By The River

There are several interesting parallels between Pennsylvania's long-burning Centralia mine fire, which ultimately destroyed the small town of Centralia, and the current oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. Both were predictable outcomes of our thirst for energy. Both were caused by violations of law and common sense, aggravated by hamhanded responses and bad luck. And the Deepwater Horizon oil catastrophe, like the Centralia mine fire, seems destined to ruin the lives of many people who had nothing to do with the initial accident.

We are actually a few days past the 48th anniversary of the Centralia mine fire, which began on Sunday, May 27, 1962, three days shy of the traditional Memorial Day until 1971. There is almost nothing left of Centralia today, but in 1962 it was a proud small town of about 1,400, with perhaps 500 homes, churches and other buildings. It was little different than other small coal towns in the Anthracite Region of northeastern Pennsylvania.

As I describe in my book, Fire Underground: The Ongoing Tragedy of the Centralia Mine Fire, workers hired by the borough council started the mine fire accidentally during the annual clean-up of the landfill, which was in an old strip mining pit a literal stone's throw from the Odd Fellows Cemetery. They illegally set the dump on fire to rid it of odors and make it less offensive to the many expected visitors to the cemetery on Memorial Day. They let the fire burn for awhile, then extinguished it with water from a fire company tanker. At least they thought they did.

Tragically, the fire was still smoldering down in the depths of the garbage. It spread through an opening in the pit into the labyrinth of abandoned deep mines that underlay Centralia, the legacy of more than 100 years of unregulated coal mining. The strip mine had cut through old, abandoned deep mines, as many here do. A state landfill inspector, knowing all too well of the potential danger, had ordered borough council to close all holes in the pit, but they had left one open.

Unlike the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, there is no corporate bad guy in the Centralia story. If anything, private mining companies tried to help, but were rebuffed by government bureaucrats at the state and federal level. Centralia was a failure of government at all levels.

Throughout the summer of 1962, Centralia Council appealed to the state and federal governments for help. Centralia's elected officials did nothing. In August, the state finally agreed to dig the mine fire out of the ground. But the project was underfunded, took several days off for the Labor Day weekend (the fire, of course, did not), and when the money ran out the fire was still there. This happened two more times in 1962 and 1963. Between 1965-70, the federal Bureau of Mines built an underground fly ash barrier--think of the booms encircling the oil spill--to block the fire from coming into Centralia. The barriers ultimately failed.

In late 1979, the fire and its deadly gases began moving under the populated part of Centralia and things got progressively worse. In 1983, the state and federal governments decided to relocate all Centralia residents at a cost of $42 million. Digging the fire out of the ground would have cost an estimated $660 million in 1983 and would have destroyed much of the town in the process.

What will be the fate of America's Gulf Coast and the Gulf of Mexico itself? BP, the owner of the spewing well, seems unable to stop the spill. There have even been semi-serious proposals to use nuclear weapons to seal the well. Russia supposedly has done this several times. Centralia still attracts earnest entrepreneurs who believe they have a way to extinguish the fire without digging. I heard from one just the other day who sounded promising. But I doubt the state of Pennsylvania will agree to spend the money. There are fewer than 10 people left in Centralia, and they will be gone soon. What is the point? Even though the fire has a clear path to Mount Carmel, several miles to the west, it might take 200 years for the fire to reach that far at its current rate of advancement. I'm sure the thought is, leave it for some bureaucrat in the 22nd century to worry about. We have more pressing problems.

Perhaps Memorial Day will come to have an environmental significance, when we think not just about wars between peoples and their cost, but wars against the environment and the equally lasting damage they do.

Posted by David at 07:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

In my nightmare, I smelled something odd. I got out of bed, quickly dressed and walked outside into the early dawn. The smell was coming from the Susquehanna River, and when I reached Riverfront Park I could see a thick plume of oil forcing its way upstream against the current. The oil gushing from the Deepwater Horizon break and eruption in the Gulf of Mexico had finally reached Harrisburg.

The experts who comment on this sort of thing had speculated at first that the break, while bad, could be contained. What they did not know, because BP had not told them, was that the day before the catastrophe they had quite unexpectedly pushed their drill into a vast and unknown oil pool that had erupted to the surface. Now the experts were saying it could spew oil for 200 years.

The water in my house stayed clean for a couple of days, but one morning when I turned on the shower crude oil began dripping out. I tried the bathroom sink and the kitchen sink and they pushed out oil as well. I walked outside again and my neighbors were packing things in their cars to flee. But to where? I awoke with a start and went to the bathroom. The water was again clean and pure. But for how long?

Posted by David at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It's not even a bad joke anymore, it's simply wrong. Wrong and destructive. A lie.

I'm talking about Pennsylvania's most embarrassing myth, that agriculture is the state's "No. 1 industry" and "contributes $45 billion to the state economy." The Patriot-News, after nearly 10 years of studiously avoiding (because of my reporting) this mendacity, jumped back in with both feet on Sunday in its top story on A-1, "Candidates cultivate farm votes." Yes, it's Farm Show week. And Auditor General Jack Wagner is only the latest in a long line of elected officials to unknowingly help perpetuate this myth.

