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July 1, 2026 - Mark Popernack was destined to mine coal for a living. His grandfather owned a tiny Pennsylvania coal mine back in the mid-20th century, and he worked it with a pick and shovel. Popernack’s dad quit school at 13 to get a job underground and, over the decades, breathed in so much coal dust that he contracted black lung disease.
Popernack began mining the coal-rich hills just east of Pittsburgh when he was 20. By the time he was 40, he’d spent half his life in mine shafts; he could pivot and whirl, back stooped, beneath the 50-inch ceilings with ease. The pitch dark of the mines didn’t bother him, and in a nation where coal miners are a vanishing species—there were 863,000 of them in the U.S. in 1923 and just 69,000 a century later—Popernack found close friends in the mining brotherhood. He went fishing and attended a gun show or two with his workmates. If a fellow miner happened to run out of chewing tobacco, Popernack had the guy covered.
On the evening of Wednesday, July 24, 2002, Popernack was part of a nine-man crew wrapping up a swing shift in the Quecreek Mine, a three-mile-long cavity underneath a dairy farm in Somerset, Pennsylvania, about 70 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. His team was tasked that night with scratching coal out of a wall adjoining the much larger Harrison No. 2 mine, which had been abandoned in 1963, filling with water ever since. There were over 50 million gallons welled up behind the wall.
But Popernack wasn’t worried. Engineers working with his boss at the Black Wolf Coal Company had consulted a map made by the Quecreek Mine owner. It showed that a wall 300 feet thick separated the Quecreek from the Harrison, so Popernack drove a 35-foot-long piece of heavy machinery called a continuous miner at the wall, via remote control. Its sharp metal teeth broke away giant slabs that fell onto the machine’s conveyor system and were then fed into a waiting shuttle car to be wheeled out of the mine.
Popernack finished loading the shuttle; then at about 8:45 p.m., he watched its driver get ready to leave. But when he turned back toward the face of the mine, he couldn’t see the mining machine or its lights. A hole had burst open in the wall, and suddenly water was raging out.
“It was like the opening of a fire hydrant,” Popernack says. “The pressure of the water was intense. It was as loud as a freight train going a hundred miles an hour.” The onrushing water formed a teeming river 20 feet wide and so powerful that it shoved the continuous miner, all 60 tons of it, a few feet down the mine corridor. Desperately, Popernack shouted to his coworkers: “Get out of the mine. Get the hell out of the mine!”
Sixty miles away, in tiny Fairchance, Pennsylvania, a man named Joe Sbaffoni was sitting at his dining room table savoring a cup of tea. It was a little after 9 p.m. when a phone call came from his supervisor: There had been an accident at Quecreek. Eighteen miners were underground.
Middle-aged and methodical, Sbaffoni had been working in mines his whole life, and in 1988 he was named bituminous chief for the Pennsylvania Bureau of Mine Safety. When he got the call, he says, “Right away my heart went into my stomach.”
He phoned the president of Black Wolf Coal, Dave Rebuck, and rushed to his office to consult maps of the Quecreek Mine and its environs. Then, shortly before midnight, he began speeding north through slumbering small towns—Oliver, Wooddale, then Acme—passing churches and grange halls as he made his way to the mine.
When Sbaffoni reached Somerset, two surveyors were already there, laboring with flashlights in the darkness, in a six-acre cow pasture on Dormel Farms, a sprawling 212-year-old dairy farm owned by Bill Arnold. They were trying to nail down where exactly the miners might be. The plan was to dig a hole about six inches in diameter down to the mine, 240 feet below, to establish contact. But where should it go?
Coal mine operators do surveys as they extend shafts underground—they need to know exactly where they’re digging amid earth’s varying strata of rocks and soil—and at Quecreek, surveys are done often as miners bore new tunnels. So it seemed logical that the miners would be gathered near the last surveyed point. And in the Quecreek Mine, that spot sat 1,830 feet above sea level, in a corridor called 1-Left.
But how to correlate that underground point with a point in the cow pasture? One surveyor used the traditional chain and compass. The other used GPS. The drilling spots they landed on were within five inches of each other. At 2:50 a.m., a local independent driller named Lou Bartels began boring a hole between the two chosen drilling spots. He used an extreme-duty six-inch Ingersoll Rand hammer and bit.
