G.P.H.S. Past Project Information
The Knox Mine Disaster Discussion
Summary by Mark Dziak
Using decades-old mine maps, survivors and historians recently located the exact spot at which the Susquehanna River broke through the roof of the Knox mine on January 22, 1959. On that disastrous day the mine flooded and 12 miners' lives were washed away. In honor of the deceased, a memorial marker, donated by Arthur Bartoli of Veteran's Affairs and Jack Marino of Dupont Monument, was placed at the Port Griffith site.
On May 8, 2003, the Greater Pittston Historical Society sponsored a public discussion on the Knox mine disaster. Approximately 40 people attended the talk at the former Pittston Hospital, including former miners, survivors of the catastrophe, the nurses who assisted them, and family members.
"In our society, we're so busy rushing towards the future-you've got to be somewhere now, don't you?-I'm not surprised that we don't do a good job understanding the past. It's a cultural phenomenon," said project moderator Dr. Bob Wolensky, who studies local mining history and has published a book on the Knox disaster. Currently he's working on a second book, Voices of the Knox Mine Disaster, which will record testimonies, editorials, and other memories of the event.
"This is not a story that ended with coal," he said, regarding the Knox tragedy. "It has taken different twists and turns. This is our story."
Wolensky began the presentation by asking survivors, family members, and anyone else with firsthand experience to come forward and share their stories. First among these witnesses was William Hastie of West Pittston, a former Knox Coal Company employee who arrived at the mine at 2 p.m. on January 22 to begin his second-shift duties. He had been unaware that the river broke through the mine roof at 11:38 a.m. that morning.
"When I went in, I was told, 'Billy, we have trouble here,'" he said. Immediately Hastie found himself a part of the effort to get the situation under control and assist the trapped miners. First he was assigned to patrol the Lehigh Valley Railroad track and halt all traffic, rail and human. He did this for around two hours when he noticed a cloud of water vapor upriver. "I wanted to go over directly, but, conscience-stricken, I decided I'd better make another patrol downriver," he said.
On this final trip, Hastie encountered another miner, Amadeo 'Paul' Pancotti, whom he initially detained. Pancotti already knew of the dangers, however; he had in fact just escaped the flooding mine through the long-closed Eagle airshaft, and said there were five or six men still stranded there. Hastie realized that the cloud of water vapor he had seen had come from the shaft.
"I called to people on the bluff, spectators and second-shift miners, 'Get rope! Get rope!'" Hastie said. They found electric cables instead, with which they hoisted out the three men they found waiting at the foot of the airshaft. By this time a crowd, including officials of the Pennsylvania Coal Company (the mine's lessor) and federal and state mining inspectors, had gathered around the shaft. They organized a rescue party to lower into the mine.
"The superintendent, who was my father-in-law, had sent orders that Big Bill Hastie was too heavy to go into the mine [with the rescue party]. Here I was, 212 pounds and lowering 260-pound Jim Jeffries in. The truth was that my wife and I were expecting a baby that day and my father-in-law didn't want to have a widowed daughter with a new baby," said Hastie.
Meanwhile, Hastie recalled, officials had sent news of the disaster to Coxton Yards, which sent down a crew of workers who cut into the track nearest the river, and swung the track over to the riverbank. Then they sent around thirty coal gondolas along the rails and began dumping them, one by one, into the void. "The first two or three just floated away," Hastie said. "They realized they'd have to open up the bottoms of the cars so the water could get in."
"Incidentally, one of those gondolas is still stranded several hundred feet below the break-in point in the river," he added. "It's a very ghostly thing, an artifact of the disaster."
The next testimony was given by Joe Stella, a former surveyor for the Pennsylvania Coal Company whose job it was to keep mining maps up to date. He was coincidentally inspecting the Knox mine on the morning of January 22, only to find himself caught in the midst of the disaster and taking on a hero's burden.
Stella was among a group of 33 miners attempting to escape through the abandoned Eagle Air Shaft, and elected to stay near the back of the group to assist some older men who couldn't keep up. "Just in that act, Joe was a hero," said Hastie. "Every minute he spent in the mine reduced his chances of escaping."
Stella and the straggling men were separated from the main group and left to fend for themselves. After facing numerous setbacks and dead-ends, they found the foot of the Eagle airshaft clogged with debris. Stella led some of the miners back into the chambers to gather tools and search for other stranded miners. In the meantime, the others had dug their way out with their hands and climbed from the shaft. Stella kept his team together and ultimately led them back to the shaft and out to safety.
