Laurel Run coal fire. Major faults near the fire could allow communication between the coal beds, but no major folds would split the fire (Sevon, 1976). Thus, the Laurel Run fire was limited to movement along the strike of the coal beds (to the northeast and/or southwest) and down dip (to the northwest). A fire began in the Red Ash Coal Mine on December 6, 1915, when a miner left a lit carbide lamp attached to a mine timber. The owners of the Red Ash Mine had no night watchman, which allowed the fire to burn undetected over the weekend. When work resumed, the company became aware of the fire and attempted to cut off the air supply by plugging openings with concrete and flushed sand into the immediate area (Randolph, 2002). They believed the fire was under control. However, in 1921, the fire was burning beyond the company’s containment area (Ashmead, 1922). The company began erecting temporary seals to contain the fire while allowing sections of the mine to be worked. The Red Ash Company continued to contain the fire until 1957 when the mines under Laurel run were closed. In September 1962, a resident was forced to abandon her home due to gases and subsidence and the community knew it faced an uncontrolled mine fire (Randolph, 2002).
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By April 1966, a plan was created to deal with the fire. A series of boreholes were drilled to determine the extent of the burn. It found that part of the fire was under the borough. Mine operators had robbed the pillars, weakening the overhead strata and leaving the ground susceptible to subsidence. Gases from the fire escaped through fractures into homes. An urban renewal project under the auspices of the Luzerne County Redevelopment Authority and the US Department of Housing and Urban Development was initiated, relocating 850 residents. Another section of the fire was burning beneath the Georgetown section of Wilkes-Barre. The pillars had not been robbed, and the fire was kept from the surface by solid rock. Dealing with the fire below Georgetown required blocking off access tunnels that fed oxygen to the fire (Dierks et al., 1971). The limited extent of the Red Ash Coal Company and adjacent mine boundaries provided barriers that prevented the spread. The fire did spread from the Red Ash mine into the Stanton–Empire mine and, in doing so, spread down dip under the Georgetown section of Wilkes-Barre. It also threatened Interstate 81 as it moved toward Wilkes-Barre (Nolter et al., 2007). Visual evidence of the mine fire is sparse (Figures 25.1.7–25.1.9). The area impacted by the fire, where homes and businesses were torn down, has been rebuilt, with larger homes than in the older section of the community. Areas that have not been rebuilt are visually indistinguishable from other areas that were not involved in underground or surface mining. The only actively burning area is under the Laurel Run Estates Mobile Home Park driveway. The authors observed gas issuing from surface vents (Figures 25.1.8 and 25.1.9) and a few examples of fractured, baked rock, and slight mineral deposition around the vents. There is no widespread lack of vegetation. Areas near hot spots contain plants, such as the lichen Cladonia cristatella and Hypericum gentianoides, which normally thrive in dry, rocky, sunbaked soils (Nolter et al., 2007). The approximately 30-ft-long section of the road that is above the fire has required extra paving but lacks visible cracks. Although the Laurel Run Mine Fire was a challenge due to its size, several factors made its abatement less of an engineering problem. All three beds cropped out east of town, where a surface mining exposed them. This provided a barrier to the fire’s advance. To the west, the mine pool under the city of Wilkes-Barre provided another barrier. With the exception of the area directly beneath the borough of Laurel Run, where pillar robbing caused subsidence and cracking, the fire burned under solid rock. There were only a few possible routes for oxygen to reach the fire (Dierks et al., 1971). Planners came to the Laurel Run fire with an understanding of what they were up against (Nolter et al., 2007) because the mine operators were able to pass information about the fire on to the government agencies. Shenanodoah The Shenandoah fire occurred on the northern margin of the Western Middle Field, which was underlain by 2000 ft (609.6 m) or more of the Llewellyn Formation. The Buck Mountain, Mammoth, Top Split Mammoth, and Primrose coal beds are present. A complex series of small synclines and anticlines occur in the Shenandoah area but do not isolate from other parts of the field. This fire started when someone kicked a salamander into the mine shaft. A salamander is a 55-gallon (208.198 l) metal drum with the top and bottom removed and holes in the side; hollow metal poles are inserted into the holes and coal added and lit it for heat. The fire started behind what is now the nursing home. It burned up to the street in front of the nursing home but never went farther. There was a baseball field close to it, and many residents recall inhaling the fumes during the games. About 25 years after the fire started, Pagnotti enterprises received $12 million to strip-mine it out, they were not to stop even if the funding ran out, and reimbursement would be made. The project ended up costing around $72 million. In the early phase of the fire, it could have been extinguished relatively cheaply but was left to burn. Carbondale Carbondale (Figures 25.1.1, 25.1.6) was the first location in the anthracite region to have underground mining. Experimental digging was started in 1812. A mine fire was discovered on the west side of town in 1946. Located
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in the northern part of the Northern Field, the syncline there is approximately 2–3 miles wide, and the fire occurred on the northern limb. The fire may have started as much as 5 years earlier, when the city was using the abandoned mine pits of the Hudson Coal Company’s Powderly Mine as a refuse dump. Because the fire was on the extreme edge of town, the City of Carbondale and the US Bureau of Mines made only modest efforts to control the burning. Water was used to flush the fire, and 80,000 cubic yards of silt were poured into test boreholes (Munley, 1998). Then, in 1952, the death of an elderly couple from carbon monoxide poisoning far from the supposed fire site convinced the town that it had a much larger problem. The Carbondale city government and Hudson Coal Company both sought more federal aid. New tests revealed that the fire now covered 120 acres and was burning to a depth of 100 ft. Experts believed it would be impossible to cut off the fire’s source of oxygen and smother it. Residents were constantly monitored for carbon dioxide, and fire-caused subsidence threatened homes and the city’s water system. At the time, the federal government only allocated $200,000 per year to fight mine fires, not nearly enough to handle a disaster the size of Carbondale’s (Munley, 1998). In 1956, Carbondale’s mayor and members of the Carbondale Redevelopment Authority attended a 2-day conference in Scranton on the newly created Federal Urban Renewal Program. Although designed for slum clearance, the Carbondale fire was accepted as an urban renewal project, with potential as a model for other efforts. Workers dug a series of trenches from 60 to 100 ft deep and three times as wide, removed the coal that was sold to help fund the project, and then replaced the earth after the burning material was extinguished. When the project was finished in 1972, $2,326,000 had been spent and 4 million cubic yards of earth removed. Two schools and 450 homes had to be destroyed (Munley, 1998). Centralia Centralia (Figures 25.1.1–25.1.4) is part of the Western Middle Field (Eggleston et al., 1999), which consists of six east-west-trending asymmetric synclines that are separated by anticlines (Arndt, 1971). This field covers 243 km2 area in Columbia, Northumberland, and Schuylkill Counties (Chaiken et al., 1980, p. 4). The central basin of the Western Middle Field consists of the Centralia syncline, which is bounded on the north by the Centralia thrust fault and on the south by the Locust Mountain anticline (Arndt, 1971). Only the four lowermost coal beds in the Llewellyn Formation are present in the Centralia area. These beds are the Buck Mountain, Seven Foot, Skidmore, and Mammoth. Other stratigraphically higher coal beds were removed by erosion (Chaiken et al., 1980, pp. 4–5). The four coal beds present resemble concentric bowls separated from one another by approximately 10–100 m of shale and sandstone (Chaiken et al., 1980, p. 4). The rim of each bowl is the outcrop of a coal bed. Each bed dips 22°north (Arndt, 1971) on the south limb of the Centralia syncline. The Buck Mountain coal bed outcrops close to the southern margin of the Centralia basin. The regional folding that had formed the Western Middle Field extensively fractured the conglomerate, sandstone, and shale, which occur between each coal bed, permitting air access to the subsurface and making it difficult to extinguish any coal fires (Nolter and Vice, 2004). Residents of Centralia set fire to a garbage dump in May 1962 and in the process, ignited the Buck Mountain coal bed (Nolter and Vice, 2004). The Centralia fire began in the Buck Mountain coal bed on a nose of an anticline separating the Centralia basin from the Ashland basin. As the fire spread, it advanced along four fronts. The dipping and fractured coal beds permitted the propagation of fire deep into the subsurface and contributed to a “self-propagating” convection cell (Chaiken et al., 1980, p. 9). As air is drawn into the fire from fractures in the coal and surrounding bedrock, hot coal fire gas escaping up dip permits more air to feed the fire. A 1938 study by McElroy showed that these convection cells provide the fire with a steady supply of air and permit it to propagate both laterally and down dip in a coal bed (Dekok, 2000, p. 31). Centralia’s fire forced the local mines to close in 1962 (Kroll-Smith and Couch, 1990, p. 3). Since then there have been intermittent attempts to control the fire. These included flushing the mines with water–rock slurry, the construction of fly ash barriers, and trenching. Dipping beds and highly fractured rock enclosing the coal made this fire expensive and difficult to control. Later, the Pennsylvania, with its share of Abandoned Mine Lands’ money, decided to buy out the nearly 1100 residents of Centralia. The Federal Government provided additional relocation funds (Dekok, 2000, p. 269–270). Buyouts began in 1969, although some residents have refused to leave. The fire has been left to burn.
