End of era
The destruction of the old St. Nicholas Coal Breaker 13 miles west of Tamaqua is the end of an era.
The industrial complex, built in 1931 and opened 1932, was the largest and most productive coal breaker in the world.
It was so large that half of the village of Suffolk, just west of Mahanoy City, was relocated to free up space for construction.
When you examine the Old St. Nick, you find its numbers staggering.
The Schuylkill County breaker soars seven stories high. Construction required 3,800 tons of steel and more than 10,000 cubic yards of concrete.
It boasted a supporting network of 20 miles of track, 25 miles of conduit, 24,241 square feet of rubber belting, 118 miles of wire and 20 miles of pipe.
Old St. Nick was the class of the industry in its 40-year run, producing 25,000 tons of coal a day at full capacity.
It was a marvel of engineering. Sources claim that coal dumped at the breaker needed only 12 minutes to pass through the entire system.
The glorious coal castle closed in 1972, supplanted by a new St. Nicholas Breaker less than half a mile away.
Of course, there's value in scrap metal, and so the days of the old St. Nick are numbered.
Demolition has been taking place since last year.
But the breaker is so well-constructed and has so much metal it likely will take a few years before the behemoth completely disappears.
Still, it's sad to see the icon fade away.
It's unfortunate we don't have "possibility thinkers" to come up with a plan to save the anthracite coal industry's final breaker.
One hundred years from now, students studying the history of our great nation will want to know more about coal and how it built America by fueling the Industrial Revolution. They'll look in books for breaker photos. They'll gaze in amazement at buildings as large as small mountains and wonder why we ever tore them down.
Sometimes we can be shortsighted when it comes to legacy.
And the fate of our coal breakers isn't something new. It's the continuation of an alarming trend of indifference.
The incredible Switchback Gravity Railroad of Carbon County, another coal industry icon, was sold for scrap exactly 78 years ago.
The Switchback was so special that when Thomas Edison was asked to convert it to electric power, he refused, declaring the "engineering was already perfect."
It's always tragic when we lose our appreciation for our greatest man-built marvels. There's something enormously wrong when we view our achievements as scrap metal.
When we do that, we make mistakes that can never be corrected. And we strip the future of priceless heritage.
By DONALD R. SERFASS
dserfass@tnonline.com
