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JEANESVILLE — Residents of this tiny village outside Hazleton became suspicious when they kept spotting smoke billowing up in the mine land near their homes.
A rotten egg smell permeated the air at times, and they discovered rocks hot to the touch and trees charred at their bases.
Government bore hole and thermal imaging testing earlier this year concluded a surface and underground mine fire that may have started in the late 1970s had spread over an estimated 28 acres and may be headed toward the neighboring village of Tresckow, state officials said.
Walter Bobowski, who lives in Tresckow and provided the description of hot rocks and other mine fire signs detected by Jeanesville residents, worries the danger cooking nearby will destroy property values and force residents to abandon their homes.
“Will we become Centralia?” said Bobowski, who often smells the pungent odor from his home of 40 years. “They’re doing what they can do, but will they succeed or not? We don’t know the answer.”
State officials reject comparisons of the Jeanesville mine fire to the one in Centralia, a Columbia County borough that became a ghost town except for a handful of holdouts due to a fire that’s been raging since 1962, said state Department of Environmental Protection northeast region spokeswoman Colleen Connolly.
“This fire in Jeanesville is nothing like that. Centralia was deeper, and that fire was burning under the whole town from one coal seam,” Connolly said.
Attack plan
The foundation of their attack: a massive 20.5-acre trench between the fire and Tresckow in Carbon County.
This trench will prevent the fire from inching toward the more-populated Tresckow. Jeanesville is partially in Hazle Township and straddles the border of Luzerne and Carbon counties.
According to Department of Environmental Protection reports:
This trench will be more than a third of a mile long — 1,900 feet — and up to 200 feet deep. The width will be as much as 240 feet on the bottom and 650 feet at the top.
An estimated 2.6 million cubic yards of material must be removed to carve out the trench.
Hazleton Shaft Corp., which has a permit to mine in the area of the fire, was awarded a $9.3 million government contract to build the trench and extinguish the fire. The company also will dig out a second isolation trench to block the fire from heading east toward the village of Junedale, also in Carbon County.
More than 50 boreholes will be used to continue monitoring the scope and intensity of the fire. If these tests indicate the fire is expanding toward Jeanesville or Hazleton, the attack plan must be revised.
The trench construction will take about two years. Contractors are now focusing on clearing about 200 acres of brush and dirt to access the trench site.
Contractors will be armed with firefighting foam and water from both a public water supply and a well to the mine pool beneath the site.
Hazleton Shaft has another five years remaining on its permit to mine the site and will continue extinguishing the fire during that period once it is isolated with trenches.
The land is owned by Lehigh Valley Anthracite and Pagnotti Enterprises, Inc. Firefighting efforts are funded through a fee paid by active coal mine operators on each ton of coal mined.
Once cooled, burning material removed to create the trenches will be used to fill hazardous abandoned mine pits elsewhere on the property if testing shows the material is not hazardous.
The trenches eventually will be filled in when the state is confident the fire is extinguished.
Will it work?
The trench approach was developed by state mining engineers, who concluded it was the best way to isolate and bring the fire under control, Connolly said.
Crews will dig out hot spots and separate them from the rest of the material at the site, so the fire won’t spread, Connolly said.
“Actually, there aren’t a lot of other ways to put out a mine fire,” she said. “You can spray water or foam on a fire. That controls it. But when you dig out trenches, it isolates the fire areas so it won’t spread,” she said.
A similar trench plan was deployed in the Simpson mine fire in 2014 in Carbondale, Lackawanna County, she said.
State officials have no proof of what started the Jeanesville fire, but their best hunch comes from an August 1973 news article about the burning of rubbish at the site, she said.
Firefighters at that time said shingles and construction debris dumped in the stripping had been set ablaze in three locations, and they suspected juveniles. The fire was in a deep pit, possibly 150 feet deep, challenging crews who used thousands of gallons of water fighting the blaze for hours.
Hazleton Shaft has been mining the site since late 2011 and first noticed the fire in early 2012 as mining progressed, the state said.
As the company continued to mine and excavate the fire, it “became clear that the fire was not isolated to one small area.”
Health concerns
Residents were warned they may smell a “sulfur-like odor” during the work.
State officials say previous air quality monitoring related to the fire found no dangerous levels of gases in the area.
Connolly said her agency and contractors are committed to using any methods available to minimize the smoke and odor and will conduct further air quality monitoring as needed.
Bobowski said the fire has left residents in limbo.
He’s considering upgrading the heating system of his double-block home to a more efficient one but is afraid to invest.
“If you want to sell your house, nobody is going to buy it now because of the mine fire,” he said. “They say it isn’t endangering homes or people, but how can anybody be sure?”
