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Valley Of Forgotten History |
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Written by Atty. Eugene Kelley
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Thursday, 16 September 2010 10:50 |
Growing up in Northeastern Pennsylvania provided an experience that could not be easily duplicated. Year-round, our playgrounds were black deserts that stretched for miles, dotted with deep pits where dark water pooled to unknown depths. We spent long hours, armed with BB guns or .22 rifles, shooting at rats that inhabited the old mine works.
 On hot summer days, we played and climbed on enormous, rusting, Erie Bucyrus, drag line shovels, splayed out–– abandoned and immovable. They look more like the bones of dinosaurs than a machine from an industrial era. These dead, hulking machines were everywhere.
We fished, waded, and swam in the Susquehanna and Lackawanna Rivers, where the banks are lined with red and orange rocks colored by seepage from the mines, which somehow still sift into their currents, reeking of sulfur and sewage.
We traversed rusting railroad bridges, sometimes at night, long since burnt and decrepit with age. We found ways to cross large gaps in the span, sometimes climbing and hanging 40 feet above the river. Our parents warned us of the dangers, but we couldn’t resist.
Old financial statements from the coal and rail industry show massive expenditures and receipts from the extraction of coal from our valley. The world demand for power and energy was met by J.P. Morgan and a few other industrialists who, on the backs of migrants from the old countries, became wealthy beyond all reckoning.
Old photographs of breaker boys, miners, and poverty-stricken, little, patch towns show an even greater price in human suffering. The lives of children were sold for a few pennies a week. From 1790 to 1957, coal was the focus of the economies of Pennsylvania and the rest of the world. At its peak, around 1917, the coal industry employed 170,000 workers, in and around the mines.
To enable the coal and rail companies to remove the coal, the Pennsylvania Legislature passed statutes that granted them vast powers over river and massive tracts of land in our region. Their unrestricted activities resulted in the moonscape we see as normal each day.
As it has a habit of doing, history is repeating itself. The giant energy companies have returned to the coal regions, this time to extract natural gas. The world demands it. Permits for drilling are being issued wholesale. Terms like “eminent domain” are being kicked around the Pennsylvania Legislature. A massive mobilization of manpower and equipment is well under way– all this at a time when our state is bankrupt and the ethical standards of our government are daily proven to be non-existent. The lives of our children are still being sold (kids for cash) and now their futures, in this region anyway, are being traded away for a pittance.
J.P. Morgan, the same company that finances the removal of mountain tops in West Virginia, has again become enamored with our region.
All of this is occurring with almost no coherent or organized outcry. The documentary Gasland appears as the only counter to the natural gas initiative. How many of us have seen it? Has its bleak message had any impact at all? While it seems clear that gas drilling and fracking, like coal mining, simply destroy the environment, drilling is moving forward at an astonishing rate. Unless it is slowed and controlled, history will repeat itself with a vengeance. Any job can be done safely if enough time and money are spent with that object. What is the hurry?
If we do not answer this question now, our grandchildren will spend their free time climbing on old gas-drilling equipment. They will fish in creeks and rivers that carry even more strange colors and smells. They will inhabit an even stranger moonscape of environmental decimation, and none of it will seem to them at all strange.
How long before we wake up? |
