COLUMN ONE : Challenges to Town on the Mend : The scars--surface and below--of decades of careless mining have begun to heal in this old coal town. But the ‘90s bring grave new dangers.

Environmental change--from polluted streams to congested highways and overdeveloped land--is affecting the quality of life across the nation. Such change is gradual and often goes unnoticed while it happens.

To measure how various areas have been affected over the decades, The Times dispatched reporters to the places where they grew up. This occasional series of articles examines how our hometown environments have been altered--for better or for worse.

“Hard times, hard coal.” The two described life in this northeastern Pennsylvania town when I was growing up in the 1930s.

Now, the coal is gone and the environmental devastation wrought by mining is partly repaired, but new ecological dangers--lead poisoning and a deluge of garbage from distant cities--again challenge the quality of life here.

Both of my grandfathers were immigrant miners. My father went to the mines when he was 8 years old, barely tall enough to walk through snow drifts. All three suffered black lung disease from the dust, which was what you got if you survived cave-ins, floods, fires, explosions and the various “damps” (gases) that cut life even shorter.

But even those who never went into the mines lived with the hazards.

Gigantic “breakers,” structures 15 stories high, rose like medieval castles, desolate and black on the landscape. They washed tiny particles from coal, creating a slurry that piled up in ever-rising hills, called culm dumps. When they reached almost the height of pyramids, the dumps caught fire spontaneously under the accumulating pressure and were unextinguishable. Acid fumes from the fires spread over the area, blistering house paint and searing throats around the clock, rain or shine.

Sulfurous yellow water was pumped from the mines into the Lackawanna River that drained the valley. So was raw sewage. As kids we were convinced that your arm or leg would wither and fall off if touched by that fetid water. “Like lepers in the Bible,” the older ones warned us.

Now the mines are dead and their detritus is being cleaned up. Red ash from the burnt-out culm dumps has been leveled into Little League baseball fields or turned into cinder blocks. Carp and even some trout have returned to the river.

Small, light industries have moved into an industrial park at the edge of town, and the steady population decline of half a century has been halted at about 4,000 from its peak of almost twice that size during the 1920s.

But along the way, new environmental hazards arrived, first in the form of a smelter that spewed poisonous lead over a section of the town for more than a decade before the danger was recognized, then by the arrival of garbage from distant cities.

Scores of toddlers and adults show crippling levels of lead in their blood. Homes were evacuated and acres of topsoil were scraped away, sometimes to a depth of two yards, to contain the pollution. But acres of crushed batteries, many leaking acid, remain a forbidding wasteland within the town.

Liquid toxic wastes from out-of-state factories were trucked to this region and pumped illegally into deserted mine shafts. The poisonous chemicals eventually seeped from the mines into creeks and rivers when rain raised the ground water level.

And huge dumps of garbage are replacing the old dumps of coal. Millions of tons of trash from distant Philadelphia, New York and New Jersey were hauled here by dump owners at highly lucrative rates, and without adequate warning to residents.

“We call the Throop dump the ‘magic mountain’ because it grew so fast,” said Fred Soltes, an activist fighting the deluge of foreign trash.

An Early Warning

“This area, northeast Pennsylvania, is becoming the garbage dump of the eastern United States,” complained Mike Cowley, a lawyer in nearby Dunmore, which shares the Throop dump. In fact, Throop’s experience may serve as an early warning of big cities dumping their garbage in small towns as major population centers run out of landfill.

A 1984 study for the California Waste Management Board concluded that best sites for garbage disposal facilities were in small, low income communities like these in Lackawanna Valley.

The implication is that poor, small-town folk are less inclined and can’t afford to protest. “The big cities are making us a sacrificial area,” Cowley said. “Just when the place was getting itself cleaned up.”

Eastern Pennsylvania contained the richest deposit of anthracite in the world. This hard coal, as distinct from bituminous, or soft coal, contains more energy per pound and leaves the least ash of any solid fuels. It was the most efficient fuel for making iron and steel, including steel for rails for the growing network of railroads in the 19th Century. Pennsylvania coal largely fueled the U.S. Industrial Revolution.

Commercial coal mining in southeastern Pennsylvania began after the Civil War. The first miners were English-speaking immigrants, including the Welsh, Scots and Irish. The Irish were disadvantaged because of their Catholic religion and lack of mining experience and soon sought help through unions. Some turned violent, like the Molly McGuires.

To solve the labor problems, more tractable eastern and southern Europeans who knew nothing of unionism were imported. And to feed the growing appetite of blast furnaces, the mines expanded northward into Lackawanna County, on the western slopes of the Pocono Mountains, including what is now Throop.

The town, until recently called a “borough,” was founded in 1894 by a surgeon and real estate speculator, Dr. Benjamin Throop, who was “land poor” before the Civil War (in which he served to escape foreclosures of his properties). He made and lost a couple of fortunes before becoming a multimillionaire. Little of the money went to philanthropy; his last heir blew it all in Paris in the midst of the Depression before dying of unspecified “stomach ailments.”