In a few hours, dozens of reporters would be gathered in a vacant Giant Eagle grocery store two miles south of the pasture. Pennsylvania Governor Mark Schweiker would make his way to the site—and would stay there for days. No one was articulating it yet, but just 10 months after the September 11 bombing had felled the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, taking nearly 3,000 lives, Quecreek was not a battle that America wanted to lose.
When the water had burst from the wall, a crewmate of Popernack’s, Denny Hall, got on the mine’s intercom system, the Loudmouth, and sounded a desperate warning: “Get the fuck out of the mine!” The 18 men began scrambling out, making much of their 1,500-foot journey into fresh air on their knees, with water surging around them. One team of nine men managed to make it out. But by the time Popernack’s crew neared the mine’s lowest point, the water was up to their necks. They had to turn their noses skyward to breathe.
But Popernack was not among them. He had been immediately blocked from the mine’s exit by the raging flow of water. As he frantically tried to devise an escape, he gazed up toward the metal plates girding the long steel bolts driven into the mine’s roof to pin rock strata and prevent roof collapses. On these roof bolt plates, he found two large dangling metal J-hooks, each about five inches long. Could he grab onto them and propel himself between the four rafter beams that spanned the river? It might be his only chance.
Popernack practiced swinging monkey-like over the dirt. He duct-taped a sledgehammer to his belt, reckoning that if he crossed safely, he might need to knock out a concrete wall or two to wriggle his way out of the mine. Then, like a pole vaulter readying to sprint, he stood still, collecting his thoughts—until he beheld a strange sight: His eight crewmates, walking toward him, away from the mine’s entrance.
“I looked at Mark standing there,” remembers one, a man named John Unger, “and I thought, ‘His next step will be his last.’”
Crew chief Randy Fogle also foresaw disaster, so he fetched the team’s giant, bulldozer-like coal scoop and maneuvered it until its long shovel reached midway over the water, even as its wheels were safely on dry ground. If Popernack could vault into the shovel, he wouldn’t even need to get his feet wet. He got a running start and leapt headlong. When he landed, after a flight of about 10 feet, in the shovel, he thought he was home free—that escaping the mine would be easy now. But then he learned that his fellow miners were there because they’d been stopped by the flood. The water in the mine’s low point was now so deep that escaping would involve swimming underwater in the dark for at least 500 feet.
“The good news,” Unger told Popernack, “is that all nine of us are together now. The bad news is that we’re trapped.”
The 9/11 attack had left the U.S. feeling vulnerable, and in our fragility we exalted the square-jawed “first responders” who’d come together to carry the nation forward—the firefighters who ran into burning towers to save lives, the cops and the ironworkers who braved the wreckage and smoldering debris to search for survivors at Ground Zero.
The miners weren’t first responders, but in their unalloyed toughness, in their fearlessness and fraternal bonding, they were close cousins.
Meanwhile, an eerie geographic coincidence shrouded their crisis. When Al Qaeda terrorists hijacked four planes on September 11, aiming to ram them into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, one of them never reached its target. Passengers aboard United Flight 93 had stormed the cockpit and attacked the terrorist pilots, forcing the plane to go down—in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, just 10 miles from Quecreek. In the popular imagination, the miners were cousins, as well, of Flight 93’s brave fighters. President George W. Bush called them “the spirit of America.” Their fate mattered.
In time, Bush would fly a team of Navy Seals into Pennsylvania in the vain hope that these underwater specialists could snorkel into the inundated mine and save lives.
First, though, a question loomed: Could rescuers even find the trapped miners?
It took Lou Bartels a little over two hours to reach the roof of the mine with his drill. When he did, at 5:06 a.m., the surveying proved spot-on. Bartels’s drill bit poked through the roof so near John Unger that he had to step out of the way, lest he incur a hole in his hard hat. Bartels shut off his machine.
In mining crises, a sort of Morse code has long prevailed: Trapped workers communicate to rescuers by tapping on a pipe, one tap for each person alive.
In the quiet above Quecreek, the crowd waited—and then counted as the taps came on the pipe, barely audible: 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9. Standing next to the pipe, straining to hear, Sbaffoni didn’t celebrate. Rather, he doubled down on his resolve. “All I knew was somebody was alive down there,” he says.
