The 50th anniversary of the Old Forge borehole is drawing attention to the dark world that underlies the Scranton area and the river and bay it pollutes.
When the Old Forge borehole was drilled in 1962, it relieved water building up in the shuttered mines. The relief value discharges between 40 million and 100 million gallon of acid mine drainage per day in the Lackawanna River near Union Street.
The hole is a monument to the end of underground mining in Northeast Pennsylvania, and is credited with ending a tense time in the area's history. It is also the largest point source of pollution in Chesapeake Bay into which it ultimately drains.
In early 1962, a rainless flood struck homes in Duryea, Old Forge and upper Pittston as a climbing water table entered the basements of homes and business. Hundreds of other homes were threatened by the unseen menace. In winter of 1961-62, water forced its way out of mine entries and mine boreholes, creating a persistent stream that formed a glacier-like formation making roads impassable and encasing some homes.
A series of mine subsidences in the Bellevue section of Scranton were blamed on the accumulating water in the mines, but experts today say that was probably just a coincidence.
The 42-inch borehole drains what some call an underground lake, one that Lackawanna River Corridor Association executive director Bernie McGurl said holds nearly as much water as Lake Wallenpaupack.
"Built on toothpicks"
The image of the legacy of mining has been culm heaps and rusty breakers. The flooded mines below are an unseen, but no less important legacy.
Deep mining had all but ended by the end of the 1950s. With limited drawings of the unseen network of mines and geological formations beneath, people in the 1960s could only imagine the caves, tunnels, underground lakes and waterfalls as something from "Journey to the Center of the Earth." The formations had names and people would discuss, for example, how the Olyphant Pool, a higher perch pool, would cascade down into the Metropolitan Pool, the water-filled mines under greater Scranton.
"It's cavernous," said Tom Supey, mine foreman at the Lackawanna Coal Mine Tour, describing the Scranton underground. Those caverns, broken up by support pillars and connected by mine passages, extend 33 miles from Forest City to Duryea where a geological formation called the Moosic Saddle serves as a divider for the coal veins, mines and now flooded mine pools. South of the Moosic Saddle is the Wyoming Valley and its flooded mines. There's not just one layer of mines. In some places there are as many as seven layers. It's been at least half a century since anyone could walk through even the uppermost caverns. Describing what it is like requires creative comparisons.
Mr. McGurl describes it as being inside a giant sponge and moving between connected voids.
The top mine is an 18-inch vein, the bane of miners who had to crawl to remove the coal. Below that is what miners called "The Big Vein," a void with a ceiling 12 to 14 feet high and soaring to 20 feet in places. Today, the water levels of the underground lake fluctuate around the Big Vein ceiling depending upon rainfall. The other layers are forever under water.
Near the hillside benches, where the coal veins and mine caverns tilt above the water level, an adventurous boater could navigate the voids, Mr. Supey said. As best as he knows, no daring boater, nor scuba diver, has tried. "I would not recommend that," he says flatly.
Reminders of the voids are less frequent today than in the 1960s and 1970s. During the construction of what is now Regional Hospital of Scranton and the original buildings of the University of Scranton campus, excavation opened up the mines and complicated construction. The Wall Street Journal described Scranton as "being built on toothpicks."
How mines flooded
Most mines in the anthracite region are under the water table. To get to lower veins, large pumps would dewater the mines allowing miners to get in and remove the rock and coal. As mining declined and more collieries ceased operation, fewer and fewer pumps were at work and the underground lake swelled. When the Pennsylvania Coal Co. abandoned its mines and turned off the last of the pumps in November 1960, the underground water levels surged 103 feet to near 700 feet above sea level. In another unrelated incident, a 200-foot-thick barrier holding back mine drainage from the Olyphant Pool was compromised, possibly from the final miners "robbing the pillars," and water began to get through and into the Metropolitan Pool. Some of that water made it over the Moosic Saddle and into Luzerne County mines at 565 feet above sea level, but then the water backed up.
The rising water created a rainless flood.
At first, about two dozen homes at the lowest level of the Lackawanna River watershed in Duryea, Old Forge and upper Pittston had flooded basements and ever-rising water. About 200 others were threatened. Water seeping from mine boreholes and mine entryways froze, creating glacier-like formations that made roads impassable and encased some homes.
Through most of 1962, people followed underground water levels with the same worried interest the public gave river levels last year in the aftermath of Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee. Half a century ago, residents worried about water rising from the ground rather than over a dike, as aware of how many feet their basement floor was above sea level as they were of their address. They checked the newspaper daily for subterranean water levels from Scranton City Engineer Thomas Kennedy or Deputy Mines Secretary Daniel H. Connelly.
The outcry prompted state and federal geologists to come to the area and find a solution. They came up with the borehole, drilled at the lowest point in the valley where it could drain into the Lackawanna River.
Peering through a metal grate down to the borehole, one sees the churning violent water emerging from deep under the ground. What comes out runs along a trough and then enters the Lackawanna River, where the iron from the acid mine water begins to kill the river by scavenging oxygen and coating the river bed with iron, giving it an orange look and a rotten egg smell. The river merges with the Susquehanna and then empties in the Atlantic Ocean through the Chesapeake Bay.
A grand solution is in the works that would create a water treatment facility and remove the iron from the water before it is discharged in the river. Mr. McGurl is confident that a compilation of grant money would help build a water treatment facility that would remove the iron, which could then be used in manufacturing. Iron is an important ingredient in pigmenting paint, for example.
Contact the writer: dfalchek@timesshamrock.com