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Panther Valley Firemen discovered a brush fire south of the Panther Valley High School in the Orchard Vein. They extinguished the brush fire and found the ground fire. This fire is in a small deposit of coal with no apparent underground interconnecting tunnels. The fire has the potential to move to the west, but would run out of coal before reaching any populated area. Since no danger is present, officials will only monitor it. A mining engineering for the Federal Office of Surface Mining (OSM) visited the site and reported that a small area of coal refuse appears to have been burning for some time. The area was inspected in 1995, and no problems were discovered. It is reported that the vegetation in the area has the typical gray cast of that surrounding older fires. Councilman David Wargo said the fire has been burning for decades. He said the matter of the fire has been raised because a new middle school is being proposed near the existing high school.
Mine Fires: ∼2000 to Present Mildred This fire occurred in the Northern Field, near the town of Mildred (Eggleston et al., 1999). The coal in this field is semianthracite. Mining began around 1860 using drifts and slopes. No surface mining was ever attempted. Veins of coal in the area varied from 24 in (0.61 m) to 6 ft (1.83 m) with most of the deposits being near the surface. Mining has tended to be small scale, and often seasonal, as a winter employment for farmers. The fire was discovered on May 30, 2004, although residents reported they had noticed a sulfur odor for about 5 weeks beforehand. The fire was restricted to an area of about 1 acre, and centered on the subsurface coal refuse at the former site of the Cline Ricci Breaker. The ground above the fire was very warm. Water poured on the site was declared to be “too hot to handle” when it pooled up. Carbon monoxide readings measured 50 ppm. After a visit by officials from the Federal OSM and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, the Sullivan Review (2004) reported, “If requested by the property owner, the Office of Surface Mining will extinguish the fire”, which they called “a quick project”. The local fire company eventually put out the fire with water. The authors were unable to gain access to the site of the fire. Local residents suggested that lightning started the fire, because there were old timbers and other wood scraps from a breaker and mine around the area. However, some have suggested that burning trash had started the fire. Olyphant The Olyphant (Figures 25.1.1 and 25.1.5) fire started in the summer of 2004 in an area on the southern limb of the Northern Field just south of the town of Olyphant. It spread through about 7 acres of underground mine workings. A 2000-ft (609.6 m)-long trench up to 130 ft (39.62 m) deep was dug to isolate the fire. When the authors visited the site in May 2008, the site had been trenched and a fence built around it. The authors neither noticed any odor nor did they see any surface manifestations but were unable to gain access to the area inside the fence. Excelsior Excelsior is in the Western Middle Field, just outside of Shamokin. Elwood Swank, owner of the Split Vein Coal Company, leased land near Excelsior from the Reading Anthracite Company. He had a permit from Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection to conduct surface mining in the area, and to bring in refuse for land reclamation. Among the refuse was leaf-based mulch approved by the Department. In December 2005, the compost caught fire. Most believed the fire had been intentionally set, probably by teenagers riding all-terrain vehicles. Fumes from the fire drifted toward the city of Shamokin, and soon coal waste on the site caught fire as well. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection ordered Swank to devote 8 h a day to removing the burning refuse and pushing it into a pond (the pond drained into a nearby stream already heavily polluted by acid mine drainage, so more mine waste was not seen as a problem). By January, the Department stated that good
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progress had been made on the fire; however, after several months it had restarted, probably because of another act of arson, and Swank was ordered to remove all the compost. In January 2007, as the work continued, the Shamokin News-Item stated that the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection had reclassified the Excelsior fire as a mine fire rather than as a refuse fire. Thomas Callaghan, the Department’s district manager in Pottsville, reportedly said that the refuse fire had burned deeper than anyone had thought, and that the subsurface coal was now going to have to be removed. After 2 days, the Department denied the truthfulness of the story, claiming that no subsurface coal was burning. Local residents did not believe the Department’s denial. Letters to the editor of the Shamokin News-Item openly called the Department incompetent and predicted that Excelsior would turn into another Centralia. By April, 200,000 tons of coal waste had been removed from the site. In July 2010, when the authors visited the site, there was no sign of an active fire. Palo Alto Palo Alto is a small, independent town adjacent to Pottsville and is located on the southern margin of the Southern Field close to the boundary between the Llewellyn and Pottsville Formations. Coal beds in the area are essentially vertical (Eggleston, 1992). In December 2008, the community became aware of a coal fire burning just outside their borough limits in East Norwegian Township. The fire had probably started in July, but because the site was isolated, about 200 yards from any homes or well-traveled roads, it had not been noticed until a local hunter, John Ketner, stumbled across it. Ketner notified the East Norwegian Township supervisors, who, after examining the site, decided “this was way beyond the scope of any municipality”, and contacted the Office of Surface Mining (Pottsville, 2009). John Mack, Office of Surface Mining project manager, was at the site within 2 days. After heat guns registered a ground temperature of 178 °F, exploratory boreholes were drilled to determine the extent of the fire. Results showed that what was burning was an 8-ft-long by 70-ft-wide deposit of coal waster. The site of the fire was less of a hazard than many of the other coal fires in NE Pennsylvania because the local water table was only 60 ft below the surface and so restricted the spread of the fire into any underlying coal beds. Once the extent of the coal fire was known, Mack said the next step was “to design a trench to isolate the fire”. By spring, the trench was in place, with 2 or 3 acres effectively isolated (Figure 25.1.1).
