SHENANDOAH’S CENTRALIA MOMENT: A look back at the Kehley Run mine fire (Part 1)

SHENANDOAH – When mine fires come up, the six-decade plight of a Columbia County borough is often top-of-mind, as is the misconception driven by said plight that mine fires are an unstoppable force.

As the Centralia Mine Fire saga began, a lesser-known mine fire was raging and threatening what was at the time one of Schuylkill County’s largest communities and economic hubs, yards away from a grocery store and the town’s Little League ballfield.

The sounds of mining equipment digging, blasting, and removing the side of Locust Mountain were as common as the sulfuric fumes of Anthracite coal aflame as scaffolding secured the side of a main regional thoroughfare.

The following series is a look back at “The Big Dig,” or “Operation Scarlift,” that many of our region’s older residents remember. This is the story of the Kehley Run Mine Fire in the extreme northeast of Shenandoah.

The First Time

The Kehley Run Colliery began operation in the town’s northeast, in the present-day area of the helipad, in 1864, two years before Shenandoah’s incorporation on lands owned by the former Stephen Girard, better known as the Girard Estate.

The coal company took its name from the nearby stream, flowing down from Locust Mountain and providing the borough’s freshwater source for decades, and the stream itself was named after Peter Kehley, one of the Shenandoah Valley of Pennsylvania’s first settlers.

Twice, fire struck the company’s workings, and each incident was met with unprecedented-at-the-time containment efforts.

The first fire broke out about 20-years since workers hoisted the first ton of coal from Kehley Run and a year after the company’s record annual production of 151,000 tons of Anthracite coal.

According to a Smithsonian Institute report on the Girard Estate’s Pennsylvania Coal Lands, published in 1972, the first fire was discovered in July of 1880.

Large quantities of gas were found in the air currents of the mine, prompting a court order to stop work at the colliery. Two steam locomotives used within the mine were blamed for the gas and taken out of service. Air quality improved only for a short time, as gas accumulated once again.

Company owners then connected the colliery’s workings with those of the Kohinoor Colliery which, again, provided only temporary relief.

In what the former Shenandoah Evening Herald called the area’s first mine disaster, on July 26, three men — Jonathan Wasley, Frank Willman, and John Reese — entered the mine workings around 10pm through old water-level gangways. According to the report, no one ever knew why the trio entered. The three did not return from the mine.

A search party was dispatched to rescue the three men, and the leader of which — the district mine inspector — was overcome by gas fumes abound 140 feet into the workings and rescued. Another search party relieved his group and recovered the bodies of Wasley, Willman, and Reese.

On August 9, fire was discovered in the workings.

“They had scarcely been buried a week when it became known that three old breasts filled with coal dirt, leading into the interior of the mine, were on fire,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported on Sept. 2, 1880.

Multiple attempts to extinguish the blaze, including forcing carbonic acid gas into the mine, failed and the Thomas Coal Company, operators of the Kehley Run Colliery, faced a legal challenge from the Kohinoor company.

Additionally, on Sept. 1, Simon Gregory, the inside boss of the mine, was killed and others injured in an explosion when he and a group of employees had entered the mine to install a door to enable the observation of the fire and the impact their current firefight efforts were having.

Schuylkill County Court ordered the Girard Estate on Nov. 24 to take possession of the colliery and extinguish the fire.

The Girard Estate’s lead engineer, Heber S. Thompson, planned to extinguish the fire by flooding the mine. He planned to seal off the area of the fire with masonry dams.

By June 10, 1881, the dams were completed using 600,000 bricks and 1,800 barrels of cement at a cost of $67,000, the equivalent of $1.9 Million today.

A 2,360ft water flume was then constructed between the Shenandoah Borough Waterworks reservoir and the colliery, flooding the mine with 8 Million gallons of water.

Days after the effort began, an explosion rocked the mine. On June 12, while a stream of water was running onto the fire, something blocked the working and allowed gas to build up, exploding and sending water high “into the air like a fountain, nearly deluging half a dozen men employed nearby,” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer at the time.

By August 25, the fire was extinguished, and hoists began operation to de-water the mine, and by April of 1882, the mine was back in operation.

According to the report, the effort was the first successful effort to extinguish a mine fire under the conditions that existed at Kehley Run.

READ PART TWO: Round Two

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