Coal barons who bought out men like Throop ran northeastern Pennsylvania as a huge “internal colony” inside the United States from the 1870s through the Depression years. Order was enforced by paramilitary “coal and iron police,” a private army that rode special trains, enjoying police powers sold by the state to corporations.

The coal was dug out of the earth by men who cost so little that, according to George F. Baer, president of the Pennsylvania & Reading coal and railroad conglomerate, they were cheaper to replace than mules.

Baer was the epitome of the hated barons. “The rights of miners must and will be protected,” he promised, “not by labor agitators but by Christian men to whom God has given control of the property interests of this country.”

Of his immigrant miners, he said: “They don’t suffer. Why, they can’t even speak English!”

Indeed, most of the miners in this area were handicapped by language and indentured by their transportation debt. They were fed, clothed and housed by company stores and company-built plank houses. Mine owners were even responsible for educating their young--or deliberately not educating them. The gravest injustice to the miners, in retrospect, was the substandard educational system which kept their sons fit only for the mines.

Boys 8 to 14 years old worked in tiers in the breakers. White-eyed in soot-choked faces, these “breaker boys” separated slate and rock from screens of moving coal. Their bloodied fingertips, sticking out of tattered gloves, were their signature: “red tops,” they were called. Many were killed each year by the lack of safety devices; most were mangled by machinery, some fell from unbarred windows.

Their fathers died deeper underground, in cave-ins and mine fires, sometimes left entombed. When recovered, they were brought home unceremoniously.

“When your old man got killed,” recalled Jim Mitnik, a crusty 87-year-old who is Throop’s unofficial historian, “they’d bring his body on a wagon pulled by two mules, and they’d lay him on the front porch. They’d leave $100 for burial expenses and say ‘take care of him,’ ” he said, his blue eyes fierce with remembered anger. “That was it.”

My Hungarian grandparents arrived before the town was created. They told of wild turkeys and red deer, even a wildcat or two, that would stray down from the slim birch and towering sycamores of the nearby hills.

Scarring the Land

But not surprisingly, the coal barons who had so little respect for their workers had no regard for the environment. Just as the smoldering culm dumps and polluted rivers despoiled the valley, the hills outside of town were scarred by huge open trenches of overturned earth as strip mining with steam shovels--literally tearing off the soil in search for coal just below the surface--supplemented the deep mines.

They left not only a ravaged landscape but a legacy of underground fires that were impossible to contain. For the trenches, soon abandoned, became town garbage dumps which caught fire and, in turn, ignited the unrecovered coal whose seams ran under the towns. In time, poisonous hydrogen sulfide and carbon monoxide would seep up through the soil into some homes, and houses would tilt and sink crazily into the ground as the voids left by the burned out seams collapsed.

Much of the town went off to war in World War II, either in the service or to aircraft and other factories along the East Coast. We moved to New Jersey, where I attended high school and then entered the service when my parents returned to Throop.

Throop’s hard times got worse, if anything, after the war, however. Virtually all of the mines had closed. At one point in the 1950s, the town could not pay its utility bills and the electric company threatened to cut off power to city buildings, schools and street lights.

Like many communities in the area, it had a very difficult set of economic problems--aging populations, very high unemployment rates, no industry. “We had a very long Depression around here,” said Mayor John Stecco, 66, who retired from the Air Force after 30 years before entering local politics.

In an interview, Stecco recalled how, in the mid-1960s, the town undertook to create an industrial park on undeveloped land at its outskirts. Small firms were offered various inducements--free land, tax breaks, cheap plant rentals--to locate in the community. Gradually they came. A TV assembly plant, a book warehouse, an air conditioner factory, a dress factory.

“We had to beg at times for some of the factories,” Stecco said, “but it put us back on the map. People found jobs, stayed around here rather than go off to Jersey or Connecticut.

“Thousands of people work there now, from Throop and elsewhere in the Valley, and the plants pay taxes. We haven’t had to raise taxes in 20 years in the town. Every street and alley is paved. There’s not a chuck pot hole in Throop streets today,” he said proudly.

At the same time, various state and federal environmental laws had been cleaning up mine debris, and this, too, increased the attractiveness of the region. The malodorous Lackawanna River was being fished for perch. Outhouses were carted away as sewage treatment plants were built. In the clean-up drive, even our favored pastime, pigeon racing, was outlawed; at least no new coops could be established.

And old company houses have been renovated by their industrious owners to bring handsome prices of up to $30,000. “The people around here,” Stecco explained, “don’t spend money on vacations. They spend money fixing up their houses, and it paid off.”

New Troubles

But new troubles were born, in part out of efforts to bring jobs to the town.