Discussion Wherever they occur, coal fires create serious problems. Mineral resources are destroyed, fires contribute to atmospheric pollution, and fire-impacted areas become hazards for local population. Even if the fire is contained, the threat of subsidence often renders the land useless for farming or building. Wildlife is forced to relocate, and gases create health problems. There have been coal fires in NE Pennsylvania from the start of coal mining in the region. The cause of these fires has been human activity, which is different from most other coal mining regions. The state Department of Environmental Protection only tracks those fires it is charged with fighting. Those coal fires that have been controlled or extinguished are dropped from the list and are known only from historical records or by local residents. The coal fires in NE Pennsylvania vary widely in size and significance. For example, the Mildred fire was small and was put out by the local fire company. On the other hand, the Centralia fire destroyed a town. The latter, the Centralia fire, is the only one in NE Pennsylvania that has achieved any notoriety (e.g. Dekok, 2000; Quigley, 2007). In examining the different fires in the anthracite region of NE Pennsylvania, several general observations may be made. First, the coal fires in NE Pennsylvania were all started by human activity. Second, they are unevenly distributed. More coal fires occur in the Northern and Western Middle Fields than in the Eastern Middle and Southern Fields. And thirdly of the 14 coal fires in NE Pennsylvania listed by Steve Jones, retired Chief, Division of Mine Hazards, Bureau of Abandoned Mine Reclamation, Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, six occur in the Northern Field and five in the Western Middle Field. Only three fires occur in the Southern Field, and there are none in the Eastern Middle Field.
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One possible cause for the greater number of fires in the Northern and Western Middle Fields is the greater number of stripping pits that have no effective control. People use stripping pits for trash disposal. When the trash catches fire, it can ignite the underlying anthracite coal beds. Another reason that a greater number of coal fires may occur in the Western Middle Field is because the area is less populated than the other fields. Thus the coal fires in the Western Middle Field are often allowed to burn because there is less threat to infrastructure. One of the reasons given by some residents of Centralia for not leaving their community despite the mine fire was that they believed the federal government wanted to get the coal underneath the town (Dekok, 2000, p. 37). In looking at other coal fires in NE Pennsylvania, we found that many private companies have been involved in putting out coal fires. We also found that it has been a common practice for these companies to keep and sell the coal they recovered while fighting the coal fire. A fourth general observation we made was that there has been a change in the responsibility of fighting coal fires. At first, the company that owned the mine fought any coal fire. However in later years, state and federal officials became involved in fighting fires, which has made the process more bureaucratically cumbersome. Commonly in Pennsylvania, the more a disaster is highlighted, the better the chance officials will act. Although relatively little research has been done on how the political process responds to coal fires (McCurdy, 2007), we have noticed that one way communities try to highlight the potential danger of their fires is by comparing them to Centralia (Wolfgang, 2008a,b). A fifth general observation that can be made about the coal fires in NE Pennsylvania is that more money and effort is put into fighting the coal fires whenever they threatened major infrastructure. Although there was no formal admission of this, it supports observations made by Whitehouse (2003). For example, the Laurel Run fire threatened I-81 and a railroad mainline as well as a suburb of Wilkes-Barre. The Carbondale fire threatened Route 6, which was the main east–west corridor in NE Pennsylvania, while Centralia threatened an isolated community and one state highway, route 61. For example, Dekok (2000, p. 60) mentions a memo written by a top assistant to the Chief of the US Bureau of Mines that a trench to stop the fire at Centralia was abandoned because it would have cost an estimated $5 million, and the total assessed value of the property in the town was only $500,000.
Acknowledgments We thank Glenn Stracher (East Georgia State College) for his assistance with our manuscript, Joseph T. Nolter Jr (Mahoney City, Pennsylvania) for the time that he spent creating our map, and library personnel at both Penn State Schuylkill and Hazelton for assisting us in gathering research materials for this chapter. We also thank the local residents in different fire site locations for providing us with information about and directions to the fires.
Important Terms Cameron Colliery Carbondale Centralia Excelsior Heckscherville Anchor Colliery Laurel Run
Mildred Olyphant Palo Alto Panther Valley Shenandoah Tamaqua
References Arndt, H.H., 1971. Geologic Map of the Ashland Quadrangle, Columbia and Schuylkill Counties, Pennsylvania. U.S. Geological Survey Map GQ-918. Ashmead, D.C., May 11, 1922. Red Ash Company’s Mine Fire, Thought to Be Slushed Out, Blazes up, Threatening Nearby Properties: Coal Age. pp. 769–770.
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Aurand, H.W., 1971. From the Molly Maguires to the United Mine Workers: The Social Ecology of an Industrial Union, 1869–1897. Temple University Press, Philadelphia. pp. 9–11. Blasé, F., 1997. Heckscherville (Anchor) Colliery. The Pottsville Republican & Evening Hearld. Saturday–Sunday, March 29–30. Cao, D., Fan, X., Guan, H., Wu, C., Shi, X., Jia, Y., 2007. Geological models of spontaneous combustion in the Wuda coalfield, Inner Mongolia, China. In: Stracher, G.B. (Ed.), Geology of Coal Fires: Case Studies from Around the World. Geological Society of America Reviews in Engineering XVIII, pp. 23–30. Chaiken, R.F., Brennan, R.J., Heisey, B.S., Kim, A.G., Malenka, W.T., Schimmel, J.T., August 1980. Problems in the control of anthracite mine fires: a case study of the Centralia mine fire. United States Bureau Mines Report of Investigations 8799. 93 p. Davies, E.J., 1985. The Anthracite Aristocracy: Leadership and Social Change in the Hard Coal Region of Northeast Pennsylvania, 1800–1930. Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb. 277 p. Dekok, D., 2000. Unseen Danger: A Tragedy of People, Government, and the Centralia Mine Fire: To Excel. An imprint of iUniverse.com, Inc., 299 p. Detterline Jr, M.E., 1968. Tamaqua Tales. Kutztown Publishing Company, Kutztown. pp. 54–57. Dierks, H.A., Whaite, R.H., Harvey, A.H., 1971. Three mine fire control projects in Northeastern Pennsylvania: U.S. Department of the Interior. Bureau of Mines, Information Circular 8524, 58 p. Eggleston, J.R., Kehn, T.M., Wood Jr, G.H., 1999. Anthracite. In: Schultz, C.H. (Ed.), The Geology of Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania Geological Survey and Pittsburgh Geological Society, pp. 459–469. Ellyett, C.D., Fleming, A.D., 1974. Thermal Infrared Imagery of the Burning Mountain Coal Fire: Remote Sensing of the Environment, 3rd vol, pp. 79–86. Kim, A.G., Chaiken, R.F., 1993. Fires in abandoned coal mines and waste banks. United States Bureau of Mines, Information Circular 9352, 58. Kroll-Smith, J.S., Couch, S.R., 1990. The Real Disaster is above Ground: A Mine Fire and Social Conflict. The University Press of Kentucky. 200 p. Lindermuth, J.R., Sunday, June 15, 2008. Colliery Fire Took Months to Extinguish. Pottsville Republican & Herald. p. C3. Lottick, S.T., 1992. Bridging Change: A Wyoming Valley Sketchbook. Wyoming Historical and Geological Society, Wilxs-Barre. pp. 92–93. McCurdy, K.M., 2007. Congressional response to coal fires: illustrating transitions in the policy process. In: Stracher, G.B. (Ed.), Geology of Coal Fires: Case Studies from Around the World. Geological Society of America Reviews in Engineering XVIII, pp. 271–278. Munley, K.P., 1998. Mine fire: the west side carbondale mine fire, 1947–1961. In: Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Conference on the History of Northeastern Pennsylvania. Luzerne County Community College, pp. 67–85. Nelson, M.I., Chen, X.D., 2007. Survey of experimental work on the self-heating and spontaneous combustion of coal. In: Stracher, G.B. (Ed.), Geology of Coal Fires: Case Studies from Around the World. Geological Society of America Reviews in Engineering XVIII, pp. 31–83. Nolter, M.A., Vice, D.H., 2004. Looking back at the Centralia coal fire: a synopsis of its present status. In: Stracher, G.B. (Ed.), Coal Fires Burning Around World: A Global Catastrophe: International Journal Coal Geology, vol. 59 (1–2), pp. 99–106. Nolter, M.A., Vice, D.H., Aurand Jr, H., 2007. Comparison of Pennsylvania anthracite mine fires: Centralia and Laurel Run. In: Stracher, G.B. (Ed.), Geology of Coal Fires: Case Studies from Around the World. Geological Society of America Reviews in Engineering Geology XVIII, pp. 261–270. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1130/2007.4118(18). Quigley, J., 2007. The Day the Earth Caved In. Random House. 237 p. Randolph, A., 2002. Overview of the Laurel Run Mine Fire, Borough of Laurel Run, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Luzerne County Historical Society. 7 p. Sevon, W.D., 1976. Wilkes-Barre East Quadrangle: Pennsylvania Geological Survey: Atlas of Preliminary Geologic Quadrangle Maps of Pennsylvania, Map 61 (published 1981), scale 1:62,500. Sternberg, R., Lippincott, C., 2004. Magnetic Surveys over Clinkers and Coal Seam Fires in Western North Dakota: Symposium on Coal Fires, T62, Wild Coal Fires: Burning Question with Global Consequences? Geological Society of America, Annual Meeting, Denver, November 7–10, 2004. Stranahan, S.Q., 1993. Susquehanna River of Dreams. The Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. 165–166. Sullivan Review, Thursday, June 3, 2004. Subsurf. Mine Fire Located between Mildred Lopez, vol. 127, no. 22, Dushore, Pennsylvania, p. 1.
