Perilous Pits As Threat of Old Mines Grows, A Legislative Fix Isn't Working Coal Fires Rage, Craters Open And People Fall Into Holes; Congress Reopens Debate Wrong Place to Cook Hot Dogs By John J. Fialka Wall Street Journal June 4, 2003

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POTTSVILLE, Pa. — Shortly before dawn on Dec. 1, 2001, a tipsy young man from nearby Shamokin was doing some off-road four-wheeling with a friend and happened upon an isolated concrete shed. He figured it was the perfect place to relieve himself. It wasn't. Inside, he fell into a 50-foot-deep anthracite coal mine shaft that had been abandoned years earlier. A garbage pile broke his fall. But when he crawled off it, he tumbled another 150 feet down a slanted shaft and hit a ledge, where he lay unconscious for more than an hour. When he awoke, he heard voices calling his name and started trying to climb back up. The man summoned to rescue him was Paul Hummel, Pennsylvania's mine safety director, who says he has handled way too many mine-related mishaps over the years. "You develop what I call anthracite ingenuity, " he says. The green hills of eastern Pennsylvania were once one of the world's biggest sources of coal. Now most of the miners and much of the coal are gone, leaving behind a dangerous legacy - a sprawling network of abandoned mines. This state is home to 1,700 of them. There are another 4,300 scattered elsewhere in the country. People falling into mine shafts are just part of the problem. Coal fires burn in abandoned mines for decades, belching dangerous levels of carbon monoxide. Mines silently flood for years before suddenly disgorging millions of gallons of red, acid-laced water, poisoning nearby streams and rivers. Sometimes the ground over shafts collapses, opening up huge holes. They undermine the integrity of nearby roads and buildings. In Pennsylvania, the dangers caused a whole town, Centrailia, to be abandoned. The U.S. Interior Department has recorded at least 81 deaths since the beginning of 1999 in abandoned mines, many of which formerly produced coal. Congress aimed to solve these problems when it passed the 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act. But the program has evolved into a wayward, slow and politically contentious process that everybody involved agrees is broken but nobody is quite sure how to fix. The law imposed fees on coal companies based on how much they mine, and the program has collected almost $7 billion so far. The money goes into a federal trust fund that is supposed to be used to reduce the health and safety hazards posed by abandoned mines. But after 26 years, an estimated 80% of the total area at risk hasn't yet been safeguarded, the trust fund brims with $1.5 billion in unspent funds, and some of the money that is spent goes to projects unrelated to coal. That leaves Pennsylvania and the country's seven other most mine-riddled states with only a trickle of funds to seal forsaken mines and clean up the mess. The main problem is that states that produce the most coal get the bulk of the money. That seemed fair to Eastern states back when they produced 75% of the nation's coal. But in the 1990s, coal production shifted rapidly westward as environmental laws and competition drove mining companies to cleaner-burning and more cheaply mined coal in such states as Wyoming, now the nation's leading coal producer. The result: About two-thirds of the program's funds are designated for states in the West. Yet 93% of the problems that remain-acid-tainted streams, underground fires, gaping holes and other hazards that would cost an estimated $6.6 billion to fix-are east of the Mississippi, says Jeffrey D. Jarrett, director of the U.S. Interior Department's Office of Surface Mining. Because the law is up for renewal next year, the debate over how to fix it is starting to heat up. Eastern states want to direct more funds to regions with lots of abandoned mines, but Western states don't want to give up their revenue. The hazards are likely to grow more dangerous and expensive. Nationwide, the U.S. Interior Department estimates that 3.5 million Americans live less than a mile from hazardous abandoned coal mines, a figure that will rise as housing construction continues to spread into the countryside. And the shafts below get ever more unstable, says J. Scott Roberts, a deputy secretary of Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection. "There are vast portions of western Pennsylvania that are supported by old locust posts," Mr. Roberts says, referring to timbers used to shore up mine shafts. Now the timber is deteriorating, he says, I and "one of the laws that everyone winds up complying with is the law of gravity.” That puts buildings and highways built over such tunnels at risk. Abandoned mines are scattered throughout Pennsylvania. The state estimates that runoff from them has poisoned 2,800 miles of its waterways. Some shafts tunnel right under cities, including Pottsville, where Mr. Hummel is based. Mining laws required coal companies to leave barriers of as much as 100 feet of coal and earth to support the surface, but sometimes they illegally mined that, too. "They left maybe 20 to 30 feet," Mr. Hummel says. "All of a sudden that falls in, and I got a 300-foot hole. " Companies are required to map their shafts meticulously so safety officials can keep track of them, but small, illicit miners often didn't. Slow Burn At the moment, there are 45 coal fires burning out of control in Pennsylvania. One of them, in Centralia, was ignited by burning garbage in 1962 and has enough coal to burn for an estimated 250 years. State officials figure it would cost $600 million to put the fire out. Instead, they bought the town's 500 homes and businesses, starting in the mid-1980s. What's left is a fenced-in ruin of vacant buildings, frequently wreathed in steam from rain and stream water seeping down onto the fire. To address all these problems, Mr. Hummel's office gets an average of $24 million a year from the federal fund. At that rate, the state estimates it will take at least 60 years to fix the most serious problems. In the meantime, Mr. Hummel performs triage, repairing immediate hazards and responding to emergencies. A stocky, gruff-voiced