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.
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