While the miners knew that someone aboveground had drilled a hole above their heads, they had no way of discerning whether rescue attempts were ongoing. They were alive, yes, and holed up in an air bubble roughly the size of a living room. But the water was rising on them, the air pocket diminishing, and they were looking for ways to distract themselves from hopelessness.
When crew chief Randy Fogle found some interlocking concrete blocks, used in mines to direct airflow, he instructed his men to build walls with them, ostensibly to contain the inrushing water—and to keep the miners busy.
“We were doing something,” says Unger. “We were occupied.” Still, it was hard not to feel hopeless. “[The walls] were never going to work. We didn’t have no cement. There was no way to seal them up,” he says.
Meanwhile, some of the miners were struggling to breathe and experiencing chest pains. When Bartels’s drill found the men, they were all freezing, at risk for hypothermia. The temperature underground was 55 degrees, and while they were no longer immersed in water, the mine was so damp they couldn’t get dry. Shivering, they huddled together in the darkness, saving their headlamp batteries and trying not to lose hope. Sleep was nearly impossible. Popernack thought of his wife, Sandy, and his two sons. His nerves jangled, thanks to nicotine deprivation—they’d run out of chaw.
Meanwhile, the water in the Quecreek Mine kept rising at two or three feet an hour; a giant pond was forming outside the entrance. Early Thursday morning, the water depth in the mine pit was at just 1,795 feet above sea level. The miners, sitting in their bubble at about 1,830 feet, had over 20 feet of water pressing down on the roof over their heads. Empty plastic gallon water jugs in the mine puckered and crinkled as a result of the pressure. “It was like being in a submarine,” Popernack recalls.
At one point, the trapped miners tacked up a canvas cloth between themselves and the coming water, an attempt to block the inundation from their thoughts. But the water continued its creep.
“It wasn’t like, ‘We might die in here,’” says Popernack. “We were gonna die, and I decided I wasn’t going to, you know, put my mouth to the roof to get my last breath. I figured that when it got up to my chin I’d just swim into it and ask the Lord to take care of my family or whatever.”
Says Unger, a lifelong churchgoer, “I wasn’t planning on dying in there. I never gave up.” He led the crew in reciting the Lord’s Prayer, and then he turned to the Bible’s 23rd Psalm. “The Lord is my shepherd,” he intoned, drawing from memory. “I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures . . .”
Aboveground, the moment the drill punctured the roof of the mine on Thursday morning, it was as though a balloon had popped. Air began hissing up the hole and out of the mine. This wasn’t just any air. It was the air the miners needed to breathe. The hole needed to be capped—fast. Sbaffoni sourced some inflatable rubber bags from fire personnel on site, but by the time he and others knelt to the earth to stuff the bags into the gap between the drill and the hole’s edge, the air was escaping so forcefully that it was blowing water and mud out of the hole like a geyser.
The escaping air had, of course, been pressing against the Harrison’s water, slowing its advance. And now John Urosek was terrified. A ventilation specialist for the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), a federal agency, Urosek knew that undeterred, the water would drown the miners. Engineers on site warned that the miners had about an hour left before the water would overwhelm them. They’re going to die, Urosek thought. We’re going to watch them die.
Soon Urosek had an idea. Mining drills rely on air compressors; pressed air drives their hammers and propels drill cuttings up and out of the hole. What if Bartels kept the drill in the hole and shot air down through the drill steel to create an air bubble that would keep the water at bay and also give the miners something to breathe?
On Urosek’s advice, Bartels turned his air compressor back on, at 90 pounds per square inch. (That’s the typical pressure inflating a skinny bicycle tire.)
But it wasn’t enough. The water in the mine kept rising. Black Wolf Coal’s Dave Rebuck got on the phone and started calling pump manufacturers. When he finally reached Godwin Pumps, 250 miles away in New Jersey, workers there instantly loaded a half dozen five-foot-tall, 400-horsepower pumps onto trailers. Then they began moving west over Interstate 76, at high speed, escorted by Pennsylvania state troopers.
The first trailer reached the mine at 8:33 a.m. Thursday, launching a massive drainage operation at the mine entrance. Up to 27,000 gallons—enough to cover an acre an inch deep—got sucked out of the mine every minute.
The pumps kept the miners from drowning, but they seemed to be fighting a losing battle: For the first 24 hours of the rescue, the water in the mine continued to rise, hitting a high of 1,857 feet at around 4 p.m. Thursday. But by 8 a.m. Friday, 35 hours into the crisis, the water level finally started to drop. It was at 1,845 feet. Three hours later, it had gone down two critical feet, to 1,843.