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Uludag, S., 2007. The spontaneous combustion index and its application: past, present, and future. In: Stracher, G.B. (Ed.), Geology of Coal Fires: Case Studies from Around the World. Geological Society of America Reviews in Engineering XVIII, pp. 15–22. Whitehouse, A.E., 2003. Coal Fires in Indonesia: Symposium on Coal Fires Burning around the World, American Association for Advancement of Science, Annual Meeting, February 13–18, Denver, Colorado. Wolfgang, B., Friday, October 24, 2008a. Experts Try to Avoid ‘Another Centralia’. Pottsville Republican and Herald. p. 1. Wolfgang, B., December 31, 2008b. Underground Fire Burns in Palo Alto. Pottsville Republican and Herald. p. 1.
CHAPTER 25
Anthracite Coal-Mine Fires of Northeastern Pennsylvania
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CHAPTER CONTENTS 25.1 Anthracite Coal Fires of Northeastern Pennsylvania Introduction History of Coal Mining Origin of Coal Fires The Anthracite Fires Mine Fires: ∼1820–1900 Mine Fires: ∼1900–2000 Mine Fires: ∼2000 to Present Discussion Acknowledgments
Shale and burning coal in the 1-m-thick top split of the Pittsburgh coal seam at Boyce Park, Pennsylvania. This split, overlain by shale, was the roof of a former underground coal mine. The burning bottom split, and the pillars in it (not visible here) that supported the top split consisted of about 2 m of coal that was mined. Modern mining operations in Pennsylvania often mine coal in both splits, and a preparation plant then separates the waste rock, such as shale. Photo: courtesy of Steve Jones, Pennsylvania, Department of Environmental Protection, 2003.
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Coal and Peat Fires: A Global Perspective Edited by Glenn B. Stracher, Anupma Prakash and Ellina V. Sokol Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-444-59509-6.00025-9
25.1 Anthracite Coal Fires of Northeastern Pennsylvania Melissa A. Nolter Harold W. Aurand Jr. Daniel H. Vice
Photo: courtesy of Steve Jones, Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, 2003.
Shale and coal (1-m thick) in the burning roof of a former underground coal mine in Boyce Park, Pennsylvania.
Introduction This chapter presents a description of some coal fires in northeastern (NE) Pennsylvania (Figure 25.1.1) that encompass the anthracite region in the Valley and Ridge province of the Appalachian Mountains; Figures 25.1.2– 25.1.9 illustrate these fires. This area is different from the bituminous coal fields of Western Pennsylvania and West Virginia both in geology and in the character of the coal. The anthracite coal beds are found in four main fields, the Southern, Eastern Middle, Western Middle, and Northern, with several smaller pockets of anthracite to
Figure 25.1.1. Map of northeastern Pennsylvania coal fields and cities where mine fires are discussed in this chapter. Photo by Joseph T. Nolter Jr., 2003.
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Figure 25.1.2. Crack on Pennsylvania Route 61 in Centralia Pennsylvania. This section of the road was repaired several times. Due to the mine fire, a permanent detour became necessary. Photo by Melissa A. Nolter, 2002.
Figure 25.1.3. The main front of the Centralia mine fire. Gases spewing from vents and evidence of baked rock are obvious. The height of the trees at the left side of the photo is about 5 m. Photo by Melissa A. Nolter, 2003.
Figure 25.1.4. An active gas vent in Centralia. The maximum horizontal distance across the vent is about 32 cm. Photo by Melissa A. Nolter, 2003.
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Figure 25.1.5. The site of the Olyphant mine fire. Crews were actively working on containing the fire. Steam can be seen and physical changes in the rock in the center of the photograph are noticeable. Note the orange blockades at the top right-hand side to keep trespassers away. Photo by Daniel H. Vice, 2008.
Figure 25.1.6. The location of the former Carbondale mine fire. This mine fire site is now a football field. The only evidence of a mine fire is the plaque that commemorates it. Photo by Daniel H. Vice, 2014.
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Figure 25.1.7. The Laurel Run mine fire. This is an active fire that has been isolated to a small area. A few metal vents are in the area, with a little steam being released. Note the subsidence and vegetation near the center of the photograph. This area contains different plants and lichen than the surrounding area. Photo by Melissa A. Nolter, 2006.
Figure 25.1.8. Vents at the Laurel Run mine fire, fenced in for safety because of curious onlookers. The height of the fence is about 3 m. Photo by Melissa A. Nolter, 2006.
Figure 25.1.9. Natural venting at the Laurel Run mine fire. There is no baked rock, as is evident in Centralia. The maximum horizontal distance across the vent is about 30 cm. Photo by Melissa A. Nolter, 2006.