Before I go any further, let me give you the real statistics, courtesy of the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis: in 2007, crop and animal agriculture, i.e., farms, contributed $3.3 billion to the $533.2 billion Pennsylvania economy. That's not even one percent! Let me give you some other statistics: manufacturing in 2007 contributed $73.4 billion to the state economy. Finance & insurance chipped in $40.4 billion. Government? $52.3 billion.

Farming didn't even beat out mining ($3.8 billion) or paper manufacturing ($3.6 billion). Agriculture in Pennsylvania is way, way down the list.

Ah, but wait, say the people at the state Department of Agriculture and the ag studies folks at Penn State whose jobs depend on this myth. If you add in food product manufacturing and the restaurant trade, that makes agriculture No. 1! Well, no, it doesn't. Food product manufacturing in 2007 contributed $7.8 billion to the state economy, and food service, $9.16 billion. Add that to farming and you get $20.26 billion. That's respectable, but well short of the claimed $45 billion and intellectually dishonest to boot. If you're going to count the rippling effect for farming, you also have to count it for mining, or paper, or any other basic industry. Those products also go into other products. Apples to apples, farming is one of the state's tiniest industries.

Income and jobs-wise, the situation is, if anything, worse. Pennsylvania had 7.4 million people employed in all jobs in 2008, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Of those, 56,230 were farmers. Now, the same folks who say agriculture is the state's number one industry say you have to also count farmhands, people working in food manufacturing (like Hanover Foods, for example), grocery stores, and bars and restaurants (I'm not making this up) as "agriculture" employees. Apart from the continuing intellectual dishonesty of this, that brings the total up to 746,660, or 10 percent of the workforce.

Sounds halfway respectable until you realize those are generally low-paying jobs. Total compensation in 2008 for the "expanded" definition of agriculture jobs was $14.2 billion, or 4.4 percent of the total $320.6 billion in compensation paid to Pennsylvania workers that year. Farmers alone were paid an average of $10,711 apiece. There have to be a lot of part-timers among the 56,230 who called themselves farmers that year.

So who benefits from this brazen mendacity? That's the really interesting part. Why should Pennsylvania have a separate cabinet department for one of its tiniest industries? Nostalgia is great, but we don't have a Department of Conestoga Wagons and Flintlock Rifles. The Ag Department ought to be merged with either the Department of Environmental Protection or the Department of Community and Economic Development to save money. But hey! Doesn't the state's "Number One Industry" deserve its own cabinet department?

But even more than that, and why the myth of Pennsylvania agriculture is so destructive, is the special status and attention it gains for farming in the state Legislature. I can tell you that many legislators believe the myth is gospel truth and act accordingly. That's why we have laws like the Right to Farm Act that limits what municipalities can do to control farm odors and other agricultural nuisances, and the loophole-ridden Nutrient Management Act that regulates how and where farmers may spread the enormous amount of manure generated by today's factory farms. I first debunked the myth while working on a 1998 series on factory hog farms and the problems they cause.

The clout of the agriculture industry in Harrisburg is such that DEP doesn't want to touch farmers, who generate much of the nutrients that are killing the Chesapeake Bay. Municipal sewage treatment plants are ordered to make costly upgrades that will burden ratepayers but yield only incremental benefits, while farmers are merely "encouraged" to undertake voluntary compliance measures like planting trees. Why would we want to burden our "Number One Industry"?

The hard truth is that animal agriculture may have to be banned or severely limited in south central Pennsylvania if the Chesapeake Bay is to be saved. Either that or the state will have to pay for manure incineration facilities for the region. As you saw from the income statistics, few farmers can afford a facility like that themselves. Farmers can't continue to burden the land (and drinking water) with endless annual applications of hog and poultry manure. I yield to no one in my love of a good meat entree, but things can't continue the way they have.

It is time for the leaders of Pennsylvania to acknowledge the truth. Agriculture isn't the number one industry and probably never was, at least since the very earliest days of the Commonwealth. It is an "important" industry, as many are. To falsely claim it is number one makes the state look ridiculous and probably harms real economic development.

(The Bureau of Economic Analysis website is at www.bea.gov. To find the contributions of various industries to the gross domestic product of Pennsylvania, follow these steps: Under "Regional," click on "GDP by State and Metropolitan Area." Under "State Annual Estimates," click on "Interactive Tables." Step 1, click NAICS. Step 2, highlight "Gross Domestic Product by State." Step 3, highlight "Pennsylvania." Step 4, highlight "All Industries." Step 5, highlight "All Years." This will bring up the table I used. To get to employment and income statistics for Pennsylvania, go back one page and click on "State Personal Income and Employment." Then click on "Interactive Tables, Annual Personal Income and Employment." Click on SA25 for "Employment by Industry" and SA06 for "Compensation by Industry." You will need to enter Pennsylvania and the years that interest you, just as before.)

