Will Pa. pay for the next energy boom?

By Michael Carroll

Pennsylvania's current natural-gas boom reminds me of the notice stamped on the deed of the house where I grew up in Mount Carmel, in the coal region. It warned that the deed did not "include title to the coal and right of support underneath the surface land," that "the owners of such coal may have the complete legal right to remove all of such coal," and that as a result, "damage may result to the surface of the land and any house, building or other structure on or in such land."

My mother was born in that house in 1919, left for some years, and then moved back into it when she married my father, in 1947. He died in 1985, she in 2001, both having stayed there until the end. We sold it in 2002 for $23,000 - not a bad price for that part of the world.

Some part of me will always think of it as our house. It no longer is, of course; another family lives there. And I suppose it never was ours completely, since a coal company could have taken the ground under it.

The deed language was not theoretical. The coal companies owned what was under our house, and that could have very real consequences.

We were lucky: It was not practical or profitable for them to take the coal under our house, which would have left it hanging, sunken, or worse. Over the years, others in the region were not so lucky. Houses did on occasion sink - sometimes a whole row of them.

One day, I came home from grade school for lunch and saw that our neighbor's garage had disappeared. From their house to where it used to be was a sidewalk to nowhere.

I also remember when a local muckraking weekly, the Citizen of Shamokin, came out to photograph the cracks in my grandmother's basement, which were caused by the too-near blasting of a strip mine.

And I recall the underground fire that burned at the east end of town during my high school years. Huge power shovels and bulldozers lifted and pushed piles of glowing red coal against the night sky to snuff it out. In Centralia, just three miles away, the mine fire won, and the town died.

Most of the big coal companies were dead or dying by the early 1960s, but what they did lived on. And because there were no companies left to clean up the mess, the money came from the public purse or not at all.

"We need the coal," they used to say when I was growing up, and now, "We need the gas." The implication is that we have to do what's necessary to retrieve the mineral wealth that keeps us warm, grows our food, powers our industry, and moves us around.

The problem is that there is more than one we. There is the big we of the country as a whole, which needs and consumes the fuel. And then there is the small we that lives near the coal and gas, and often pays a heavy price for everyone's benefit.

Somebody always pays. Too often, those who pay the most benefit least, and those who benefit most pay not at all.

Most of the coal-mining damage stayed in the coal-mining regions. Things may be different with natural gas. Polluted water may affect those at the drilling site first and most, but water has a way of traveling. Cities like Philadelphia and Pittsburgh may feel much more pain from fracking than they ever did from mining.

We need the gas. We need the coal. And until and unless our country figures out a new way to get its energy, someone will always pay.