The review-- Broken Streams, Broken System, Broken Trust - PA DEP's Failure to Protect Southwestern Pennsylvania from Widespread Longwall Coal Mining Damage-- calls on Gov. Josh Shapiro and the General Assembly to intervene directly in the Department of Environmental Protection's coal mining oversight program and require the agency to follow the law.
Act 54 of 1994 is the only law standing between coalfield families and unchecked damage from underground coal mining, said the Council.
It requires DEP to compile and analyze the effects of mining on structures and water resources every 5 years and to report the results to Pennsylvania's top elected officials.
The Council’s independent review-- conducted by senior ecologists Stephen P. Kunz and Dr. James A. Schmid of Schmid & Company, Inc.-- found that DEP's most recent report to the Governor and Legislature is, in the reviewers' words, “a haphazard compilation of selected raw [database] statistics,” riddled with data errors and containing virtually no analysis of trends.
It is the first Act 54 report in 20 years that DEP did not have independent university researchers prepare.
“The Governor's office and the General Assembly have been receiving these reports for thirty years. They already have everything they need to know that this program is failing,” the Citizens Coal Council said. “What's been missing is the political will to demand better — from DEP, and for the people living over these mines.”
“That is the weakening of the coal mining law by agency dysfunction. It makes a DEP permit easier to get and Pennsylvania's water and property less protected -- the Department prefers after-the-fact mitigation to actually preventing the damage,” said Michael Nixon, board member of the nonprofit Citizens Coal Council.
Reforms Needed
In addition to the review of the Act 54 report, the Citizens Coal Council also released a second report-- Act 54 and Longwall Mining in Pennsylvania: Impacts, Oversight, and the Case for Reform-- which lays bare three essential problems with the DEP’s inexcusable decades-long poor performance:
-- Lack of Impact Prediction and Enforcement by DEP
-- DEP’s Failure to Address Known Stream Impacts
-- DEP’s Lack of Transparency and Accountability
“Act 54 was built on a simple promise: if underground mining damages your home, your water supply, or a stream, it gets fixed,” said Aimee Erickson, longtime Executive Director of Citizens Coal Council. “DEP is not keeping that promise, and its own reporting is getting worse, not better, in telling the Governor, the Legislature, and the public whether it's being kept. Coalfield families deserve better than that — and so far, only DEP has been asked to fix it. It's time for Harrisburg to act.”
Key Findings Of CCC Review
Here are the key findings from the independent review--
-- Longwall Mining Responsible For 98% Of Damage: Longwall mining is responsible for 98% of mine-liable structural damage claims reported between 2013 and 2023 (459 of 467), even though the technology was approved under Act 54 in 1994 on industry assurances that "planned, controlled" subsidence would be more predictable and less damaging than traditional room-and-pillar mining.
Three decades of Act 54 reports have shown the opposite to be true.
-- Only 5% Of Mining-Caused Damage Is Repaired: Despite Act 54's core "you damage it, you fix it" premise, repair status is almost never confirmed: historically only about 5% of documented underground-mining damage-- and just 3% of longwall-attributed damage specifically-- has been documented as actually repaired.
In the 5th reporting period, 52% of 486 mine-liable damage claims were resolved through undisclosed "agreement," and another 31% through outright purchase of the property by the mine operator; together, these two resolution types accounted for 83% of all outcomes, with no public information on whether repairs, demolition, or abandonment ultimately followed.
-- Non-Disclosure Agreements Hide Whether Act 54 Is Working: NDAs were never contemplated in Act 54's original design, which envisioned open settlement agreements that could be reviewed by DEP or recorded on a property deed.
They have nonetheless become the dominant tool for resolving mining-damage claims, and they systematically prevent DEP, the Citizens Advisory Council, the General Assembly, and the public from learning whether a given home, water supply, or stream was ever actually restored.
