The Newtown Pentacle

Tuesday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Bridgeville, PA., well, that’s a community which can be found within the South Hills region of the Pittsburgh Metropolitan Area.

Historically, Bridgeville’s economy was centered around coal mining, during the late 19th and first few decades of the 20th centuries.

Basically; Boom and bust, entrepreneur and robber baron, monopoly and trust, abandonment and dissolution. Usual story.

The coal people left behind a huge environmental mess, and it’s pretty routine to observe the waterways in this part of Pennsylvania running with bright orange water, suggesting that it’s runoff from abandoned mines that’s causing the pollution. The orange coloration is caused by dissolved metals, notably pyrites and iron, in the ground water. In prior mentions of Bridegville, I’ve mentioned the vast taxpayer funded environmental remediation efforts at work in the area.

Our Lady of the Pentacle has been taking a class in Bridgeville – and apparently – so have I. While she’s bene inside ‘a-learning,’ I’ve been wandering the streets, which are my classroom.

I recently spotted this charming feature, pictured above, which seems to be an open to the atmosphere coal mine portal. Lovely.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Now that I sort of know what to look for, it’s everywhere.

Conversation with the locals reveal that it’s only been a generation or two since mine work was a common experience, for men in particular. My dad used to tell me that you could pick up non-union day work along the waterfront in South Brooklyn, unloading ships and loading trucks, back in the 40’s and 50’s. Wonder if it was the same sort of situation here, but with coal instead of maritime trade goods?

I’ve read that child labor was pretty common in the mines, as a note.

One was standing along the fence lines of a large industrial site, which in modernity hosts several businesses, and that’s where I spotted that chunk of rusting machinery pictured above.

That thingie looks like the remains of, to me at least, a ‘Coal Tipple.’

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The older structures at this industrial park display a characteristic masonry motif that one has learned to associate with the Pittsburgh Coal Company, a historical monopolist trust that was controlled by the Mellon Family.

Hey… where do you think that the extra money to start a university, and then a bank, came from for these Captains of Industry? They had poor people dig treasure out of the ground for them on 12 hour shifts, employed child labor, and colluded with oligarchal colleagues like Henry Clay Frick – who were the end customers for the coal at the steel mills – and with whom they conspired to set wages and prices – so everyone felt great about the whole affair, while drinking french wine in their baronial mansions, before moving to Manhattan. When the coal seam sputtered out, the trust moved on, leaving behind a real mess.

Captains of industry, right? Not ‘Robber Barons,’ right? America was great, back then, right? Which side are you on, kid? Bah!

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Our Lady’s class was scheduled to last an hour, so I had a somewhat limited amount of time available to me to wander about with the camera.

An interesting bit of trivia about this particular area, transmitted to me by the folks who were conducting Our Lady’s class (they are located within this complex), is that this section of Bridgeville seems to have been rich in deposits of Vanadium. So much so that a nearby road is dubbed ‘Vanadium Road,’ and that tenants in these industrial buildings need to set up specialized monitors and ventilation systems within, as the subterrene deposits of Vanadium produce radioactive gas, and the depositional strata associated with the element seems to include the compounds that produce Radon, with all of this reactivity happening deep down within the Appalachian Layer Cake forming the ground hereabouts.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Hey Now! That’s Wheeling & Lake Erie #6986 hurtling by.

Above and just beyond these tracks is a bus depot and maintenance garage. Below them is that open coal mine portal. Sigh…

The really annoying part of this scene is what they were hauling.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Don’t know if the tankers were full, but they were pulling a long train of LNG tankers through a densely populated area. I’ve used the term ‘bomb train’ before, but it’s alarmist and somewhat disingenuous.

Let’s just say that if conditions were just right when said conditions went perfectly wrong, and any single of those tanker cars were to derail and became punctured… that would make the news. Remember East Palestine in Ohio, where a train went boom?

There’s a lot of ‘horizontal fracturing’ or ‘fracking’ oil company activity around these parts. Major part of the local and national economies, it is. Future generations will hate us for this, and talk about this industry in the manner which I do, regarding coal.

Back tomorrow with something different.

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