The Near-Disaster at Quecreek Mine

Charles McCollester

 Last summer the attention of the nation and the world was riveted by the amazing rescue that brought nine Pennsylvania coal miners out of a non-union mine in Somerset County. In a period of economic recession full of anxieties generated by the 9/11 attack, the gripping drama of the rescue provided an inspiring positive moment for the nation. As investigations proceed, however, broader dimensions of the story are unveiled. Few of them have been explored by Disney or other organs of corporate media.

The most common characterization of the incident was the appellation: “miraculous”, In this conservative and religious rural area, a combination of the memory of many mining deaths, the dedication and commitment of the rescuers, and the solidarity of the trapped men triggered an outpouring of church and community sentiment. The emotion of the moment was further intensified by the fact that the crash site of United Flight 93 with its well-promoted message of courage and solidarity in the face of death was only thirteen miles away.

The flood of testimonials to the mercy of God threatens to obscure the very human factors that led to the near disaster in the first place. In fact, the flooding of the mine reveals much about government incompetence and/or complicity with powerful vested interests, corporate irresponsibility and greed, as well as coordinated anti-union activity. God may well have had a hand in the rescue, but the flooding can’t be pinned on the deity. Human avarice and more than a century of fierce manipulation and corporate struggle for profit and control were behind the wall of water that swept into the Quecreek mine.

It is unsurprising that most of the multiple investigations undertaken to date have focused on the failures of state officials from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection to maintain accurate maps and provide them to the Black Wolf Coal Company at the time of its granting a mining permit. The fact that a more recent map of the neighboring Saxman mine than that in the hands of the operator was donated by a deceased state mining official to the nearby Windber Coal Heritage Center led to the hope initially that the whole mess could be blamed on a dead bureaucrat. Indeed, state officials from Governor Mark Schweiker to the director of mine safety were naturally much more interested in celebrating the rescue than investigating the causes of the disastrous breakthrough.

The brouhaha about the state’s granting of the mining permit to Black Wolf based on a map made in 1957 seven years before the last coal was extracted from the adjoining Saxman mine tended to exonerate the operator/president Dave Rebuck, a rough and tumble coal operator. The media the time of the rescue focused on how Black Wolf was mining hundreds of yards from the Saxman based on information from state approved maps. Rebuck, even tried to ride on the divine coattails when in one local TV interview he called the flooding an “act of God”.

In fact, Black Wolf had multiple warnings about the inadequacy of their map in 1999 when the mining pennit was issued to Mincorp, owner of the coal and sponsor of Black Wolf. Rebuck is a former Mincorp executive, Local residents who opposed granting the mining permit literally predicted the flood that occurred. One of them, Jeffrey Bender, stated after the accident: “We all knew this would happen. We supported the miners and prayed for them, but we all knew what would happen.. .What’s so frustrating for us is that we warned DEP (Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection) and they seemed to be on the side of the mine, not us. But we knew, we knew.” On local television several elderly former Saxman miners testified that they had gone to Black Wolf in the months just preceding the breech to warn the company that their map was inadequate and Black Wolf was nearing the Saxman workings. It was also well-known that operators often “cheated around the edges” taking adjoining company’s coal without recording it on a map.

More recently in a “deathbed” conversation reported to a U.S. Senate investigating committee convened by Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Spector, Blame Mayhugh, one of the trapped miners said that Randy Fogle, their crew foreman, expecting imminent death, revealed that he had gone to Rebuck two weeks before the accident urging him to pull out, “that things were getting bad.” When the accident happened, Rebuck claimed that the mine was dry and that state inspectors had visited recently. A union miner friend who was at the rescue site asked why then were all the rescued men wearing rain gear and why had the pumps been running full bore prior to the breakthrough? Indeed, one of the nine miners, John Philippi, recently testified before same Senate subcommittee that production had been reduced by half in the days preceding the flood because of the supersaturated state of the mine. “The problem was water was coming down the roof. The roof bolters couldn’t keep up. Everything was sloppy and wet. It couldn’t hold the roof bolts.”