DEP has acknowledged it is not privy to NDA terms and has no mechanism to track outcomes independent of them-- even though its own field inspectors could, without violating any confidentiality term, simply note whether visible repairs exist.
-- Damage-Prediction Models Are Decades Out Of Date: The 35-degree Rebuttable Presumption Zone (RPZ), which determines whether a mine operator is presumed liable for water-supply damage, and the related 30-degree "angle of draw" used for structural damage assessments, both reflect mining practices from roughly 30 years ago, when longwall panels were far smaller than they are today.
DEP's own 4th Act 54 Report found that 50% of documented water-supply damages occurred outside the 35-degree RPZ, at angles as steep as 85 degrees.
At Ryerson Station State Park, Duke Lake dam sustained irreparable damage from mining at a 66-degree angle — nearly double the current presumption threshold.
The companion model used to predict stream flow loss, developed by Dr. Syd S. Peng in the 1980s, is now more than 30 years old and has never been recalibrated or validated against modern longwall panel dimensions.
A more rigorous streamflow-characterization methodology, developed by the U.S. Geological Survey and partly funded by DEP itself (Hittle and Risser, completed 2019), has never been adopted into DEP's technical guidance or permit requirements.
-- Stream And Wetland Damage Is Extensive, Slow To Recover, Poorly Tracked: In the 5th reporting period alone, 183 documented stream impacts affected at least 27.4 miles of Pennsylvania streams, 90% of them caused by flow loss-- a harder-to-predict and harder-to-restore impact than pooling.
Flow-loss damage can extend up to a mile from the affected mining area, and restoration, when it happens, typically takes five to ten years; pooling impacts took an average of nearly eight years to reach biological "release."
Some damaged streams have never been restored at all.
None of the streams documented as impaired by mining during the 5th Report period were listed on Pennsylvania's official Clean Water Act Section 303(d)/305(b) impaired-waters reports to the EPA-- evidence of a communications gap between DEP's mining program and its own Division of Water Quality that leaves state and federal regulators effectively blind to mining's water-quality footprint.
-- PA's Highest-Quality Streams Get No Special Protection From Mining: Streams designated Exceptional Value (EV) or High Quality (HQ) are entitled to heightened anti-degradation protection under state and federal law, but DEP's mining-permit review process does not specifically screen for these designations before approving longwall operations.
The 5th Act 54 Report did not mention Special Protection waters at all, despite documented damage at sites including the Enlow Fork and Harvey mines-- watersheds increasingly targeted for mining expansion even as EV/HQ designations spread across southwestern Pennsylvania.
-- Report Maps And Appendices Don't Hold Up To Scrutiny: The Appendix A maps meant to document each mine's impacts are illegible at the scale provided. For example, Cumberland Mine's map purports to show all 31 reported structure-damage complaints from the period, but only about 10 distinct symbols are visible because overlapping points render on top of one another-- and none of the maps display the "Problem ID" numbers used in the report's own tables, making it impossible to connect a specific mapped point to its written case history without filing a separate Right-to-Know request for the underlying shapefiles, as CCC had to do.
-- DEP Has Not Meaningfully Responded To CCC Or Its Own Citizens Advisory Council: CCC submitted 19 specific written questions to then-DEP Secretary Patrick McDonnell in February 2021 and met with DEP staff over seven subsequent conference calls through early 2022.
The 6th Report states that "the Department reviewed and considered all comments and suggestions made by the CCC," but the independent review finds no evidence that any of CCC's substantive concerns were incorporated or resolved-- the 6th Report addresses CCC's original concerns even less thoroughly than the 5th Report did.
DEP's own Citizens Advisory Council, which by law reviews and formally comments on every five-year Act 54 report, raised many of the same concerns in more than 100 pages of comments on the 5th Report and specifically recommended DEP adopt the 2019 USGS streamflow methodology.
None of that input is reflected in the 6th Report, which does not mention the USGS study at all.