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semianthracite coal in outlying areas. The general trend of the fields is northeast to southwest (Eggleston et al., 1999). They are complex synclinoria (Eggleston et al., 1999), i.e. each field is one large syncline or basin but each contains numerous secondary synclines or basins separated by anticlines and/or faults. This is illustrated by the fact that the anthracite region covers 1400 square miles (2253.08 km2), but only 439 square miles (706.50 km2) contain coal. A total of 33 minable coal beds occur in the Southern Field with fewer in the Northern Field because the higher beds have been removed by erosion. The coal deposits in NE Pennsylvania are Pennsylvanian in age (Eggleston et al., 1999). Most of the coal beds are within the Llewellyn Formation, although some are present in the upper part of the Pottsville Formation. Anthracite coal may be considered to be a transition stage between bituminous coal and graphite, produced by the more or less complete elimination of the volatile constituents of the former, and it is found most abundantly in areas that have been subjected to considerable earth movements, such as the flanks of great mountain ranges. Anthracite coal is a product of metamorphism and is associated with metamorphic rocks. Anthracite is a higher rank of coal than bituminous coal because most of the volatile material has been driven off, so that it contains between 92% and 98% carbon. Anthracite coal is difficult to ignite but burns hotter and cleaner. The Buck Mountain coal bed forms the boundary between the Llewellyn and Pottsville formations and is late Middle Pennsylvanian in age, which is equivalent to the Monongahela Group of Western Pennsylvania (Eggleston et al., 1999). This suggests that coal deposits in NE Pennsylvania are a remnant of more extensive coal deposits.
History of Coal Mining Pennsylvania’s earliest settlers knew that there was coal in the NE section of the state. Limited amounts were used by local blacksmiths as early as the 1770s. By 1795, an anthracite-fired iron furnace had been built on the Schuylkill River. However, it was only in the 1820s, after Judge Jesse Fell’s open grate provided a means for burning anthracite in a fireplace and canals provided a transportation link between the anthracite mines and the urban centers of Philadelphia and New York City, that large-scale commercial mining began (Lottick, 1992; Aurand, 1971). Mining was first done in small surface pits and then in underground mines. Open pit mining did not become practical until after 1900 with the development of equipment that could move large amounts of overburden. Coal fires have occurred throughout this time period. Early coal companies in NE Pennsylvania were generally small. Although large railroad companies sometimes operated their own mines, most mining companies leased the land from the railroads that owned the land and mineral resources. These mining companies had few assets, and were often short lived (Davies, 1985). One of the biggest uses of anthracite coal has been for home heating. During the 1930s–1950s, the market for anthracite coal gradually declined as people switched to heating oil or to natural gas. During this time, many of the mines went out of business. By the 1960s, even the large mines owned by the railroads were suffering economic duress. Some towns and cities attempted to have the mineral rights to the coal transferred to them when active mining ceased because they feared that someone would rob the pillars under the town, removing the coal that supported old mine overburden, thus causing massive subsidence problems. Some cities succeeded. As an illustration of this, when one of the authors (Vice) purchased a home in Pottsville, he had to sign over any rights to the coal under his property to the city. Although companies such as Reading Anthracite still own a large area of land and mineral rights to the coal, little mining is actually done. The companies maintain skeleton work crews and do not monitor inactive stripping pits. This has led to people dumping trash in stripping pits and on coal company lands. One recent change in regard to Pennsylvanian coal fires concerns how the community views them. For most of Pennsylvania’s history, mine fires, especially if on company land, were seen as an economic problem and threat to jobs. Companies erected temporary barriers and airtight seals to isolate the fire and allowed work to continue in other parts of the mine, but local or state governments, much less private individuals, had little room to intervene. The Pennsylvania State Supreme Court had codified this stance in the case Pennsylvania Coal Company versus Sanderson and wife Eliza McBriar Sanderson sued the coal company for severely polluting a stream, which ran through her property. The high court ruled that coal-mine owners would not be able to do business if they could be held liable for damage caused in the normal course of operations. According to the court, “The
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trifling inconvenience of particular persons must sometimes give way to the necessities of a great community”. This decision was later specifically expanded to damage caused by mine fires. Only in the 1960s did a greater concern for public health and environmental concerns allow mine fires to be seen as legitimate areas of public concern, rather than the private, economic concern of the mining companies (Stranahan, pp. 165–16).
Origin of Coal Fires Three main causes of coal fires are human activity, spontaneous combustion, and surface fires. Human activity can range from careless mistakes to burning trash. This has been the principal cause of coal fires in NE Pennsylvania. Spontaneous combustion is not clearly defined but is understood as the tendency of a coal bed or stockpile to heat to the point where it starts burning (Uludag, 2007; Cao et al., 2007; Nelson and Chen, 2007). Generally, coals that have a tendency to spontaneously combust have a low rank and a high sulfur/sulfide mineral content (Cao et al., 2007). Anthracite in NE Pennsylvania does not have a tendency to spontaneously combust because of its higher rank (92–98% fixed carbon) and low sulfur content (0.3–1.2%) (Eggleston et al., 1999). Surface wild fires, either forest fires or grass fires, or lightning strikes can start coal beds on fire when they come in contact with coal (Whitehouse, 2003; Sternberg and Lippincott, 2004). The oldest known continuously burning underground mine fire is in New South Wales, Australia. It began from a lightning strike and has been burning for over 2000 years (Ellyett and Fleming, 1974). Even though one of the early discoverers of anthracite coal in NE Pennsylvania reportedly made his discovery when his campfire set a coal outcrop on fire, no reports of existing coal fires were made by the early settlers, and none of the coal fires researched for this chapter were started by wild fires.
The Anthracite Fires The anthracite region is similar to other coal regions in that it has had an extensive history of coal fires. However, the anthracite region is different from many other coal regions in that all of its coal fires appear to have started from human activity. Learning how to fight the coal fires was a trial and error process as illustrated by some of the early coal fires. The state Department of Environmental Protection only tracks those fires that it is charged with fighting. According to Steve Jones (Retired Chief, Division of Mine Hazards, Bureau of Abandoned Mine Reclamation, Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection) Pennsylvania has 39 active mine fires, more than anywhere in the nation. Of the fires that are being tracked by the Division of Mine Hazards, 14 occur in NE Pennsylvania. These numbers may or may not include recent fires. This number also does not include older fires that have been put out or are believed to be dormant. As an example of the difficulty of compiling a complete list of the mine fires in Pennsylvania, the 1993 US Bureau of Mines Information Circular 9352 listed 25 coal fire projects active in Pennsylvania (Kim and Chaiken, 1993, Table 2). Comparing their list with the one provided by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection shows that while some fires are on both lists, others are not. Therefore, there is no definitive list and certainly no historic database of dormant or eradicated fires. Selected coal fires have been described below to illustrate the mode of ignition, methods of fighting, and responses of the affected communities. Some fires, such as the Cameron Colliery at Shamokin occurred during the early days, while other fires like Mildred are more recent. Some of these fires occurred through mining accidents or human carelessness like at Laurel Run. Some fires have been fought, others were controlled but let burn, and still others were allowed to burn uncontrollably.