Governmental inadequacy whether stemming from chronic under-funding, indifference, or complicity wit private sector interests is symbolized by the recent transfer of the state’s Bureau of Mine Safety from the Department of Labor and Industry to the Department of Environmental Protection. Miner safety is subsumed under environmental concerns — an area that has not exactly attracted much support from Republican lawmakers on either the state or national levels. The ultimate act of political cynicism was reserved for President Bush who made a choreographed whistle stop visit with the rescued miners on his way to a multi-million dollar campaign fimd-raiser in Pittsburgh. While his administration has cut black lung benefits as well as funding and employees from the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration, he came to “celebrate life, the value of life, and as importantly, the spirit of America.”

Unwittingly, one paragraph of Bush’s remarks actually comes close to defining the central issue: “They understood that they needed to rely on each other, rely on the strength of each. They huddled to keep warm; they said prayers to keep their spirits up. They understood they needed to tie together to fight the underground current. It was their determination to stick together and to comfort each other that really defines kind of a new spirit that’s prevalent in our country, that when one of us suffer, all of us suffers; that in order to succeed, we’ve got to be united...”

One of us suffers? - How about an injury to one is an injury to all. Tie together to fight? - How about the human right of workers to associate, to organize, to be represented. United? - How about the United Mine Workers of America.

If the union had been recognized in that mine, the workers could have refused to continue advancing as they saw conditions worsening without fear for their job. They could have demanded that test drilling precede mining in any border area that was as clearly a potential danger as the approaching Saxman mine. Advance drilling is a much more reliable method than mapping. It provides physical evidence not historic testimony. Union miners at Saxman had been trained not to mine up slope because of the constant danger of flooding in that area. Quecreek miners were mining up-slope directly toward a mine that available hydrologic studies had shown was full of water.

If workers had not been afraid, they might have raised concerns like these. They might have been more candid about the issue of responsibility immediately after the rescue when some of them supported Management’s claim of a dry mine and good mining conditions. In fact three of the miners had signed union cards in the past and were very aware what the price of trying to be united and collectively organized in a dangerous work environment can be. Now that issues of company negligence are being raised and the attorney for most of the miners is threatening to sue, the media is giving voice to those frying to suppress questions about the operation of the local coal industry by saying that such exposure threatens the jobs and the livelihood of those miners still working at Black Wolf and elsewhere.

Unfortunately that’s true. Coal mining in Somerset County is a tough and hard business at $30 a ton. Each one of us benefits from the cheap electrical energy that we waste so profligately. I visited a German mine this summer that produces coal at 3,100 feet deep for $200 a ton. Miners retire at 50 years old with 95% of salary and of course free medical care. People conserve energy in Europe because it is not cheap. Quecreek Mining was run no worse that many other operations here and around the world. Unionism is fiercely resisted, among other reasons, because health and safety, adequate medical care, and a decent retirement costs money.

 Somerset County has been a battleground between the mineworkers union and anti-union operators for more than a century. Up in the northeast of the county a sharp controversy has recently arisen over the placement of a state approved historical marker commemorating the bitter “Windber Srike for Union: 1922-3”. The town of Windber was the operations center of the Berwind White Coal Co. that once provided coal to the city of New York’s commuter rail system. As the strike of the non-union miners stretched on for 18 months with miners’ families evicted from their homes spending a winter in tents and makeshift shelters, a commission of inquiry was sent by the mayor of New York City to investigate. Their finding that the condition of the striking miners, was “worse than slaves prior to the Civil War” was reported around the country.

The Berwind Group today is a billion dollar company with nearly 4000 employees, Berwind Corp. is the largest landowner in Cambria and Somerset counties owning approximately 35,000 acres. At this point, the majority of the Windber City Council proclaiming their loyalty to Berwind, opposes placing the marker in the town’s Miners’ Park. The UMWA plans to hold its April 1 Mitchell Day rally next spring in Windber to dedicate the marker. A negotiated settlement is hoped for.

Since the geology of the region is very convoluted and the coal is relatively near the surface, mining has been done either by surface strip operations or in deep mines smaller than those prevalent in the large Pittsburgh seam, traditionally union, operations to the west. A pattern of ownership has developed that is even more convoluted and less understood than the local
geology. A half-dozen layers of ownership/partnerships fills the space between the hardscrabble operators like Black Wolf and the big corporate entities like Citigroup, Berwin and Consol who sit at the top of the pyramid and enjoy the fruits without the liabilities or the need to get their hands dirty. Avoidance of the UMWA as well as of tax, insurance and environmental liabilities is the name of the game.