Andy Starnes, Post-GazettePittsburgh Post-Gazette
SPRAGGS, Pa. -- On Thanksgiving Day 2000, Roy and Diane Brendel had to eat turkey and trimmings down the road at her brother's house while Consol Energy carved a 6-foot-thick slab of the Pittsburgh coal seam out from under their National Historic Register-listed home.
It was the first time in 30 years that the Brendels couldn't host the Thanksgiving meal in what was then the finest example of Spanish Revival architecture in southwestern Pennsylvania. A family tradition was broken, and now, six agonizing, frustrating and painful years later, they have to admit that their home is too.
Known as the Ernest Thralls House in honor of its builder, the sandstone and stucco structure in Greene County fell more than four feet in the subsidence that followed Consol's Blacksville No. 2 longwall mine under the Brendels' 133 rural green acres. As it fell, the 12-room dwelling twisted, corkscrewing into the ground like some slow-motion version of Dorothy's house dropped on Munchkinland.
"When we came back from my brother's six years ago I sat here in the night listening to my entire house crack apart," Mrs. Brendel, 60, a retired elementary school teacher, said recently as she stood outside the severely damaged and soon-to-be-bulldozed home. "It was the most horrendous thing I'd ever been through."
The Brendels' attachment to the house, built in 1939 by Maj. George Washington Ernest Thralls, caused them to hold out hope that it would eventually be set right. Maj. Thralls was a Greene County native who served under Gen. John Joseph "Black Jack" Pershing in Mexico and fell in love with the architecture, and they shared his passion.
As plaster walls cracked open wide enough to insert a fist, as doors went cockeyed and jammed shut, as stairs pulled off of their anchoring walls and hardwood floors buckled and humped, as water pipes burst and the ceramic tile roof leaked, the Brendels vowed to fight to the bitter end to get their historic home repaired.
That end came this past summer. Although the state Department of Environmental Protection finally ordered Consol to repair the house this past spring, those repairs never happened. Black mold had by then infested the house so pervasively and produced such an unhealthy atmosphere their doctor told them to get out.
A month later the Brendels reluctantly agreed to an out-of-court settlement with Consol.
It was not the ending they envisioned or wanted. And they blame the mining company for botching the damage mitigation and delaying repairs, and state mining law and policies for failing to adequately protect historic homes in southwestern Pennsylvania's coal fields.
"We thought when the mining company got the repair order from the DEP they'd do something," Mrs. Brendel said. "When they failed to do anything yet again, I looked at Roy and he at me. Our eyes were watery red slits because of the mold. We had to move out."
"We'd piled up so much debt with our engineers, architects, attorneys and mold experts. It got to the point that for our health and finances we just couldn't go on," said Mr. Brendel, a retired school guidance counselor who at 62 is still wiry and tough, though his hair and neatly trimmed beard have more salt and less pepper than they did when he first heard that his property would be undermined.
"We settled. We took it as far as we could go. We were committed, but when it came to our health, well, that was the bitter end."
The mold had its genesis, the Brendels say, when the home subsided and their basement sank below the local water table and flooded. It took Consol six months to install sump pumps. The mold permeated the house, inside the walls and under the floors. At the end it was so bad that this past summer they had to burn more than a third of their belongings -- furniture, clothes, books and bedding (and scrap most appliances) -- in the field out back.
"Our house is destroyed," said Mrs. Brendel, who felt so terrorized by the destruction of her home and the lack of help from state and federal agencies two years ago she suffered from anxiety and panic attacks. "I had to burn two antique wicker furniture sets handed down from my grandmother and her needlepoint pillows too. I cried that day, believe me."
A law written in coal
Under terms of the settlement the Brendels received some money -- the amount hasn't been revealed because of a confidentiality agreement insisted on by Consol -- and the coal company bought the right to walk away without repairing the structure as required by the state's mining law, Act 54.
That still-controversial law, written in part by coal industry attorneys and quickly approved on the day before Christmas 1994, allowed coal companies to dig under homes and other structures built before 1966, provided the property owner was compensated for subsidence damage and water loss. Before 1994, coal companies had to leave pillars of coal to support such homes, including historic or architecturally significant structures, which are afforded no special protections by Act 54.
The law enables Consol and other coal companies to mine the rich Pittsburgh coal seam using longwall techniques. That full extraction method, used in seven massive mines in southwestern Pennsylvania, removes coal in horizontal "panels" 800 to 1,500 feet wide and two to three miles long, causing immediate subsidence on the surface.
Adrian Fine, director of the National Trust for Historic Preservation's northeastern field office in Philadelphia, said longwall mining has been devastating for a lot of communities and historic properties in southwestern Pennsylvania, and the Thralls House is a particularly egregious example.
"I visited the house before it was undermined and it was clearly a significant property. But it sustained tremendous damage, and what happened to that property is beyond belief," said Mr. Fine, who added that it has been a challenge to get state agencies to conduct historic preservation reviews in southwestern Pennsylvania.