January 22 began as an ordinary day for Stella, who had been assigned to inspect the Knox's May Shaft and River Slope mine. Leaving his lunch in the car (he planned to finish work by 1 p.m.), he chose to tour the west slope section of the May Shaft first. There, he and the foreman, Myron Thomas, inspected the work area over the course of a few hours. When they were finished, Thomas said, "Joe, wait a minute. Wait for me while I have a sandwich and I'll walk out partway with you."
Stella followed the foreman into a makeshift office area, which was whitewashed and had electricity provided by trolley wires. He began looking over his maps but was soon interrupted by Thomas. "'Joe,' he said. 'There's something wrong. I hear that motor coming back. It just went out with the loader, and it takes an hour, hour and a half, for the motor to come back,'" Stella said. "Then I could hear the motor buzzing, coming in, and it stopped right at the office where we were."
The driver reported to Thomas that they'd just received a call from the outside for everyone to get out of the mine. According to Stella, Thomas said to the driver, "Go over to Marcy--I have two crews over there--and meet us at the beginning of the tunnel. Joe and I will go in [this section] and get the rest of the men out."
"So we went in and got men out and we all assembled at the beginning of the main tunnel, which is the entrance and exit of that section," Stella said. "We got together, I don't know how many men. Myron said, 'Is everyone here?' 'Yeah, yeah.' 'Okay, well, let's start out.'" Stella began leading the group, but within about 50 feet, they were already stepping in water.
"And I knew there was no water in this tunnel," Stella said. "I said, 'Myron, there's something here.'" Using his spotlight, Stella peered down along their intended path, a downward-pitched tunnel. There was water to the roof; the miners were cut off from escaping to the May and Hoyt Shafts. Stella and Thomas decided to lead the group toward the River Slope instead.
"We get towards the River Slope, and the pressure of the water is getting greater. That's how we knew that that's where the water was coming from. The pressure was taking mine cars and timber. The ice was 18 inches thick," Stella recalled. "You couldn't hear anything, you just had to motion with your light, or go to a man's ear and tell him what you're going to do."
Since the main haulage road was set in a gully, it filled up quickly with fastwater, but the stranded miners were able to negotiate a safe path above it. When they reached the River Slope, however, they found water to the roof. Cut off once again, Stella and Thomas decided to turn around and head for the Eagle airshaft.
"I said, 'You take the lead, I'll stay on the back end,'" Stella recounted. "I stayed back. There were a couple old men back there who were having a tough time keeping up. We got separated, and we were left behind. We encountered more and more miners who just couldn't keep up."
Stella's group, now seven in number, eventually made it to the Eagle airshaft. To their dismay, there was no sign of Thomas, and the shaft was completely blocked up. Stella was the most surprised of all, since he'd surveyed the shaft in 1947 and it was "wide open, with sun shining in from the outside. When a train went by, you could hear the train. But when I got there [on January 22], it was filled in."
Despite the debris, the miners knew it had to be the correct spot because they could feel ventilation pulling through. But how could they get out? "I said, 'Who wants to come with me? We'll go back and break into miners' boxes for tools.' So three of us go back, and four stay there [at the Eagle] and start pulling this debris down.
"Instead of just getting tools, we went all the way back to where we met, probably a couple thousand feet, but couldn't find anyone else. So I told my buddies, 'Let's go back, break into some miners' boxes and take whatever we can and go back up,'" Stella continued. They did so, and collected fire line, batteries, dynamite, picks, shovels, and a sledgehammer.
The men found their original path now impassable due to the water pressure, so they headed towards a cinderblock wall about 400 feet up a slight grade. "I said, 'Let's break the wall here and see how great the water pressure is here,'" Stella related to the audience. The miners did just that, knocking cinderblocks from the top of the wall using the sledgehammer. When the wall had been reduced to a height of three or four feet, water began pouring over. The water was just building there, and there wasn't a dangerous amount of pressure yet, so the men decided to jump the wall and proceed through the water.
Helping the older miners (at least one being over 60 years old) and hauling their equipment, the group headed into the water, dodging floating timbers. Their path took an uphill slant, and the water level became lower and lower. Finally, looking ahead, they saw a light. Stella called out towards it, thinking it might have been other men from his and Thomas' original party. An unfamiliar voice answered: "This is [Knox foreman] Frank Handley... They opened up the hole here. We came down this shaft."
Stella's group dropped their tools and rushed towards the opening. "From in the mine, you couldn't tell how much fill there was. [The trapped miners] started pulling debris down, and it took us a couple hours or more to get back [from gathering tools, during which time] they opened up the hole," Stella said.
