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Not many people know the story of Amedeo Pancotti, who lived most of his life in Exeter before relocating to a small house on St. James Street in Plains Township in 1972.
Pancotti, the son of Italian immigrants, died May 21, 1979, at Mercy Hospital in Wilkes-Barre. He was 70.
More than 20 years before his death, Pancotti was underground mining coal as he had done for 33 years of his life for the Knox Coal Company.
Knox Coal leased the River Slope mine in Port Griffith, Jenkins Township, from the Pennsylvania Coal Company.
Late on the morning of Jan. 22, 1959, the ice-swollen Susquehanna River broke through the roof of the River Slope, flooding the mine and trapping miners, including Pancotti. Twelve miners were lost. Pancotti helped saved others. He never mined coal again.
Pancotti in October 1959 received the Carnegie Hero Medal for his heroics when the disaster occurred.
Months before Pancotti died, he gave the Times Leader an interview in 1979 for the 20th anniversary of the disaster.
“Sure I was scared. You get scared when you think you are going to die, that you’ll never get out of the mine alive,” Pancotti was quoted as saying in Jan. 20, 1979 edition.
Pancotti, then 50, was among 33 miners who escaped the mine through the abandoned Eagle Air Shaft.
Billions of gallons of water and huge chunks of ice poured into the River Slope washing over and around panicked miners who scattered their tools and raced for higher areas of the mine, the Evening News reported Jan. 23, 1959.
“Pancotti and 32 other men rushed into an adjoining mine seeking an abandoned air shaft. He and six others became separated from the group and reached the air shaft alone, only to find it blocked by debris. Digging feverishly, Pancotti and three others cleared a tunnel through the 30 feet of debris. They found themselves some 50 feet below the surface, surrounded by steep walls,” the Times Leader reported Oct. 31, 1959.
Pancotti slowly climbed the steep walls without rope reaching the surface. He summoned help and tossed a rope into the hole, helping miners out of the flooded mine. A rescue team entered the Eagle Air Shaft and located other miners, including Joseph Stella.
Stella was credited with helping Pancotti in locating the Eagle Air Shaft.
The bodies of the 12 miners were never recovered.
A ‘troublesome shaft’
The shaft where Pancotti and 36 other miners escaped was long known as a “troublesome shaft,” the Evening News reported Aug. 13, 1966.
Known as the Eagle Shaft when mining commenced there in 1855, an explosion on Aug. 14, 1871, killed 17 miners.
“In the long history of mining in upper Luzerne County, it was the second greatest loss of life in a single disaster up to that time. It followed by two and one-half months of the Knight Shaft Disaster in West Pittston on May 27, 1871, when 20 men and boys died,” the Evening News reported.
The cause of the August 1871 explosion was due to “Black Damp,” a mixture of carbolic acid gas produced by an explosion of carbon hydrogen.
Owner of the Eagle Shaft in 1871, Alva Tompkins, paid the burial expenses of the 17 killed. Funerals averaged $10 each, the Evening News reported.