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Quecreek Lessons Learned: Pennsylvania Mine Nears Closure 15 Years After Near-tragedy

Published: July 25, 2017 |

[Click image to enlarge]

[Click image to enlarge]

Some five dozen miners gouged coal from the dark depths of the Quecreek Mine last week as a Somerset County community prepared to mark the 15th anniversary of the mine rescue that riveted a nation and forever changed the industry.

The mine best known as the site of the 2002 near-tragedy is nearing the end of production, said Peter Merritts of Corsa Coal Corp., which acquired the operation three years ago.

Quecreek Mine will close next year when the last coal is extracted from the Upper Kittanning seam there. Lessons learned from the ordeal that left nine miners huddled in a flooded shaft 24 stories underground for more than three days will remain — and have made miners across he country safer ever since, experts said.

The drama began to unfold around 9 p.m. July 24, 2002, when a crew working with outdated mine maps mistakenly bored through the walls of the abandoned Saxman mine, unleashing 72 million gallons of icy water.

The miners sent an alarm to a second crew, which allowed them to flee the rushing waters. Then, after finding all exits blocked by rising water, they headed for high ground and sheltered in the darkness on a spit of rock for 77 hours.

Meanwhile state, federal and industry experts labored 240 feet above the mine shaft in a pasture on Bill Arnold’s farm. They were desperate first to drill a 6-inch hole to force air into the frigid mine and finally to bore a hole that would accommodate a rescue capsule that slowly lifted each man, one by one, to safety early July 28.

The rescue, broadcast around the world, was greeted by cheers from the miners’ families and a nation still reeling from the 9/11 attacks a year earlier.

“People are still coming to see where that happened and experience part of that miracle,” said Arnold, a dairy farmer and executive director of the Quecreek Mine Rescue Foundation.

He estimates 10,000 people a year come to the rescue site and visitors center, located on his family’s Dormel Farms on Haupt Road near Sipesville. He is booking tours as far ahead as August 2018.

“What, for a very long time, looked like it was going to be another tragedy, I think was a real turning point for Americans everywhere,” Arnold said. “To realize that God is still on the throne and Americans can do amazing feats when we pull together as humans, shoulder to shoulder.”

LASTING LESSONS

Just as important were lessons the mining industry took away following a series of state and local investigations that concluded that a lack of accurate underground maps led to the accident.

Perhaps the most important takeaway was the push to collect, digitize and archive old mine maps, said Joe Main, the former director of the Mine Safety and Health Administration and deputy secretary of Labor.

Main began his career as a miner 50 years ago in Greene County and rose to become one of the nation’s foremost mine safety advocates. He said the effort was long overdue, especially in regions such as Western Pennsylvania where more than a century of mining activity left countless abandoned mines.

In Pennsylvania, officials launched a major effort to search out old mine maps and had them digitized and stored at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

“It was a problem in Pennsylvania and across the country,” Main said. “Across the country, activity took place to better identify and have a repository of those mined-out areas.”

The quick response to locate the high spot in the Quecreek Mine and sink an air shaft to the miners was critical to their survival, he said.

COMING TOGETHER

Former Gov. Mark Schweiker — who stayed on the scene throughout the rescue and was among the volunteers who helped lift weary miners to a staging area where doctors provided emergency care — will be the keynote speaker when the miners and rescuers gather at 2 p.m. Thursday on Arnold’s farm to mark the 15th anniversary of the rescue that was chronicled in a movie and several books.

Arnold said all nine miners — only one of whom ever returned underground — are expected to be on hand for the event.

Merritts said Randy Fogle, the 59-year-old mine foreman who rallied his crew as they sat in the dark for days, still works in Corsa’s Casselman Mine, just over the Maryland border.

While none of the others returned underground, Harry B. Mayhugh, Tom Foy, John Unger, John Phillippi, Ronald Hileman, Dennis Hall, Robert Pugh and Mark Popernack stayed in the area and picked up their lives. One went to work for the state prison system; another stayed in the energy industry, working for the company that placed giant windmills on the ridges of Somerset County; another found a job with the Turnpike Commission; and yet another opted to continue working for the coal company, albeit above ground.

“They’re all still good, hardworking people. This didn’t change that one bit,” said attorney Howard Messer, who represented eight of the nine miners in a civil suit that settled seven years after their underground ordeal.

John and Betty Rhoads in 2002 renamed their restaurant in nearby Jennerstown the Coal Miner’s Cafe to honor the men.

“They was a lot of our friends, and we knew the families of a lot of them, so we christened it one night. We had them down for supper, and we christened it Coal Miner’s Cafe,” Rhoads said.

Walls in the main dining room are filled with old mining artifacts that have been donated by local families over the years. A small display including photos of each of the nine Quecreek miners decorates a corner of the restaurant.

The Rhoadses said it’s not unusual for one of the former miners to stop in to eat, even as visitors wander over to the display.

It’s still something to celebrate.

A community festival celebrating the rescue, including food, live music, a car cruise, free tours of the visitors center and fireworks, will kick off at the Arnold farm at 3 p.m. Saturday.

Those who huddled with the families of the trapped miners 15 years ago recall how the community rallied to support the anxious families as they waited, sequestered at the nearby Sipesville fire hall.

Sally Shroyer, 60, president of the Sipesville Volunteer Fire Department’s Ladies Auxiliary, said she learned about the accident about an hour after it happened.

“We just grabbed boxes of Kleenex, blankets, pillows — anything we could find — and ran to the hall,” she said.

Shroyer, whose son-in-law works in the Quecreek Mine, said she and other women cooked feverishly and tried to calm the families over the next three days.

“We did our best. We tried to get everything (the families) needed and help them,” she said.

Shroyer said she didn’t realize until after the ordeal was over that it had been broadcast worldwide.

“We were in our own little world up there,” she said.

SAFETY INNOVATION

Bill Tolliver, a retired mine rescue expert, trained and led 22 rescue teams in five states for CONSOL Energy. He still marvels at the previously untested technology that plucked the Quecreek miners to safety.

Tolliver, who was ill when the Quecreek mine flooded, sent his rescue team from Enlow Fork in Greene County to the Somerset County mine, where experts from across the industry and nation came together. He remembers watching the rescue on television.

“The part that amazed me so much was that capsule had to go down nine times and come up nine times. Going down a bore hole, you get a piece of rock and everything can snag. That it went down and came up nine times was amazing,” Tolliver said.

Eight years later, the same technology would play out successfully once again when 33 trapped copper miners were pulled from the Copiapo Mine in Peru after 69 days in the dark.

Although the mining industry has contracted dramatically over the past decade and a half, safety and rescue technologies continue to advance.

Main said MSHA officials worked with robotics experts from Carnegie Mellon University to perfect robots that can be used in rescues. They’ve also developed a seismic device that will allow miners trapped as far as 2,000 feet underground to communicate with rescuers on the surface.

“Episodes like Quecreek, you have to stop and see what went wrong and fix it. It is remarkable how far we have come. But we still have a distance to go to make sure every miner can go home safe,” Main said.

— By: Debra Erdley and Stephen Huba, Tribune Review

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