After their harrowing journey through the flooding mines, the group was pulled out to safety. Stella came out last, around 4:30 p.m., and was immediately asked what happened. He told the story and speculated that Myron Thomas and his group must have missed a turn in the chambers. "'They're either lost in the old workings or trying to get out through the Schooley shaft, and they won't stand a chance there,'" he said.
A rescue party headed down into the air shaft, where they eventually located and saved Thomas' group of 34 miners, Stella said. Meanwhile, Stella and his compatriots were rushed to Pittston Hospital. He remembers being soaking wet as the medical personnel snipped off his clothing and boots with scissors and treated his water-numbed legs. He was kept at the hospital overnight and then allowed to go home.
"I guess that's about it," he said.
Where Stella's experience ended at the hospital, many others' experiences began there. Violet Williams, the Pittston Hospital nurse supervisor on the day of the disaster, next told her part of the story. "It was bedlam at first, because we got the report of the mine cave-in, and the water rushing in. [The miners] didn't all come in at once. There were a few in the beginning. Most of them were wet and full of coal dust and exhausted," Williams recounted. To accommodate them all, the nurses who were already on duty stayed there, and some other, off-duty nurses were called back to work.
The bruised and fatigued miners were treated by the doctors, given oxygen, and stabilized. One by one they were transported up to the wards where they were "washed and given fresh clothing and tender loving care," Williams said. "They were happy to be in the hospital in warm beds and warm clothing, with no injuries or fractures, mostly just exposure and exhaustion. Some stayed overnight, others a few days."
"There were a lot of people in the waiting room, waiting for loved ones to come," she added.
One of those people was Al Cianelli, 19 years old at the time, who had rushed to the disaster site when he learned that his brother's father-in-law, Sam Altieri, was trapped underground. Cianelli joined the discussion and said, "We saw the gondolas going down into the river, twisting. It was amazing." When he and his family learned that rescued miners were being taken to Pittston Hospital, they rushed there in hopes of finding their loved one alive.
"We were in the aisleway down below where the miners were coming in, just standing there. They were coming in one by one. We just kept waiting. Finally, they said, 'That's it,'" Cianelli said. "That was something embedded in my mind forever, seeing the miners coming in one at a time. It was heartbreaking."
Fred Bohn told Wolensky and the audience that his father was one of the first men to emerge from the mine that day. "My father never talked about [his ordeal] afterwards," he said. "He was one great gentleman. He didn't last long after that."
Joe Francik, Jr., told the crowd he recalled the day when he, at the time a 10-year-old student at St. Mary's Assumption School, was fetched out of class by his sister and driven by their uncle to the scene of the tragedy "to see the water going in." Francik's father was trapped somewhere below. "After seeing that, I didn't think I'd ever see him again. When I did see him again, at the hospital, his face was covered in black. It was a hard time getting him clean."
Francik later learned that his father hadn't been informed of the dire nature of the emergency; he was simply told to get out of the mine. Not realizing the extent of the danger, he had continued working for (as Francik was told) a full hour.
Faced with the question of whether or not the miners should have been told exactly what was happening, Stella said he felt the right course of action had been taken. He explained that if they'd been told the river broke in, the men would dash for the main tunnel where they would be caught in the swift, icy water.
Hastie agreed. "It was a blessing," he said. "[If they'd been told] there would have been panic and chaos."
However, whatever benefits were gained by the decision had to be weighed against tragic losses. Don Baloga and his sister Audrey Calvey lost their father John Baloga that day because he stayed in the mines to retrieve his tools, knowing he was supposed to leave but not realizing his life was in very immediate danger. Baloga recounted the horrifying morning:
"I was in the garage. About 11:30 or 11:45 a.m., my mother comes screaming, 'The river broke into the coal mine. Your father is down there.' I jumped into the car and went to the shaft." He found it filled with water, and spectators crowding around it. "I was up there, with all the miners coming out. I saw one miner; I said, 'Did you see my dad?' He said, 'Yeah, he's right behind me.' But he never came out," Baloga added.
Calvey remembered being very close to her father. "When he got home from work I'd usually have a shot and a beer for him, to wash down all that black," she said. She did not attend school on January 22, and was witness to the panic and the rush to the hospital. "My mother was going crazy. I'm going nuts myself, asking, 'Is John Baloga here?' We kept asking. Someone said there were still some missing. We saw a list the nurses had. My dad's name was the second name. Still missing.
"The disaster didn't have to happen. It did because of greed, the almighty dollar," she said.