When the Thralls House was undermined in 2000, the DEP's policy was to allow mining under historic homes unless it was shown that subsidence would cause "irreparable damage," even though that policy violated a state law that prohibits activities that would adversely affect such sites.
Betsy Mallison, a DEP spokeswoman, said Consol made its original repair proposal in 2002 and the Brendels didn't respond until 2005.
"We issued the repair order in the spring of 2006," Ms. Mallison said. "We interceded, but the litigation has been resolved. As far as we're concerned it's done."
Bev Braverman, executive director of the Mountain Watershed Association in Fayette County, and chairwoman of the Tri-State Citizens Mining Network's Center for Coalfield Justice, said state and federal mining agencies failed the Brendels.
"It's an intolerable situation and unthinkable that this has happened to a hardworking couple like the Brendels," Ms. Braverman said.
Bethel Park-based Consol Energy, which had sued the Brendels, the U.S. Department of the Interior and the Keeper of the National Historic Register in U.S. District Court to remove the Thralls House from the Register of Historic Places, confirmed that the terms of the settlement are "confidential," but declined any substantive comment on what happened to the house. The settlement ended that court case.
Consol, which in the past has blamed the delay in repairing the Brendels' home on their foot-dragging, had previously offered a settlement of more than $500,000, which it claimed was enough to repair any damage done by mining. The state Department of Environmental Protection had estimated the repairs to the home alone would cost $1.2 million, and an independent contractor put the repair costs at $1.8 million. In a counterclaim to Consol's federal suit seeking to remove the house from the National Historic Register, the Brendels asked the court to award them $3 million for damage to the house, property and outlying buildings.
"It's a shame things weren't done in an appropriate manner. I can't believe Consol came out ahead using the tactics they used here," said David Hook, an attorney who represented the Brendels in the case. "I don't see where the company benefited in any way. I don't think it saved money. I don't think it furthered its public image or furthered its political situation.
"It spent more money than it had to, had it approached this in a businesslike manner, and really put a nice family through living hell with their house falling down around their ears."
The Brendels also deny they caused the delay in repairs.
"Consol wanted to address the repairs under 84 Lumber standards and we wanted the repairs done to National Historic Preservation Act standards," said Mr. Brendel. "We didn't drag things out. We just refused to capitulate."
Cracked, broken, infested
From the outside, the Brendels' pine-shaded home, just off state Route 218 along Roberts Run, looks much the same today as it has since it was undermined -- braced with stout timbers and steel beams and rods installed by Consol, its stone walls cribbed with elaborate if ineffectual supports that failed to provide the promised protections from subsidence.
Inside that broken shell, deep cracks spiderweb through the plaster walls. Almost all of the furniture is gone, burned because of the mold or cleaned and put in storage along with stained glass windows, ornamental Spanish tiles and a heavy, elaborately carved, oak front door once set in the stone turret entryway.
On a west-facing living room window sill, near an inlaid tile floor and fireplace the Brendels hope to salvage, there are hundreds of dead ladybugs, that, contrary to customary country wisdom, have not brought this household good luck.
In the otherwise empty master bedroom, three half-full buckets catch water coming through the leaky tile roof, and a half-dozen blocks of wood, used to try to level their bed, are scattered on the floor.
The Brendels' daughter, Michelle, and her husband, Landon Bowser, are stripping the last salvageable items -- ornamental woodwork, paneling, inlaid tiles and light fixtures -- out of the out-of-kilter house. They hope to finish the salvage work by Christmas.
Walking through the skeleton that was their home, Mrs. Brendel recalled better times.
"I used to sit in the sun room and read while I watched the kids swimming in the pool. Now it's all gone," she said, gesturing out the second-floor window to an in-ground pool that also subsided and cracked apart. "In the living room where the stained glass window was, the sun would come in and send jewels of color throughout the room. It's the memories that kill you."
Mr. Brendel said they plan to raze their historic home early next spring and then break ground in the field behind their old house for a new home that will also be built in a Spanish architectural style, but be only about half the size of their historic home. The new home will be built on stilts, like a beach house, in an effort to mitigate any future subsidence.
For now, they've moved into a new 30-foot trailer set up on a cracked macadam basketball court just behind the old house and surrounded by insulating hay bales for the winter. Though they're not looking forward to winter in the trailer, both say they are relieved that the battle over the house is done.
"Our lives have been run by the coal company, the state and lawyers for a long time. Everything revolved around our case and I would have nightmares about it," Mrs. Brendel said. "We became the poster child for longwall mining opponents and the media when all we wanted for our retirement was to lounge around the pool and do some gardening."
"We're trying to put this all behind us and be in the new house before next Thanksgiving," Mr. Brendel said. "Then we'll really do a celebration up right."
First Published: November 23, 2006, 5:00 a.m.
