They Dumped 60 Railroad Cars Into a River — They're Still Down There

On 22 January 1959, the Susquehanna River broke through the roof of a coal mine at Port Griffith, Pennsylvania. Eighty-one men were underground. The river poured in through a hole more than a hundred feet across — and to stop it, a railroad cut its own track, bent the rails toward the whirlpool, and ran coal cars off the end. About sixty railroad cars went in. Then four hundred mine cars. Then hay, railroad ties and 25,000 cubic yards of rock. It took three days. This is the story of the Knox Mine disaster: why men were digging under a river with nineteen inches of rock above them, how thirty-three of them climbed out through an air shaft abandoned years before, who secretly owned the company — and why people in the Wyoming Valley still name that Thursday as the day deep mining ended. CHAPTERS 0:00 Sixty railroad cars, aimed at a river 0:50 The valley that sat on anthracite 1:51 The stop line 2:59 The river rises 3:35 11:30, Thursday morning 4:57 Plugging the hole 6:51 Who really owned Knox Coal 8:20 The day deep mining ended 9:03 What is still down there THE NUMBERS 81 men on the shift — 36 got out quickly, 33 climbed out through the Eagle air shaft, 12 were never recovered 35 feet — the rock cover Pennsylvania law required under a river 19 inches — the thinnest point, by federal core drilling (historians put the roof at about six feet) 90 feet — how far the workings ran past the stop line About 60 railroad cars by the state's own history; 38 by a newspaper count that week 400 mine cars and roughly 25,000 cubic yards of rock and earth More than 10 billion gallons of the Susquehanna went underground 1,200 cubic yards of concrete and 26,000 of sand to seal the breach THE TWELVE Samuel Altieri · John Baloga · Benjamin Boyar · Francis Burns · Charles Featherman · Joseph Gizenski · Dominick Kaveliski · Frank Orlowski · Eugene Ostrowski · William Sinclair · Daniel Stefanides · Herman Zelonis SOURCES Robert P. Wolensky et al., "Disaster — or Murder? — in the Mines", Pennsylvania Heritage Magazine (Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission) W. Rachunis and G. Fortney, "Report of Major Mine Inundation Disaster, River Slope Mine, May Shaft Section, Schooley Colliery, Knox Coal Company", U.S. Bureau of Mines, 1959 Robert P. Wolensky, Kenneth C. Wolensky and Nicole H. Wolensky, "Voices of the Knox Mine Disaster" Times Leader (Wilkes-Barre), 26 January 1959 Where the sources disagree — the number of railroad cars, the thickness of the roof — the video says so. FOOTAGE AND IMAGES Archive film: "Drive for Anthracite" (1942, U.S. National Archives) and "Anthracite" (1920s, Prelinger Archives) — public domain Photographs: Lewis Hine, National Child Labor Committee Collection, Library of Congress; Tichnor Brothers Collection, Boston Public Library — public domain Map of the flooded workings: U.S. Bureau of Mines report, 1959 Present-day Pittston riverside: Wikimedia Commons (CC0) Additional footage: Pexels Archive scenes show anthracite mining in the same region and era; they are not footage of the Knox mine itself. Diagrams are schematic, not to scale. MUSIC "Long Note Two", "Lost Time", "Dark Times", "Gathering Darkness", "The Dread", "Impact Prelude", "Colorless Aura" and "At Rest" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License #KnoxMineDisaster #Pennsylvania #CoalMining #Anthracite #Susquehanna #1959 #MiningDisaster #IndustrialHistory #History #Documentary