State investigators rejected the contention of some of the trapped miners and of officials of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) that Quecreek’s bosses disregarded warning signs that miners were getting close to the nearby, water-filled Saxman mine. Instead, the report blamed inaccurate maps of the adjoining, abandoned mine.

“This is a story about insufficient maps,” said DEP secretary Katherine McGinty. She announced new guidelines for issuing mine permits. These will give mine safety officials veto power over new permits, she said, and would compel companies to prove that they know the extent of adjacent mining.

Meanwhile, other investigations continue including by the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) and by the Pennsylvania Inspector General’s office.

UMWA officials had joined the lawyer of six of the trapped miners, Howard Messer, in criticizing a preliminary report the DEP released last November as “woefully inadequate.” There is “little new in the Quecreek report,” said the July 24 Somerset County Daily American, referring to the DEP verdict.

The report glosses over conditions in the mine and blames former mine and mining officials for inadequate maps of the Saxman Mine, which had been abandoned since the 1960s. At the same time, the report does show some of the problems in the process of issuing permits to the operators of Quecreek.

The facts revealed include: The map of the abandoned Saxman mine shows digging through 1961, while the mine was in operation until 1963; no maps in use at that mine met state requirements as “true, complete, and correct”; state authorities approved a permit for Quecreek without the company reviewing coal production or county tax records for abandoned adjacent mines; no additional map search was conducted when Quecreek’s permit was greatly expanded in 1999.

A retired miner in the area had warned of a large, dug-out cavity in the adjacent mine at the time.

Messer filed lawsuits May 16 at Allegheny County Common Pleas Court on behalf of six of the nine trapped miners. They charge that a simple search of Somerset County tax assessment records by Quecreek Mine managers and their engineering firm would have revealed the true dimensions of the abandoned mine next door.

Unexploited coal reserves are taxed as property in Pennsylvania. About 3 percent of Somerset County’s revenue reportedly come from unmined coal. When a coal seam is exhausted, taxes on underground property are significantly lower. For this reason, mine owners have a substantial incentive to provide accurate information.

Tax records would have alerted the company that Saxman’s groundwater-flooded void was hundreds of feet closer than their plans showed. Underground miners could have been prevented from breaching it.

Messer’s lawsuits are based on a claim that mine officials had a legal obligation to use “reasonable care.” He told reporters that someone at Mincorp—a strip-mining giant that owns Quecreek Mining—must have looked at the assessment records and suspected that something was wrong. Messer said he has uncovered a “paper trail” from the Somerset County Recorder of Deeds office to the Tax Assessor’s office.

The lawsuits have been filed against Mincorp and its subsidiaries—PBS Coals, Inc., RoxCoal, and Quecreek Mining Co. Musser Engineering is also a defendant.

Although McGinty and the DEP blame inaccurate maps of Saxman to explain away the Quecreek disaster, the tax records tell a different story. They reveal that detailed information about coal mining in the area was available—including at the Saxman mine.

“The records are only as good as what the coal companies give us,” said John Riley, Somerset County Tax Assessor. “In this case, it looks like the old miners removed most of the coal in that tract. We don’t take off the assessment unless they’ve proven to us that they mined out all the coal.”

The paper trail began Jan. 1, 1951, when Saxman executives leased the rights to the “C Prime” coal seam near the village of Quecreek. Saxman mined the “Elias Bittner Tract” of coal until 1963. The 121 acres of coal taken out of the Bittner Tract formed the bulk of the underground lake pierced by the nine miners last year.

Citigroup, one of the nation’s largest financial institutions with profits exceeding $15 billion last year, is the largest single shareholder of Mincorp. In 1998, Citigroup and PBS managers seeking to salvage PBS from near bankruptcy announced a buyout of PBS and formed Mincorp.

It is the profit drive of these companies that’s behind the Quecreek disaster and a rising number of accidents and deaths in the mines. The number of fatalities in U.S. coal mines, surface and underground, was up to 21 as of July 26—compared to 16 for the same period last year and a total of 27 for all of 2002. Underground deaths this year are double the same period in 2000.  
 
 
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