The terrible cost of an unknown mine

PENNSYLVANIA often is split into its major parts. It is Pittsburgh to the west, Philadelphia to the east and everything else in the middle. Aside from the handful of cities, it is filled with almost 17 million acres of forest and more than 7 million acres of farmland. It is state parks and national forest and 85,000 miles of waterways. And below and between and under all of that is another Pennsylvania, easily forgotten. Pennsylvania used to be a leader in coal mining. To be fair, it is still the third-largest producer of coal in the United States, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. But today that means it produces 6.7% of the nation’s coal, less than half of neighboring West Virginia’s 14%. Wyoming is first with 41.2%. Coal is so much a part of the state’s history and legacy that dominance in the industry seems like something that just ended. For many places in Pennsylvania, those jobs are just a generation away. But Pennsylvania’s zenith in coal production was 1918 — more than a century in the rearview mirror. What we have left are the fossils of the coal industry. There are streams still being cleaned up from acid drainage. There are strip-mined swaths of land still being reclaimed. And under the earth are the mines we don’t remember.