Mine Fires: ∼1820–1900 One early fire in the Tamaqua area started in 1852, which is in the central part of the Southern Field. The Little Schuylkill Company had allowed the underprivileged of the community to work one coal outcrop on the “E” vein, which occurred between the High Mine and the Greenwood Colliery. In the fall of 1852, while scavenging, they
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built a fire near an airshaft, and let it burn during the night. Some of the burning coals fell into the airshaft and lodged near some pillars in the Greenwood Colliery, starting them on fire (Detterline, 1968). The company attempted to extinguish the fire. At first, the company trenched around the fire, and this was unsuccessful. Next, they installed some large fans to pump carbonic acid in and smother the fire. Flaming sulfur protruded out of the airshaft 30 ft (9.14 m) high, creating a short-lived tourist attraction. The company hired a local faith healer, called a “pow-wow” to extinguish the fire, which was also ineffective (Detterline, 1968). By 1855, gas from the fire made working in the mine difficult and some miners were overcome and later revived when brought to the surface. Eventually, miners refused to mine and work was abandoned. Two attempts were made to determine if the fire could be controlled or extinguished. One occurred several months after the abandonment, when the boss and two miners went to see if they could starve the fire of oxygen or block areas so that other areas could be mined. When they did not return, a search party found all three dead. The second attempt occurred in 1858 when the General Superintendent of the Little Schuylkill Company and the General Agent entered the mine to see if the fire could be extinguished. Both perished. Finally, in 1859, the Greenwood Colliery was flooded ( Detterline, 1968). Blasé (1997) described a coal fire in the Heckscherville Anchor Colliery. This fire was on the northern limb of the Southern Field. It was first discovered on September 20, 1869, but no cause is given. The colliery was shut down, but another operator reopened the mine and worked the third or lower level, which was below the fire. The Philadelphia & Reading Coal & Iron Company took over operation of the mine in 1875 and continued working until 1877 when it was discovered that the fire had reached that area. The mine was flooded and abandoned. Attempts were made to reopen the colliery in 1896 by exploring the old workings. No evidence was found of a coal fire, but Dyer’s Creek was turned into the old workings in 1901 as a precaution. No evidence was found of the fire in 1906 (Blasé, 1997). The Cameron Colliery fire at Shamokin is in the Western Middle Field. This fire began on February 25, 1890, in the underground operations and defied early efforts to fight it (Lindermuth, 2008). It was decided to flood the colliery, and so the waters of Shamokin Creek were diverted into the mine. The water was finally pumped out of the mine on September 5, 1890, and work started on restoring the colliery to production (Lindermuth, 2008).
Mine Fires: ∼1900–2000 Laurel Run Laurel Run (Figures 25.1.1, 25.1.7–25.1.9) is a small town in the Northern Field adjacent to Wilkes-Barre. The Laurel Run fire occurred on the south limb of the Northern Field, that was approximately 6.4 km (4 miles) wide at that point. There is a broad, shallow dipping shelf with no subbasins. Three coal beds are burning at Laurel Run: Ross, Top Red Ash, and Bottom Red Ash (Dierks et al., 1971). The Red Ash coal bed is stratigraphically equivalent to the Buck Mountain bed in Centralia (Eggleston et al., 1999). The Llewellyn Formation occurs above the Red Ash and the Pottsville Conglomerate below it in the Northern Field. Based on a cross-section in Dierks et al. (1971, p. 13), the coal beds dip between 10° and 15° to the north in the area of the Laurel Run coal fire. Major faults near the fire could allow communication between the coal beds, but no major folds would split the fire (Sevon, 1976). Thus, the Laurel Run fire was limited to movement along the strike of the coal beds (to the northeast and/or southwest) and down dip (to the northwest). A fire began in the Red Ash Coal Mine on December 6, 1915, when a miner left a lit carbide lamp attached to a mine timber. The owners of the Red Ash Mine had no night watchman, which allowed the fire to burn undetected over the weekend. When work resumed, the company became aware of the fire and attempted to cut off the air supply by plugging openings with concrete and flushed sand into the immediate area (Randolph, 2002). They believed the fire was under control. However, in 1921, the fire was burning beyond the company’s containment area (Ashmead, 1922). The company began erecting temporary seals to contain the fire while allowing sections of the mine to be worked. The Red Ash Company continued to contain the fire until 1957 when the mines under Laurel run were closed. In September 1962, a resident was forced to abandon her home due to gases and subsidence and the community knew it faced an uncontrolled mine fire (Randolph, 2002).
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By April 1966, a plan was created to deal with the fire. A series of boreholes were drilled to determine the extent of the burn. It found that part of the fire was under the borough. Mine operators had robbed the pillars, weakening the overhead strata and leaving the ground susceptible to subsidence. Gases from the fire escaped through fractures into homes. An urban renewal project under the auspices of the Luzerne County Redevelopment Authority and the US Department of Housing and Urban Development was initiated, relocating 850 residents. Another section of the fire was burning beneath the Georgetown section of Wilkes-Barre. The pillars had not been robbed, and the fire was kept from the surface by solid rock. Dealing with the fire below Georgetown required blocking off access tunnels that fed oxygen to the fire (Dierks et al., 1971). The limited extent of the Red Ash Coal Company and adjacent mine boundaries provided barriers that prevented the spread. The fire did spread from the Red Ash mine into the Stanton–Empire mine and, in doing so, spread down dip under the Georgetown section of Wilkes-Barre. It also threatened Interstate 81 as it moved toward Wilkes-Barre (Nolter et al., 2007). Visual evidence of the mine fire is sparse (Figures 25.1.7–25.1.9). The area impacted by the fire, where homes and businesses were torn down, has been rebuilt, with larger homes than in the older section of the community. Areas that have not been rebuilt are visually indistinguishable from other areas that were not involved in underground or surface mining. The only actively burning area is under the Laurel Run Estates Mobile Home Park driveway. The authors observed gas issuing from surface vents (Figures 25.1.8 and 25.1.9) and a few examples of fractured, baked rock, and slight mineral deposition around the vents. There is no widespread lack of vegetation. Areas near hot spots contain plants, such as the lichen Cladonia cristatella and Hypericum gentianoides, which normally thrive in dry, rocky, sunbaked soils (Nolter et al., 2007). The approximately 30-ft-long section of the road that is above the fire has required extra paving but lacks visible cracks. Although the Laurel Run Mine Fire was a challenge due to its size, several factors made its abatement less of an engineering problem. All three beds cropped out east of town, where a surface mining exposed them. This provided a barrier to the fire’s advance. To the west, the mine pool under the city of Wilkes-Barre provided another barrier. With the exception of the area directly beneath the borough of Laurel Run, where pillar robbing caused subsidence and cracking, the fire burned