-- DEP Has Not Pursued Funding It Could Use To Fix This: DEP cites "fiscal restrictions" as the reason it could not commission independent expert analysis for the 6th Report, but has not visibly pursued funding sources available to it: OSMRE has historically covered half the cost of prior five-year reports and could be asked to contribute more; Pennsylvania's Mine Subsidence Insurance Fund holds an accumulated surplus of roughly $100 million; and EPA funding mechanisms exist for wetland and water-resource work that could underwrite relevant portions of a future report
Conclusion
“Taken together, the independent reviewers conclude that DEP's 6th Act 54 Report is "essentially a haphazard compilation of selected raw BUMIS statistics" containing "little or no analysis"-- a significant regression from the 2nd through 5th reports and a failure to meet the data-compilation and analysis obligations Act 54 imposes on DEP by law.
“Three decades after Act 54 promised that mining damage would be identified, tracked, and repaired, that promise remains undocumented, unverified, and in most cases unmet.”
CCC Recommendations
-- Gov. Shapiro
-- Direct DEP to secure dedicated funding — from the federal Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, the roughly $100 million surplus in the state's Mine Subsidence Insurance Fund, and/or the U.S. EPA — to contract independent experts for the 7th Act 54 Report, restoring the standard his administration inherited from the 2nd through 5th reports.
-- Publicly commit to enforcing Act 54's “you damage it, you fix it” standard, including requiring disclosure of repair status even where non-disclosure agreements are used to settle claims.
-- Senate/House
-- Hold oversight hearings on DEP's 6th Act 54 Report and the Department's failure to fund or staff its own mining program adequately.
-- Update Act 54's 30-year-old damage-prediction assumptions, including the 35-degree “rebuttable presumption zone,” to reflect the size of modern longwall mines and the real-world damage documented in DEP's own reports.
-- Appropriate dedicated funding for the 7th Act 54 Report rather than leaving DEP to claim, as it has for a decade, that it cannot afford to comply with the law.
DEP
-- Contract qualified independent experts to prepare the 7th Act 54 Report and never again substitute raw, unanalyzed data for the comprehensive analysis the law requires.
-- Replace its outdated BUMIS tracking system and predictive models with modern, transparent GIS tools and updated science, including USGS streamflow methodology completed in 2019 but never adopted for permit applications.
-- Enforce a firm three-year deadline for stream restoration, suspending mining permits when that deadline is missed, and give Pennsylvania's highest-quality streams heightened protection from longwall mining.
-- Track and publicly report the repair status of every mine-liable damage claim-- including those settled privately — so the Governor, the Legislature, and the public can see whether the damage was actually fixed.
Click Here for the Citizens Coal Council announcement.
Follow these links to the two reports released by the Citizens Coal Council--
-- Act 54 and Longwall Mining in Pennsylvania: Impacts, Oversight, and the Case for Reform
Visit the Citizens Coal Council website for more information.
[Visit DEP’s Act 54 Report webpage for more information on the current and past reports.
[In addition to the 2018-2022 Act 54 report, DEP also made available the raw information it gathers on these issues annually.]
[DEP Citizens Advisory Council Accepting Comments
[Public comments on DEP’s Act 54 Report can be sent to DEP’s Citizens Advisory Council through July 31.
[Click Here for instructions on how to submit comments.]
(Photos: DEP’s Act 54 Report - Trying to protect home from longwall mining damage; stream damage; Map of areas impacted.)
Resource Link:
-- DEP Citizens Advisory Council Invites Comments On DEP's Act 54 Report Documenting Adverse Impacts Of Longwall And Underground Coal Mining On Structures, Surface And Ground Water; Report Says 20% Of Undermined Streams Damaged [PaEN] [Deadline Now July 31]
NewsClips:
-- Tribune-Democrat: Quecreek Mine Rescue Remembered Quietly On 24th Anniversary; Plans In Place For Larger Celebration Next Year
[Posted: July 30, 2026] PA Environment Digest
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