That Sinking Feeling

Longwall mining beneath streams is unlawful under federal and state clean-water laws. And under the Fifth Amendment, which proscribes government-facilitated takings of property without due compensation, it's unlawful under houses. No other legislation supersedes these statutes; but, despite its inherent illegality, longwalling continues without major legal challenge. Pennsylvania's Subsidence Act of 1966 outlawed destruction of people's homes. The industry challenged this all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and lost. Then, in 1996, it got the state legislature to slip through Act 54. The part of the bill that required longwallers to replace the water supplies they destroyed sounded great. But the second part—which allowed longwallers to destroy homes, provided they pay to have them fixed or replaced—attracted scant attention, and the bill sailed through without a single nay. So, propped up by Act 54 and conveniently ignoring countermanding federal statutes, longwallers now destroy private and public property. Bob Ging, the attorney who has litigated most of the longwalling cases in Pennsylvania, says this: “If government agencies want to destroy your home, they have to compensate you first and then only after they go through eminent domain proceedings. So coal companies basically have more power than our government.”

But longwallers can't take your home if it's on the National Register of Historic Places; they have to prevent its destruction with pre-mining “mitigation.” To get a feel for how well this mitigation works, I returned to Spraggs and, in fading light and driving rain, dropped in on Roy and Diane Brendel, whose house had been built in 1939 by Major Ernst Thralls of the U.S. Cavalry with tiles and stained glass he'd brought back from Mexico and with native timber milled and carved by local craftsmen. It had been one of the best examples of Spanish Revival architecture in the East.

On November 30, 2004—four years and four days after being undermined by Consol—house and property looked like a set from The Addams Family. A fence of wood, stone, brick, and concrete lay in ruins in the front yard. Cribs of crisscrossed mining timbers supported porches. Steel posts set at 45-degree angles buttressed sagging walls. The yard was festooned with scraps of blue plastic tarp, Consol's attempt at roof repair. Blue plastic pipes shunted rainwater off the roof—in the opposite direction it used to flow. A white plastic pipe vented methane. Standing in for ruined wells was a black water buffalo. Propane tanks replaced the broken gas line.

The Brendels have lived here since 1971. Choking back tears, Diane showed me pre-mining photos of her daughter in a wedding gown standing on an elegant veranda amid potted flowers and looking out over bright gardens and an immaculate swimming pool. “This was like going to the Mediterranean,” she said. “Look at it now.” The stone steps were broken and piled by the creek, the railings nowhere in sight, the stone floor cracked and separated from the house, the 17-inch-thick sandstone walls split all the way through and up to the second floor. The stone arch was fractured. Thick mats of vegetation covered the bottom of the crumbling swimming pool.

Inside the house more cribs supported ceilings. Stairs were separated from walls. Chandeliers had been replaced by bare lightbulbs. Consol's mitigation had included bubble-wrapping the chandeliers, stained glass windows, painted glass doors, china, and antique furniture. Eighty boxes were piled in the now unlivable living room, and after four years they're so moldy that Diane is loath to clean for fear of spreading pathogens. The kitchen door, made of steel, keeps getting stuck shut. So far, says Diane, Consol has sawed through it 13 times. Nineteen other doors don't open or don't shut, and some are off plumb by as much as three inches on a side. Every now and then the whole house jumps as rubble settles in the old coal panel. In 2001, a year after longwalling, a motion alarm went off upstairs. The Brendels raced home to find that a rug had slid four feet across the hall and into the separated wall, which then dropped and pinned it. I couldn't budge the rug. There are cracks in the ornate floor tiles, bulges in wooden floors high enough to tempt a young skateboarder. Before we had finished our tour of the cellar, Consol's sump pump went off. According to Roy, it does so about every 10 minutes because the house dropped 4.5 feet into the now unpotable water table. “Waterfowl now land in our hayfield,” he continued. “We like waterfowl, but we want our hayfield back.”

Unlike their neighbors, the Brendels refuse to settle. “I think this mitigation was a dog and pony show so that Consol could get permission to mine,” said Roy. “I don't think they ever planned to restore this house; I think they thought we'd take a settlement.” Still, if the Brendels would just come around, they could move to a safe, comfortable house. I asked them why they were standing their ground.

“Why should we go from a 13-room mansion to a double-wide?” said Roy. “That's about what they offered us.”

“This is our home,” said Diane.

Shortly after the Brendels were undermined (and purely by coincidence), their insurance company dropped every noncorporate account. Now, despite two hearings before the insurance commissioner, they can't get homeowners' insurance because there's a “preexisting condition” in the form of planned subsidence—planned by Consol, not the Brendels. To wage the constant and as yet unsuccessful battle to get their house restored, the Brendels say they've had to retire—she from her job at Shields's organic farm, he from guidance counseling for the local school district. “So far,” Roy told me, “this has cost us about $100,000—our life savings—for lawyers, architects, historical renovators, engineers, and estimates from contractors to document what a blind man on a galloping horse could see.”

I can't tell Consol's side of the story because Jonathan Pachter declined to comment, citing “ongoing litigation.”