under solid rock. There were only a few possible routes for oxygen to reach the fire (Dierks et al., 1971). Planners came to the Laurel Run fire with an understanding of what they were up against (Nolter et al., 2007) because the mine operators were able to pass information about the fire on to the government agencies. Shenanodoah The Shenandoah fire occurred on the northern margin of the Western Middle Field, which was underlain by 2000 ft (609.6 m) or more of the Llewellyn Formation. The Buck Mountain, Mammoth, Top Split Mammoth, and Primrose coal beds are present. A complex series of small synclines and anticlines occur in the Shenandoah area but do not isolate from other parts of the field. This fire started when someone kicked a salamander into the mine shaft. A salamander is a 55-gallon (208.198 l) metal drum with the top and bottom removed and holes in the side; hollow metal poles are inserted into the holes and coal added and lit it for heat. The fire started behind what is now the nursing home. It burned up to the street in front of the nursing home but never went farther. There was a baseball field close to it, and many residents recall inhaling the fumes during the games. About 25 years after the fire started, Pagnotti enterprises received $12 million to strip-mine it out, they were not to stop even if the funding ran out, and reimbursement would be made. The project ended up costing around $72 million. In the early phase of the fire, it could have been extinguished relatively cheaply but was left to burn. Carbondale Carbondale (Figures 25.1.1, 25.1.6) was the first location in the anthracite region to have underground mining. Experimental digging was started in 1812. A mine fire was discovered on the west side of town in 1946. Located
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in the northern part of the Northern Field, the syncline there is approximately 2–3 miles wide, and the fire occurred on the northern limb. The fire may have started as much as 5 years earlier, when the city was using the abandoned mine pits of the Hudson Coal Company’s Powderly Mine as a refuse dump. Because the fire was on the extreme edge of town, the City of Carbondale and the US Bureau of Mines made only modest efforts to control the burning. Water was used to flush the fire, and 80,000 cubic yards of silt were poured into test boreholes (Munley, 1998). Then, in 1952, the death of an elderly couple from carbon monoxide poisoning far from the supposed fire site convinced the town that it had a much larger problem. The Carbondale city government and Hudson Coal Company both sought more federal aid. New tests revealed that the fire now covered 120 acres and was burning to a depth of 100 ft. Experts believed it would be impossible to cut off the fire’s source of oxygen and smother it. Residents were constantly monitored for carbon dioxide, and fire-caused subsidence threatened homes and the city’s water system. At the time, the federal government only allocated $200,000 per year to fight mine fires, not nearly enough to handle a disaster the size of Carbondale’s (Munley, 1998). In 1956, Carbondale’s mayor and members of the Carbondale Redevelopment Authority attended a 2-day conference in Scranton on the newly created Federal Urban Renewal Program. Although designed for slum clearance, the Carbondale fire was accepted as an urban renewal project, with potential as a model for other efforts. Workers dug a series of trenches from 60 to 100 ft deep and three times as wide, removed the coal that was sold to help fund the project, and then replaced the earth after the burning material was extinguished. When the project was finished in 1972, $2,326,000 had been spent and 4 million cubic yards of earth removed. Two schools and 450 homes had to be destroyed (Munley, 1998). Centralia Centralia (Figures 25.1.1–25.1.4) is part of the Western Middle Field (Eggleston et al., 1999), which consists of six east-west-trending asymmetric synclines that are separated by anticlines (Arndt, 1971). This field covers 243 km2 area in Columbia, Northumberland, and Schuylkill Counties (Chaiken et al., 1980, p. 4). The central basin of the Western Middle Field consists of the Centralia syncline, which is bounded on the north by the Centralia thrust fault and on the south by the Locust Mountain anticline (Arndt, 1971). Only the four lowermost coal beds in the Llewellyn Formation are present in the Centralia area. These beds are the Buck Mountain, Seven Foot, Skidmore, and Mammoth. Other stratigraphically higher coal beds were removed by erosion (Chaiken et al., 1980, pp. 4–5). The four coal beds present resemble concentric bowls separated from one another by approximately 10–100 m of shale and sandstone (Chaiken et al., 1980, p. 4). The rim of each bowl is the outcrop of a coal bed. Each bed dips 22°north (Arndt, 1971) on the south limb of the Centralia syncline. The Buck Mountain coal bed outcrops close to the southern margin of the Centralia basin. The regional folding that had formed the Western Middle Field extensively fractured the conglomerate, sandstone, and shale, which occur between each coal bed, permitting air access to the subsurface and making it difficult to extinguish any coal fires (Nolter and Vice, 2004). Residents of Centralia set fire to a garbage dump in May 1962 and in the process, ignited the Buck Mountain coal bed (Nolter and Vice, 2004). The Centralia fire began in the Buck Mountain coal bed on a nose of an anticline separating the Centralia basin from the Ashland basin. As the fire spread, it advanced along four fronts. The dipping and fractured coal beds permitted the propagation of fire deep into the subsurface and contributed to a “self-propagating” convection cell (Chaiken et al., 1980, p. 9). As air is drawn into the fire from fractures in the coal and surrounding bedrock, hot coal fire gas escaping up dip permits more air to feed the fire. A 1938 study by McElroy showed that these convection cells provide the fire with a steady supply of air and permit it to propagate both laterally and down dip in a coal bed (Dekok, 2000, p. 31). Centralia’s fire forced the local mines to close in 1962 (Kroll-Smith and Couch, 1990, p. 3). Since then there have been intermittent attempts to control the fire. These included flushing the mines with water–rock slurry, the construction of fly ash barriers, and trenching. Dipping beds and highly fractured rock enclosing the coal made this fire expensive and difficult to control. Later, the Pennsylvania, with its share of Abandoned Mine Lands’ money, decided to buy out the nearly 1100 residents of Centralia. The Federal Government provided additional relocation funds (Dekok, 2000, p. 269–270). Buyouts began in 1969, although some residents have refused to leave. The fire has been left to burn.
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Panther Valley Firemen discovered a brush fire south of the Panther Valley High School in the Orchard Vein. They extinguished the brush fire and found the ground fire. This fire is in a small deposit of coal with no apparent underground interconnecting tunnels. The fire has the potential to move to the west, but would run out of coal before reaching any populated area. Since no danger is present, officials will only monitor it. A mining engineering for the Federal Office of Surface Mining (OSM) visited the site and reported that a small area of coal refuse appears to have been burning for some time. The area was inspected in 1995, and no problems were discovered. It is reported that the vegetation in the area has the typical gray cast of that surrounding older fires. Councilman David Wargo said the fire has been burning for decades. He said the matter of the fire has been raised because a new middle school is being proposed near the existing high school.
