The Office of Surface Mining recently celebrated a collaborative project that will make thousands of historical maps of closed or abandoned underground coal mines in Pennsylvania available to the public. On Jan. 15, OSM representatives participated in an open house that the University of Pittsburgh Archival Center hosted to announce a public-private pledge to fund the project. OSM’s Appalachian Regional Director Thomas Shope, Federal Reclamation Program Chief Vann Weaver, Technology Support Branch Chief Robert McKenzie, National Mine Map Repository Team Leader Paul Coyle and Headquarters Regulatory Program Support Chief John Craynon were among those attending the event.

At the open house, the university announced that the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, OSM and CONSOL Energy Inc. had pledged a total of $400,000 for the mapping initiative. The project will make available to the public more than 8,000 historical underground-mine maps, covering much of the coalfields in southwestern Pennsylvania.

OSM’s NMMR is providing specialized staff and equipment in collaboration with PADEP and the university to create digital copies of the historical maps. These digital images will allow the expansion of a publicly accessible Internet-based geographic-information system. The mines maps — some dating back to the 1850s — are a donation from CONSOL Energy, which in 2000 donated its Pennsylvania collection to the university’s library system.

“OSM is committed to supporting collaborative projects like this that improve public safety, protect the environment, safeguard miners, and improve economic development,” said Shope at the event. “This is another example of the work that OSM is doing to acquire, preserve, archive, and make abandoned underground coal mine maps available before they’re lost forever.”

Map conservationists restore historical maps in steps, which may include humidifying, repairing, and cleaning them. Once conservationists recondition the maps, they transfer them to PADEP or NMMR, where staff digitally scan, archive on microfilm, and add the maps to the national collection. The index to the NMMR mine-map collection is available at http://mmr.osmre.gov.

Since 2005, OSM has provided more than $1 million to 32 underground mine map-archiving projects in 15 coal-producing states. OSM has also worked with states and other federal agencies to develop approaches for acquiring mine maps and making them available. Its current projects in the Appalachian Region include cooperative agreements with the states of Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia. 

For additional information, please contact Paul Coyle, OSM, at (412) 937-2833, pcoyle@osmre.gov.