The Center for Public Integrity

Down in Washington, Pennsylvania, an hour’s drive southwest from Pittsburgh, one message can be found plastered on billboards, newspapers, even diner placemats. It reads: “Coal, Pennsylvania’s #1 Fuel for Electricity. Now Clean and Green.” 

Those last words probably don’t spring to mind for citizens in the coalfields of northern Appalachia, where longwall mining thrives. A highly productive method, longwall mining yielded 176 million tons of coal in 2007—15 percent of total U.S. production. An estimated 10 percent of all U.S. electricity now depends on coal from longwall mines, which have grown in Appalachia and in Illinois, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. 

But longwall mining is the most brutal technology yet employed to extract coal from underground quickly and cheaply. A hulking shearer, the longwall machine chews the coal seam and leaves the ground to cave in what the industry calls “planned subsidence.” Residents living above mines describe the effect differently. Says Rebecca Foley, whose historic house has been shaken apart by the shock waves: “It’s like living through an earthquake that happens in slow motion.”

Northern Appalachia represents that epicenter. In southwestern Pennsylvania, six of the country’s top 25 longwall mines snake below 138,743 acres of rural terrain—15 percent of the area. By contrast, the remaining 19 mines are scattered among West Virginia, Ohio, Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, and western states. Nationwide, no other place has as many operations—or as many citizens living above them—as southwestern Pennsylvania.

Rebecca Foley, by contrast, seems desperate to discuss that topic. Sitting at a cluttered desk in her library, she talks a blue streak about the seven-year battle that she’s waged against Consol Energy, the owner of Dilworth Mine. A petite nurse whose golden locks and ruby cheeks belie the warrior within, Foley, 50, lives atop a ridge in Jefferson, just west of the Hatfield’s Ferry coal-fired power plant (among the state’s 10 dirtiest). She moved to the basin in 1986 from the Virginia side of 

The sound of the longwall machine hits you first, a steady churning, methodical chomping that seems to emanate from everywhere at once. Stand before the six-foot-high layer of coal — the “coal face,” in mining parlance — and you’ll witness the source of this cacophony. It thunders like an industrial slicer: you can hear the steel shearer’s engine swirling away as cutting blades lop off the jet-black bed and crush it to chunks. The machine passes by, leaving the seam face three feet thinner than before. The sound continues around the clock, from deep inside the earth, wherever coal can be had.

The Center for Public Integrity’s year-long investigation into the social and environmental impacts of longwall mining centered on hundreds of pages of documents obtained from government sources, such as the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; legal agreements between coal companies and property owners; environmental studies; landowner letters; and federal and state records requests. The library features key documents exemplifying key people or issues in each of the project’s magazine articles.

The library for Longwall, Part One, includes the following records:

1. A Notice of Intent to Mine — A typical Notice of Intent to Mine is sent by a coal company to landowners whose properties it will undermine informing them of their legal rights under Act 54. Here, Consol Energy’s subsidiary, Mine 84, sent the notice to John and Cynthia McGinnis, of Washington, Pennsylvania.

2. Official Notes on Stream Damage — These are the notes on record in a district mining office of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) documenting an agency investigation into the de-watering of Tributary #32596, dubbed “Kim Jones Trib.” Kim Jones reported that her stream had disappeared after Consol’s Bailey Mine and its longwall machine went underneath her farm in 2004.