Route Fifty City-County Roadtrip Recap: In Greene County, the Legacy of Energy Runs Deep
A monument to the 1962 mine disaster in Greene County. Michael Grass / RouteFifty.com
Like in other fracking regions, the gas drilling boom times are over in Southwestern Pennsylvania.
Route Fifty is currently featuring dispatches from a city-county summer roadtrip in Maryland, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and elsewhere along the way. An Introduction to the Series | Previous Stop: Sideling Hill, Maryland | Next Stop: Pittsburgh
WAYNESBURG, Pa. — During my recent trip through the reference section of Seattle’s Central Library , it was a book on Greene County, Pennsylvania, that caught my eye. While library collections certainly are full of unexpected surprises, it seemed unusual that a library in the Pacific Northwest would have a biographical history of this particular county in the far southwest corner of Pennsylvania.
I had driven through Greene County on Interstate 79 on three separate occasions previously but had never given much thought about this hilly corner of Pennsylvania. (The county motto is “ The Cornerstone of the Keystone State ,” and if you imagine the outline of Pennsylvania’s boundaries, Greene County would make a good cornerstone, especially considering how Delaware bumps up at the southeastern corner of the state thanks to the 12-Mile Circle .)
This time around, though I was still just passing through this part of Pennsylvania, I planned to make a stop to check out the Greene County Courthouse in the Borough of Waynesburg, the county seat.
But first, after crossing the West Virginia-Pennsylvania border, I stopped off at a Pennsylvania Welcome Center rest area off I-79.
As I discovered, there’s a monument to the 1962 Robena mine disaster at the rest area. It reads:
On December 6, 1962, 460 feet directly beneath this site, 37 miners lost their lives in the U.S. Steel Robena Mine's Frosty Run Explosion. One of the worst mine disasters In Greene County History.
But it wasn’t the worst mine disaster in Greene County history.
In 1928, 195 coal miners died after an underground explosion at a mine in Mather, a small coal-mining community about nine miles from Waynesburg.
It’s among of the most deadly coal-mining disasters in U.S. history. (The worst was the 1907 coal mine disaster in Monongah, West Virginia, when 362 miners died.)
A video about Mather, Pennsylvania:
Coal mining remains big business in this part of Pennsylvania. Bituminous coal mining began in 1902, according to a county history . Today, Greene County is still a top coal producer in Pennsylvania.
Oil and natural gas drilling is important, too. Oil drilling started in the late 1880s and since 1890, the county “has yielded a large amount of gas” with 1,300 wells drilled according to a 1907 U.S. Geological Survey report on oil and gas fields in Greene County. There are still plenty of drilling sites across the county .
Greene County is in the expansive Marcellus shale region, which has fueled a drilling surge across Pennsylvania in recent years, thanks to the hydraulic fracturing extraction technique, aka fracking.
That’s helped boost the local economy. But just like in other parts of the nation that have benefited from the drilling boom, 2015 hasn’t been all that great to places like Greene County.
As The Wall Street Journal reported this week:
As fracking took off here over the past eight years, so did Gary Bowers’s business supplying everything from Gatorade to replacement valves to crews drilling into natural-gas reserves a mile underground.
This year, however, the good times at his firm, Producers Supply Co., came to a screeching halt. Since January, the company’s monthly sales have declined by more than half . . .
. . . In June, the county received $4.5 million from a fee that gas companies paid last year on wells that had been fracked. The county had 873 wells producing shale gas last year, the fifth-highest number in the state. Through Tuesday, 77 shale-gas wells had been drilled in Greene Co., down 50% from the 154 drilled in the year-earlier period.
The downturn in drilling trickles down and is hitting businesses, from restaurants to oilfield suppliers. Chris Ramsey, who works for KSW Oilfield Rental LLC, told The Journal that the outlook is not great: “We’re in survival mode.”
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