Posted by David at 03:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday I gave 25 environmental studies students from the State University of New York a tour of Centralia and its mine fire. During lunch afterward at May's Drive-In in Ashland, I was talking with the bus driver and he mentioned how he lives in the Skaneateles, N.Y., area, and recently allowed a gas drilling company--he didn't say which one-- to lease the right to drill on his property for gas in the Marcellus Shale formation.

What I found interesting and disturbing was his description of how the gas company approached him. Kind of a bad cop, good cop approach. The first guy sent out by the gas company was blunt and heavy-handed. According to the driver, he said the gas beneath his property didn't belong to him and they would get it one way or another, including by drilling sideways from the property of someone who did sign a lease, which technically can be done. He offered a low ball price, basically said take it or leave it, and then told him that he could sue, but the gas company would win in the end and he would get nothing.

"I almost threw him him (bodily) out of my house," the bus driver said.

Then the gas company sent a second representative, much nicer than the first, and offering a somewhat higher price. The bus driver, by now unnerved, signed with the second rep. I asked him if he had consulted a lawyer at any point during this process, and he said no, but now wished he had. I mentioned how the Republicans in the Pennsylvania General Assembly had stopped an extraction tax on the gas industry on the grounds that they didn't want to hurt a "struggling young industry" and that got a good laugh at the table.

Let's be straight. This is not a "struggling young industry." It is Halliburton, Chesapeake Energy, and the other big boys from Texas. Pennsylvania apparently has a whole lot of gas in the Marcellus formation, and this gas is the legacy of all state residents. We need to levy a serious extraction tax and devote that windfall to something like making college more affordable, if not free, for Pennsylvania children.

And the state needs to beef up regulation of the gas industry, not cut it as appears likely in the wake of the disastrous budget agreement signed recently. The state also needs to proactively educate land owners about their rights and how to get the best deal from drillers. There are lawyers developing this as a specialty, among them Bill Cluck of Harrisburg. Lawyers cost money, true, but they can save or make money in the long run.

We have ample evidence in Pennsylvania of the cost of unregulated energy extraction, the Centralia mine fire being a prime example. The mine fire was the result of a 1962 clean-up fire set by the borough in its landfill, which was in an abandoned strip mining pit with openings into the labyrinth of abandoned underground mines beneath Centralia. Had that pit been backfilled after the coal was extracted, as must be done with new strip mines now under a federal law passed during the Carter Administration in 1977, there would have been no Centralia mine fire and the town would still exist.

There is considerable concern among environmentalists and public officials about the threat to drinking water supplies posed by Marcellus gas drilling. New York City is desperately trying to stop any gas drilling in its pristine watershed, which provides some of the best, safest, tastiest drinking water in the world, and isn't filtered. New York is concerned that they will be forced to built filtration plants at huge cost to protect city residents in the event dangerous chemicals used in gas extraction get into ground water supplies.

We need to take action now in Pennsylvania so all residents benefit from the gas reserves and we don't have Centralia's younger brother 100 years from now.

Posted by David at 08:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

If I ever seem impatient with my fellow Democrats in the Rendell Administration, it is because too much of the time they act like Republicans.

Just as the word went out from Harrisburg a couple of years ago that Pennsylvania was wide open for wind energy development, and that local residents who didn't want their mountain ridges despoiled by wind turbines would be treated as obstructionists, so too the welcome mat has been extended to the natural gas industry. Northeastern Pennsylvania, especially Susquehanna County, is part of the Marcellus shale belt, a promising place to find natural gas, and a certain full speed ahead mentality has set in. Landowners are struggling to get fair prices for the right to drill for gas on their property, turning in some instances to public interest lawyers like my Harrisburg neighbor Bill Cluck to help them get fair deals from these big Texas oil and gas companies.

The environmental toll is mounting. The state Department of Environmental Resources this week ordered Cabot Oil & Gas of Houston, Texas (of course), one of the most active explorers for natural gas in Pennsylvania, to shut down operations pending an intensive environmental review after having committed three chemical spills in nine days in Susquehanna County. Interestingly, one of the drilling contractors for Cabot was our old friend Haliburton, also of Houston, Texas (of course), who everyone came to love during George W. Bush and Dick Cheney's Iraq War. Just great, all around lovers of the environment.

A side note: remember how the Pennsylvania Senate Republicans fought hard and defeated Gov. Rendell's attempt to capture some of that natural gas revenue for the people of Pennsylvania, because we supposedly didn't want to hurt young, struggling start-up businesses--like Haliburton? Similarly, if you like the environmental record of gas drilling now, imagine what it will be after widely-rumored layoffs take place at DEP to help balance the state budget in place of those natural gas tax revenues.

Much of this gas drilling occurs in a part of Pennsylvania (as does wind energy development) that is far outside the backyard of any large newspaper. The only reporter who appears to be doing the kind of hard-hitting stories that need to be done is Abrahm Lustgarten of ProPublica, a relatively new, non-profit investigative reporting organization based in New York City. You can read his gas drilling stories here. Since ProPublica stories can, as I understand it, be used free by other media, newspapers in Pennsylvania ought to start running Lustgarten's pieces if they can't send their own reporters up there.

Posted by David at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)