Meanwhile, the rescuers were also devising a plan to retrieve the miners, and there was only one way to get them out. They would need to dig a hole 30 inches wide, big enough to accommodate a cylindrical, yellow-painted, steel mesh capsule that could lift the men up one by one. Thirty-inch drill bits are specialty items, specific to the oil and gas industries, but there happened to be one just a little over 100 miles away, on a job site in West Virginia. A veteran driller named John Hamilton had been pointing it toward oil for a week, working 24/7 save for the odd catnap. When his boss and good buddy Duane Yost, of Yost Drilling in Mount Morris, Pennsylvania, called to say there were nine guys trapped in a mine, Hamilton was a bit punchy.
“You’re full of shit,” he said. “You’re fucking with me.” He hung up, laughing. Then Yost called back, and Hamilton quickly packed his “doghouse,” or tool trailer, and began moving east, carting both the $38,000 diamond-tipped drill bit and his 45-ton drill rig. By the time he pulled off the highway into Somerset County, there were cops at every stop sign, holding traffic so he could roll through.
For Hamilton, a 240-feet-deep cut was no biggie—he’d done that a bunch. The challenge of this project, he says, was that “the media was there, the governor was there, and, you know, the miners’ families was there. It was one of them deals where you’re either a hero or a zero.”
At 6:45 Thursday evening, Hamilton began drilling. The bit he was using was almost new, and it had recently been “blacklighted”—exposed to ultraviolet light to check for cracks.
Still, at a depth of 105 feet, after more than six hours of drilling, the bit broke—a curveball so unexpected that when Governor Schweiker pressed Hamilton to source a new 30-inch bit right away, Hamilton snapped.
“Bud,” he told the governor, “you can’t just go to Walmart and buy one of them off the shelf.”
There were only a handful of giant, tire-sized drill bits within a day’s drive of Quecreek. And the now-useless broken bit was blocking progress; fishing a 30-inch bit out of a deep hole can take four or five days.
But from its start, and despite the dire circumstances, the Quecreek rescue had been graced with luck. There was the concordance of the two surveyors, analog and digital, and the proximity of the drill bit to Unger’s helmet; there was also the uncanny availability of drills and pumps. Was the flow of good karma now going to cease, with the snapped bit?
What rescuers needed was a custom tool—a sort of giant pipe wrench that could be attached to the drill and then latched onto the top of the broken bit so it could be extracted. Remarkably, there was a company just 90 minutes from Somerset that fabricated such tools. Workers there dropped all other projects. They made the device in a few hours and loaded it onto a National Guard helicopter bound for the cow pasture on Dormel Farms. The tool was, Sbaffoni says, still hot when it arrived.
Dropped into the hole, it worked on the first try. And with a new drill bit sourced from nearby company, Hamilton was back in business. Though this bit was smaller at 26 inches in diameter, it was still big enough to bore a hole that would accommodate the 22-inch rescue capsule.
On TV, the Quecreek rescue looked like a fairly straightforward exercise in brute force. It was all about punching a humongous hole in the ground ASAP, right?
No. Success also hinged on intricate calculations regarding, among other things, air pressure. With their air pressurized by surrounding water, the miners were like deep sea divers—vulnerable to decompression sickness, also known as the bends. If Hamilton ripped a hole into their roof at the wrong moment—if he caused the air pressure in their space to shift radically—bubbles could form in their spines and their brains, causing pain, paralysis, confusion, or even death.
It fell to a scientist named Kelvin Ke-Kang Wu to steer the rescue away from such an outcome. A Taiwanese emigrant in his sixties, Wu was a hydrologist for MSHA. As the only hydrology PhD on the site, he exuded an aura of expertise. In his view, timing was everything: He decreed that Hamilton could bore into the mine only after vast quantities of water had been pumped out. Precisely, he stipulated that Quecreek’s water level had to be lowered to 1,829 feet, a foot beneath where the miners sat. If Hamilton stopped drilling and waited until the water was at 1,829, Wu explained, the miners would no longer have the weight of water above them. The air pressure in the mine would equal that on the surface, meaning they would avoid the bends. Also, critically, the water would simply be too low to inundate the miners’ air pocket.