Baloga shared his sister's indignation over the unnecessary disaster. "Many times before that day, I heard him tell my mother: 'You know we're mining beyond that red line; we aren't supposed to.' But word was out that if you tell the bosses, they'd tell you: 'You got a family? Keep your mouth shut.' My father told my mother this a lot of times. It was greed, that's all it was," Baloga said.
Michaelene Sinkavitch was the niece and goddaughter of one of the cave-in's victims, Frank Orlosky. Her story shed light on the domestic side of the tragedy. "On the day of the disaster we were at his house, and we got the most critical call we ever got. He'd died. There was no money coming in. [My aunt] had to go bake cookies and wash clothes and clean houses," Sinkavitch said tearfully. "She never got compensation--about 15 years later they compensated her, a lump sum of several thousand dollars. She had to raise two children. This was simply disastrous for her."
Sinkavitch remembered her late godfather as a "happy-go-lucky guy, always whistling, laughing, giving rides on his knee."
Some believe all the fear and sadness of the day inspired supernatural events throughout the area. John Baloga, who lost his life in the mine, wound a 7-day clock before leaving for work that morning--the clock ran for 10 days. Calvey said she has since wondered "if maybe Dad lasted that long." Wolensky told the audience that in several instances, people reported having had dreams of drownings and other terrible events in the nights just before January 22.
Stella was persuaded to share his memory of an eerie phenomenon he has long kept to himself. "As I was going with those men, heading towards the shaft, I could see light. Every time I'd look up. It would narrow and then widen out, as far as I could see. That stayed with me for a very long time," he said. "The way it made me feel was: keep going, keep going, don't stop. I really had a lot of energy."
"Well, you didn't get your energy from your lunch. You left that in your car," joked Hastie, to the laughter of the attendees.
Also attending the presentation was Steve Lukasik, a photographer who, along with his brother, was among the first on the scene on January 22, documenting the catastrophe for future generations. They spent two weeks at the scene taking pictures of the miners, the river, and the land. Lukasik said 35 photos of theirs were on exhibit at the Anthracite Museum in Scranton; a picture he took of Joe Stella emerging from the shaft was "published all over the country," he said.
With the personal memories shared, the broader question remained: How could this have happened?
Stella explained his position in the matter. Though he was charged with inspecting the mines, due to bureaucratic limitations he could not have prevented the abuses that led to the disaster. He explained that the Knox mine was leased from the Pennsylvania Coal Company, which owned all the mines. The Knox Company needed permits from the Pennsylvania Company to undertake any mining project. Stella would receive a copy of each permit, and study the data therein: the seam of coal being mined, the width of the chamber, how much pillar they would leave, and so forth, he said. "I used to do periodic inspections. Since I had the permit, I knew right where to go to check," he added.
A red line had been drawn on all mining maps, denying the Knox Company access to the coal under a certain area of the river where the rock cover was dangerously thin. Knox requested permission to dig a chamber along the red line, and the request was granted.
Here began a series of miscalculations. Due to the slopes and anticline in the area, the rock cover between the mine and the river was uneven and hard to determine. In one area, they measured 53 feet of rock; in another area, only one foot, seven inches. "At that time, you had to have at least 35 feet of rock cover to go under the river. What did they do? They averaged," Stella said. "They took a chance, figured they had enough rock cover. They got fooled."
On top of this, some foremen cheated in order to meet their quotas. "I found during the investigation that they were short on coal, they had 12 feet of coal there. They took a skip off the right side on the day shift, then on the night shift came and took another skip, off the left side. The foreman Billy Receski said: 'Boy, this place looks wide. Hand me the measuring tape.' Pulled it across-27 feet wide. The widest it should be is 12 feet," Stella said. The cheating took place between inspections and could not be stopped.
"In the meantime, there was a warm spell, and January thaw," Hastie added. "By the 22nd, the river was 15 to 20 feet above the low water mark. Everything happened after that. Where water came through was where they'd taken that last, forbidden, cut of coal."
The discussion turned to the aftermath of the infamous disaster.
"With all the mine cars and railway cars that went into the opening, it never really stopped that water," Hastie said. "It stopped on Saturday morning, only because the water in the mine had reached the water of the river. We never really stopped it."
Stella added that, shortly thereafter, cofferdams were erected in the river to divert the water so that the flooded mine could be inspected. Workers searched for clues or answers but found very little.
"Nobody was ever convicted of illegal mining," Wolensky said in conclusion. "They used legal devices--the court systems did what the court system does, gives the defendant all the chances in the world to prove their innocence. There were a variety of strategies. Nobody ever got convicted for the break-in, manslaughter, or illegal mining, in the final analysis. There was some jail time done for this, but not for the reasons you might think."