The Marjol company had for years run an open-pit smelting operation near the town dump to recover lead from used car, truck and even submarine batteries. No one paid any attention to it until RCA Corp. in the early 60s, as it considered opening a plant in the new industrial park, complained that lead and acid in winds from the site could affect their workers and electronic components they were assemblying.

So Marjol was moved in 1964 with the help of Throop authorities--but closer, not farther from town, to an area called McCulsky’s Patch that was bordered on three sides by homes. A nurse in the neighborhood soon noticed that her uniforms, hung out daily after washing, had pin-sized holes from the acid and were disintegrating. But nothing was done.

In 1970, the company was cited as the second worst air polluter in the entire state. In 1974, the state health department conducted blood level tests on neighborhood children but did not disclose the results, reportedly because they were extremely high. A year later, the state environmental agency examined the facility, but it recommended that the crushed batteries on the site, numbering literally tens of millions, merely be covered over.

The residual lead and acid continued to leach into the soil and seep into the Lackawanna River, driving away the newly returned fish. Worse, the smelter continued pouring poison into the air. Not even a fence prevented children from playing at the site.

Lead in the blood can cause severe learning and behavioral disabilities, particularly in small children, medical research has found. The problems can persist into adulthood, according to studies which followed exposed children through high school. The federal government defines lead poisoning as 25 micrograms per decaliter of blood, and is currently preparing to lower the unsafe level to 15.

In 1982, the plant was finally closed, and then only because the price of lead had plummeted to make recovery unprofitable. Marjol had been sold a year earlier to Gould Inc., for $2 million. Gould lawyers claim the company was never told of the emerging tragedy, including the buried battery casings, but by all accounts is fully cooperating and funding a clean-up effort overseen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Soil in the neighborhood was contaminated to a depth of six feet with up to 10 times the safe level. The interiors, carpets and upholsteries of some of the 60 affected homes had twice the level considered unsafe and are still being cleaned.

Worse by far, blood tests in 1988 found that almost 10% of the children up to 6 years old in the 10-block neighborhood had levels in excess of 15 micrograms, and several had levels far above 25 micrograms. Some of them, including 2-year-old Chiara Lamanna, have had unexplained seizures or other symptoms of lead poisoning.

Her mother, Sandra Lamanna, a special education teacher who lives across the street from the plant, said neighbors had tried since 1976 to get the plant closed. “But our politicians did nothing,” she complained.

There is more than enough blame to go around. The town blames the state for refusing to move in hopes that the federal government would pay for the clean up, and the state blames the town for failing to close down the plant in the face of legal threats from Marjol lawyers.

In the end, the townspeople suffer most. The Lamannas and others will be unable to sell their house for 20 years or more, realtors say. Throop children and some adults will be monitored for lead for the foreseeable future since no one can be sanguine about the potential long-term effects of the metal in their bodies.

Imported Garbage

The garbage hazard also went unnoticed until it was overwhelming.

In 1979, under pressure from the state, local municipalities began trucking their garbage to the Keystone Landfill which is partly in both Throop and neighboring Dunmore. The two boroughs divide the $1-per-ton tax on dumped garbage. The payments made Throop garbage collection almost free and helped keep its taxes lowest in the region.

But instead of taking 20 years to fill, the dump ran out of space in 1987 after its owner, Louis de Naples, a junkyard operator as well as garbage collector, began trucking in garbage from Philadelphia, New Jersey and even New York, at prices and volumes that grossed him an estimated $500,000 a day at the peak, according to Cowley.

More than 90% of the trash came from other states, including some hazardous and illegal garbage for which De Naples was fined more than $500,000 in recent years.

“And then, before anyone knew it,” Stecco said, “(De Naples) bought land under different names” adjacent to the existing dump and, in effect, quadrupled its size. Despite more than 180 violations of regulations, state officials called Keystone a “model landfill” and quickly approved its request to expand.

Throop’s politicians were no braver. The borough council could have refused a license for the expansion, but at the crucial meeting, one councilman quit and another did not appear due to “illness.” Stecco cast the deciding vote in favor of the new license.

“De Naples,” Stecco said, “is a philanthropist. Let me tell you, he is kind and generous. Anyone can go to Louie de Naples to get help for church causes, for children.”

“Now they’re trying to snow us by talking about ‘high-tech’ solutions at the garbage dump and plastic liners to keep the leachate (seepage from the dump) from getting into the ground water and maybe even our drinking water,” said Jim Smith, 39.

“We’ve had the lead--one of my boys has a high level even though we don’t live near the site, and my level is higher than average--and we’ve got the garbage, and they keep trying to hand us a lot of crap about it all.”

“The distrust in Throop is clearly a legacy of the past,” said an aide to Sen. John Heinz (R-Pa.). “They’ve been exploited and betrayed so much during the days of the mines that they have a very difficult time believing anything officials tell them now.”