Knox Mine disaster

The Knox Mine disaster was a mining accident on January 22, 1959, that is widely credited with single-handedly killing the mining industry in the Northern Anthracite Region of Pennsylvania. The Susquehanna River broke through into the many interconnected mine galleries in the Wyoming Valley between west/right-bank town of Exeter, Pennsylvania and Port Griffith, a left/east bank town in Jenkins Township, Pennsylvania, near Pittston. Mitigation efforts created several new islands between the two towns and altered the western-side flow of the Susquehanna around these.

The River Slope Mine, an anthracite coal mine owned by the Knox Coal Company, flooded when coal company management had the miners dig illegally out under the Susquehanna River. Tunneling sharply upwards toward river bed without having drilled boreholes to gauge the rock thickness overhead, the miners came to a section with a thickness of about 6 feet (1.8 m) -- 35 feet (10.6 m) was considered the minimum for safety. The insufficient "roof" cover caused the waters of the river to break into the mine.

It took three days to plug the hole in the riverbed, which was done by dumping large railroad cars, smaller mine cars, culm, and other debris into the whirlpool formed by the water draining into the mine.

Twelve mineworkers died; 69 others escaped. Amadeo Pancotti was awarded the Carnegie Medal for climbing 50 feet up the abandoned Eagle Air Shaft and alerting rescuers which lead to the safe recovery of 33 men including Pancotti himself. The bodies of the 12 who died were never recovered, despite efforts to pump the water out of the mine. The victims were Samuel Altieri, John Baloga, Benjamin Boyar, Francis Burns, Charles Featherman, Joseph Gizenski, Dominic Kaveliski, Frank Orlowski, Eugene Ostrowski, William Sinclair, Daniel Stefanides, and Herman Zelonis.

The Knox catastrophe was less deadly than the Twin Shaft Disaster in Pittston in 1896, which claimed 58 lives.

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