Stopping seemed, in a way, crazy. From early Thursday on into Saturday, the rescue had been go, go, go! Nine men were trapped underground. The media had the nation’s viewers on tenterhooks. But Wu was a man whose directives carried weight.
At 1:38 Saturday afternoon, when the drill reached a depth of 1,860 feet—30 feet above the roof of the mine—Hamilton stopped drilling. Wu didn’t want to puncture the roof and mess with the mine’s air pressure until the water was low enough.
For nearly six hours, Hamilton waited, respectful of Wu’s calculations. Then, at 7:50 p.m., the water level fell to 1,829. Hamilton resumed drilling. When he penetrated the mine two-plus hours later, the air pressure was, as Wu had predicted, just fine. The miners were hypothermic, dehydrated, and famished. But essentially they too were just fine—and, after 77 hours underground, they still had the bandwidth for humor. When all the machinery on the rescue site was, for a second time in three days, powered down, one miner elected to breach the silence with a joke. Through a microphone dropped into the six-inch hole, he croaked, “Are we going to be paid overtime for this?”
Rescuers hung the steel mesh capsule on a long cable that dangled from a crane, and the men were pulled out of the earth one by one. “As every man came to the surface,” farm owner Bill Arnold says, “there was applause. But it was not the fist-pumping-and-cheering applause that comes with winning the Super Bowl. No, it was a very respectful and methodical ovation to the strength and the resilience that these guys had exhibited. The moment was, I’d say, reverent.”
Thanks to the coal dust down in the mine, and to the water gushing into the rescue hole from underground aquifers, each miner emerged with his skin wholly black and almost glistening. It was as though these nine men had already been cast into statues. And in time, they would indeed become icons. President Bush met with the miners just a week after their rescue, in a Pennsylvania fire station. ABC rushed out a made-for-TV movie three months later—The Pennsylvania Miners’ Story arrived replete with promotional material rendered in red, white, and blue. There were numerous documentaries; there was a best-selling book.
There was also a report on the MSHA investigation issued in 2003 that shed light on the primary culprit. It turned out that the map the miners had been provided was inaccurate. According to the report, “The primary cause of the water inundation was the use of an undated and uncertified mine map of the Harrison No. 2 mine that did not show the complete and final mine workings.” The report also cited the “unavailability of a certified final mine map . . . in the State of Pennsylvania’s mine map repository.”
Soon, Pennsylvania would tighten its permitting process for mining operations. In 2009, the state created a Mine Safety Board that would be empowered to shape mining regulations without legislative approval. And in 2013, in response to the Quecreek incident, Penn State University launched the Pennsylvania Mine Map Atlas, a searchable database of more than 100,000 high-resolution scans of original mine maps, overlaid onto a modern map of the state.
As he waited for his long capsule ride up to the dairy pasture, Mark Popernack could hardly have imagined these eventual changes—or the more immediate ruckus that would greet him aboveground. “I just thought, ‘They’re going to take me to my truck and I’m going to get a shower and go home,’” Popernack says. “I thought, ‘I’m going to have to take a couple days off. I’m not going to be able to come to work tomorrow.’”
Up on the surface, Popernack’s wife, Sandy, saw things more clearly. “He is never setting foot in that mine again,” she told a friend.
Popernack had volunteered to be the ninth and final man out, and for about 15 minutes he was alone in the darkness, communing with an underground world that was, for all the terror it had caused, the world that had made him, as well as so many people he loved. “It was kind of a relaxing moment,” he says. “I just got to sit there and reflect back on what the hell just went on.”
After he finally climbed out of the capsule, Popernack says, “It was weird, but for months I wouldn’t even step on an ant on the sidewalk. I’d been given a second chance, and I saw that life is precious.”
Popernack still lives his days attuned to that preciousness. He is, at 64, retired now, after a couple of decades of peripheral coal industry jobs—selling coal, routing trucks—and his life is quiet. “We got a nice house, a nice yard,” he says. “I tinker around in the garage some. It’s just Sandy and me now, and our dog, Molly—she’s a big part of our family. She’s spoiled. She goes everywhere with us. The back seat of the truck’s hers.”
These days when Popernack thinks about all the years he spent coal mining, he sometimes misses being underground, in the dark. But since July 2002 he has never once been back to work in a mine. Because, of course, life rarely offers up a third chance. |
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