former miner and Marine sergeant, Mr. Hummel, 56 years old, says he has fished six human corpses and one live horse out of mine shafts over the past 24 years. One time, the earth beneath a downtown Scranton scrap yard suddenly opened up, swallowing a 35-ton crane-which was about to be used in a mine-reclamation project elsewhere. Mr. Hummel helped pull that out, too. Racing toward the mine shaft containing the young man from Shamokin, Mr. Hummel knew it was going to be a risky operation, he recalls. Old mine maps showed two underground fires burning within 1,000 feet of the spot, suggesting there might be pockets of carbon monoxide nearby. The precipice on which the man landed overlooked a drop of several hundred more feet into an acid-tainted water pool. Mr. Hummel had two state mine inspectors rappel toward the man on ropes, so they could toss him a line and haul him out. He emerged two hours after his ordeal began, wearing a "Bad to the Bone" T-shirt. Mr. Hummel took him to a hospital for an examination, which revealed only bruises and a minor concussion. "Then I had the police arrest the S.O.B. for being so stupid," Mr. Hummel says. "This kid doesn't know how lucky he was.” He was fined $500 for public drunkenness and disorderly conduct. Pennsylvania spent $2 million of its federal abandoned-mine money filling that shaft with tons of concrete and construction debris. The federal money also finances a statewide advertising campaign called "Stay Out and Stay Alive," which informs people that trespassing on abandoned mine land is illegal and treacherous. Many of the mines were abandoned decades ago, and the companies responsible for them are long gone. The federal fees imposed on the nation's remaining coal companies in 1977 were intended to repair damage their predecessors left behind, says West Virginia Democratic Rep. Nick J. Rahall II, who helped pass the law. "The idea was that the days of rape, ruin and then run were over for the coal industry," he says. Under the law, half of the taxes on coal production must be returned to the states where the coal originated. The law also allows states that have fixed all their abandoned coal-mine hazards to apply the money to similar problems associated with copper, uranium and other mines. Once those are fixed, states can use the money for more loosely defined mining-related activities. Wyoming has earmarked $17 million to build and equip a geology building at the University of Wyoming. Indian tribes, which get a share of the money to deal with mine problems on their reservations, are using the money to build community centers and sewage-treatment plants. “We've got a fundamental problem here that's based on the law,” says the Interior Department's Mr. Jarrett, who previously headed Pennsylvania's efforts to control mine hazards. He advocates revising the 1977 law, scheduled to expire next year, to focus more of the money on states that have the most problems. That would be fine with Pennsylvania and other Eastern coal states, but not Western governors. Some of them back coal-industry demands that the fees be eliminated or reduced from the current rate of 35 cents a ton for surface mines and 15 cents a ton for underground mines. Under the existing law, the government could allow more money to flow to needy states. Over the years, however, several administrations and the House and Senate appropriations committees have decided to keep, rather than spend, about $1.5 billion of the money. If all coal production tax revenues were spent every year, funding would total about $288 million annually. But the program's budget consistently ends up being much less; $203 million was appropriated for the fiscal year ended last October. Leftover funds accumulate in the Treasury. That suits many people in Congress and the administration, explains Rep. Rahall. "They like [the money] sitting here, so it looks like they're offsetting the federal deficit," he says. Another problem is that the total appropriation changes every year. "Our funding fluctuates so much we really can't do a good job of planning because we're never sure," says Murray Balk, who regulates mine safety in Kansas and heads a national association of state officials who deal with abandoned mines. In Wyoming, officials protest that they have fixed all the state's abandoned mines, yet its coal production results in more payments to the trust fund than any other state 40% of the total. And over the years, $358 million of Wyoming's share has accumulated in the Treasury. The $64,000 Question "This program is broken and how to fix it remains the $64,000 question," says Rep. Barbara Cubin, a Wyoming Republican. She thinks Mr. Jarrett's proposed solution - giving more of the money to states with the most abandoned mines - is unfair. "We have companies in Wyoming who have never worked in the East and therefore feel they have no obligation to pay for projects in Pennsylvania," she says. "We are being asked to pay for transgressions in the coal industry that go way back over a hundred years." Rep. Rahall has brokered two previous extensions of the 1977 law, but this time he has difficulty seeing a solution. Forcing the Treasury to cough up money it owes the states may seem simple enough but is unlikely in an age of growing budget deficits, he says. Sending the bulk of the money to states with the most remaining abandoned mines sounds logical, but "the reality in Congress is that we can hardly expect the Wyoming congressional delegation to sit back and allow such a [bill] to go through," he says. None of this is very helpful to Pennsylvania's Mr. Hummel, who will spend this summer trying to keep kids out of harm's way. Coal pits from abandoned surface mines filled with water look like inviting alpine lakes surrounded by high cliffs to dive from, but they make for dangerous swimming holes. Old machinery sometimes lurks just under the water, which is laced with pollutants. Mr. Hummel usually handles a drowning or two a year. On a recent visit to Centralia, where anthracite has been burning near the surface for more than 40 years, he chased away a group of teenagers who didn't want to see a good fire go to waste. "They go in there at night to drink beer and roast hot dogs," Mr. Hummel says.