Mine Fires: ∼2000 to Present Mildred This fire occurred in the Northern Field, near the town of Mildred (Eggleston et al., 1999). The coal in this field is semianthracite. Mining began around 1860 using drifts and slopes. No surface mining was ever attempted. Veins of coal in the area varied from 24 in (0.61 m) to 6 ft (1.83 m) with most of the deposits being near the surface. Mining has tended to be small scale, and often seasonal, as a winter employment for farmers. The fire was discovered on May 30, 2004, although residents reported they had noticed a sulfur odor for about 5 weeks beforehand. The fire was restricted to an area of about 1 acre, and centered on the subsurface coal refuse at the former site of the Cline Ricci Breaker. The ground above the fire was very warm. Water poured on the site was declared to be “too hot to handle” when it pooled up. Carbon monoxide readings measured 50 ppm. After a visit by officials from the Federal OSM and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, the Sullivan Review (2004) reported, “If requested by the property owner, the Office of Surface Mining will extinguish the fire”, which they called “a quick project”. The local fire company eventually put out the fire with water. The authors were unable to gain access to the site of the fire. Local residents suggested that lightning started the fire, because there were old timbers and other wood scraps from a breaker and mine around the area. However, some have suggested that burning trash had started the fire. Olyphant The Olyphant (Figures 25.1.1 and 25.1.5) fire started in the summer of 2004 in an area on the southern limb of the Northern Field just south of the town of Olyphant. It spread through about 7 acres of underground mine workings. A 2000-ft (609.6 m)-long trench up to 130 ft (39.62 m) deep was dug to isolate the fire. When the authors visited the site in May 2008, the site had been trenched and a fence built around it. The authors neither noticed any odor nor did they see any surface manifestations but were unable to gain access to the area inside the fence. Excelsior Excelsior is in the Western Middle Field, just outside of Shamokin. Elwood Swank, owner of the Split Vein Coal Company, leased land near Excelsior from the Reading Anthracite Company. He had a permit from Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection to conduct surface mining in the area, and to bring in refuse for land reclamation. Among the refuse was leaf-based mulch approved by the Department. In December 2005, the compost caught fire. Most believed the fire had been intentionally set, probably by teenagers riding all-terrain vehicles. Fumes from the fire drifted toward the city of Shamokin, and soon coal waste on the site caught fire as well. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection ordered Swank to devote 8 h a day to removing the burning refuse and pushing it into a pond (the pond drained into a nearby stream already heavily polluted by acid mine drainage, so more mine waste was not seen as a problem). By January, the Department stated that good
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progress had been made on the fire; however, after several months it had restarted, probably because of another act of arson, and Swank was ordered to remove all the compost. In January 2007, as the work continued, the Shamokin News-Item stated that the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection had reclassified the Excelsior fire as a mine fire rather than as a refuse fire. Thomas Callaghan, the Department’s district manager in Pottsville, reportedly said that the refuse fire had burned deeper than anyone had thought, and that the subsurface coal was now going to have to be removed. After 2 days, the Department denied the truthfulness of the story, claiming that no subsurface coal was burning. Local residents did not believe the Department’s denial. Letters to the editor of the Shamokin News-Item openly called the Department incompetent and predicted that Excelsior would turn into another Centralia. By April, 200,000 tons of coal waste had been removed from the site. In July 2010, when the authors visited the site, there was no sign of an active fire. Palo Alto Palo Alto is a small, independent town adjacent to Pottsville and is located on the southern margin of the Southern Field close to the boundary between the Llewellyn and Pottsville Formations. Coal beds in the area are essentially vertical (Eggleston, 1992). In December 2008, the community became aware of a coal fire burning just outside their borough limits in East Norwegian Township. The fire had probably started in July, but because the site was isolated, about 200 yards from any homes or well-traveled roads, it had not been noticed until a local hunter, John Ketner, stumbled across it. Ketner notified the East Norwegian Township supervisors, who, after examining the site, decided “this was way beyond the scope of any municipality”, and contacted the Office of Surface Mining (Pottsville, 2009). John Mack, Office of Surface Mining project manager, was at the site within 2 days. After heat guns registered a ground temperature of 178 °F, exploratory boreholes were drilled to determine the extent of the fire. Results showed that what was burning was an 8-ft-long by 70-ft-wide deposit of coal waster. The site of the fire was less of a hazard than many of the other coal fires in NE Pennsylvania because the local water table was only 60 ft below the surface and so restricted the spread of the fire into any underlying coal beds. Once the extent of the coal fire was known, Mack said the next step was “to design a trench to isolate the fire”. By spring, the trench was in place, with 2 or 3 acres effectively isolated (Figure 25.1.1).
Discussion Wherever they occur, coal fires create serious problems. Mineral resources are destroyed, fires contribute to atmospheric pollution, and fire-impacted areas become hazards for local population. Even if the fire is contained, the threat of subsidence often renders the land useless for farming or building. Wildlife is forced to relocate, and gases create health problems. There have been coal fires in NE Pennsylvania from the start of coal mining in the region. The cause of these fires has been human activity, which is different from most other coal mining regions. The state Department of Environmental Protection only tracks those fires it is charged with fighting. Those coal fires that have been controlled or extinguished are dropped from the list and are known only from historical records or by local residents. The coal fires in NE Pennsylvania vary widely in size and significance. For example, the Mildred fire was small and was put out by the local fire company. On the other hand, the Centralia fire destroyed a town. The latter, the Centralia fire, is the only one in NE Pennsylvania that has achieved any notoriety (e.g. Dekok, 2000; Quigley, 2007). In examining the different fires in the anthracite region of NE Pennsylvania, several general observations may be made. First, the coal fires in NE Pennsylvania were all started by human activity. Second, they are unevenly distributed. More coal fires occur in the Northern and Western Middle Fields than in the Eastern Middle and Southern Fields. And thirdly of the 14 coal fires in NE Pennsylvania listed by Steve Jones, retired Chief, Division of Mine Hazards, Bureau of Abandoned Mine Reclamation, Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, six occur in the Northern Field and five in the Western Middle Field. Only three fires occur in the Southern Field, and there are none in the Eastern Middle Field.
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One possible cause for the greater number of fires in the Northern and Western Middle Fields is the greater number of stripping pits that have no effective control. People use stripping pits for trash disposal. When the trash catches fire, it can ignite the underlying anthracite coal beds. Another reason that a greater number of coal fires may occur in the Western Middle Field is because the area is less populated than the other fields. Thus the coal fires in the Western Middle Field are often allowed to burn because there is less threat to infrastructure. One of the reasons given by some residents of Centralia for not leaving their community despite the mine fire was that they believed the federal government wanted to get the coal underneath the town (Dekok, 2000, p. 37). In looking at other coal fires in NE Pennsylvania, we found that many private companies have been involved in putting out coal fires. We also found that it has been a common practice for these companies to keep and sell the coal they recovered while fighting the coal fire. A fourth general observation we made was that there has been a change in the responsibility of fighting coal fires. At first, the company that owned the mine fought any coal fire. However in later years, state and federal officials became involved in fighting fires, which has made the process more bureaucratically cumbersome. Commonly in Pennsylvania, the more a disaster is highlighted, the better the chance officials will act. Although relatively little research has been done on how the political process responds to coal fires (McCurdy, 2007), we have noticed that one way communities try to highlight the potential danger of their fires is by comparing them to Centralia (Wolfgang, 2008a,b). A fifth general observation that can be made about the coal fires in NE Pennsylvania is that more money and effort is put into fighting the coal fires whenever they threatened major infrastructure. Although there was no formal admission of this, it supports observations made by Whitehouse (2003). For example, the Laurel Run fire threatened I-81 and a railroad mainline as well as a suburb of Wilkes-Barre. The Carbondale fire threatened Route 6, which was the main east–west corridor in NE Pennsylvania, while Centralia threatened an isolated community and one state highway, route 61. For example, Dekok (2000, p. 60) mentions a memo written by a top assistant to the Chief of the US Bureau of Mines that a trench to stop the fire at Centralia was abandoned because it would have cost an estimated $5 million, and the total assessed value of the property in the town was only $500,000.
Acknowledgments We thank Glenn Stracher (East Georgia State College) for his assistance with our manuscript, Joseph T. Nolter Jr (Mahoney City, Pennsylvania) for the time that he spent creating our map, and library personnel at both Penn State Schuylkill and Hazelton for assisting us in gathering research materials for this chapter. We also thank the local residents in different fire site locations for providing us with information about and directions to the fires.
Important Terms Cameron Colliery Carbondale Centralia Excelsior Heckscherville Anchor Colliery Laurel Run
Mildred Olyphant Palo Alto Panther Valley Shenandoah Tamaqua
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Uludag, S., 2007. The spontaneous combustion index and its application: past, present, and future. In: Stracher, G.B. (Ed.), Geology of Coal Fires: Case Studies from Around the World. Geological Society of America Reviews in Engineering XVIII, pp. 15–22. Whitehouse, A.E., 2003. Coal Fires in Indonesia: Symposium on Coal Fires Burning around the World, American Association for Advancement of Science, Annual Meeting, February 13–18, Denver, Colorado. Wolfgang, B., Friday, October 24, 2008a. Experts Try to Avoid ‘Another Centralia’. Pottsville Republican and Herald. p. 1. Wolfgang, B., December 31, 2008b. Underground Fire Burns in Palo Alto. Pottsville Republican and Herald. p. 1.