Berlin, Rockwood and Shanksville, Pennsylvania

First timer? In this formerly once-a-day blog (and now pretty much a once-a-week blog) I use an app that provides a random latitude and longitude that puts me somewhere in the continental United States (the lower 48).  I call this “landing.”

I keep track of the watersheds I land in, as well as the town or towns I land near.  I do some internet research to hopefully find something of interest about my landing location. 

To find out more about A Landing A Day (like who “Dan” is) please see “About Landing” above.  To check out some relatively recent changes in how I do things, check out “About Landing (Revisited).”

Landing number 2663; A Landing A Day blog post number 1108

Dan:  Today’s lat/long (N40^o 1.754’, W79^o 8.065) puts me in southwest Pennsylvania:

Here’s my local landing map:

Somerset is far and away the largest town, but it just didn’t have the chops to go titular.

My streams-only map shows that I landed in the watershed of the West Branch of Coxes Creek; on to Coxes Creek. 

Zooming way back:

Coxe Creek discharges to the Casselman River (1^st hit ever!); on to the Youghiogheny (1^st hit ever!); then to the Monongahela (5^th hit; 187^th river on my list of rivers with five or more hits); to the Ohio (164^th hit); to the MM (1037^th hit).

The Orange Dude could get a look at the West Branch:

He looked upstream towards my landing:

He also looked downstream:

I saw Rockwood on my local landing map, and realized that I had been there before.  Way back in the day (in the 1980s), I was doing environmental work for Texas Eastern Corporation, which owned and operated a natural gas pipeline system that transmitted natural gas from Texas to New Jersey.  There was a compressor station in Rockwood, which functioned as a pumping station to boost the pressure in the pipeline and keep the gas flowing.

There were 18 Texas Eastern compressor stations in Pennsylvania, and the turbines in the compressor stations were lubricated with PCB oil.  Inevitably, some of the oil leaked into the pipeline, which then accumulated in the low spots along the pipeline.  The accumulated oil had to be cleaned out, so Texas Eastern would periodically send “pigs” through the pipeline.  A pig is essentially a cylindrical device cleverly designed to inspect the pipeline and collect accumulated fluids at the same time.  The pig is carried through the pipeline by the flow of gas (from compressor station to compressor station), scooping up the oil as it goes.

The pig would surface at the downstream compressor station, loaded up with PCB oils.  So, the pig needed to be emptied, and the cheapest and easiest way to do it was to dump the contents in an earthen pit.

Bad idea.

For about a year and half, me and about a hundred other people (including my future wife Jody) sampled the hell out of the soils and groundwater and figured out the extent of PCBs associated with each of 50-odd disposal pits located at the 18 compressor stations spread across Pennsylvania (including Rockwood).

OK, OK.  Neither Jody nor I did any of the actual sampling, but somebody had to organize and manage the effort and then look at all of the data and figure out what was going on.  I could go on and on with stories, but I won’t . . .

Moving on to Berlin.  Wiki tells us that there was a riot in Berlin in June of 1794 as part of the Whiskey Rebellion.  OK, I’ve heard of the Whiskey Rebellion, but don’t know a thing about it.  From Wiki:

The Whiskey Rebellion (also known as the Whiskey Insurrection) was a violent tax protest in the United States beginning in 1791 and ending in 1794 during the presidency of George Washington. The so-called “whiskey tax” was the first tax imposed on a domestic product by the newly formed federal government.

The tax applied to all distilled spirits, but consumption of American whiskey was rapidly expanding in the late 18th century, so the excise became widely known as a “whiskey tax.”  Farmers of the western frontier were accustomed to distilling their surplus rye, barley, wheat, corn, or fermented grain mixtures to make whiskey. These farmers resisted the tax.

Throughout Western Pennsylvania counties, protesters used violence and intimidation to prevent federal officials from collecting the tax. Resistance came to a climax in July 1794, when a US marshal arrived in western Pennsylvania to serve writs to distillers who had not paid the excise. The alarm was raised, and more than 500 armed men attacked the fortified home of tax inspector John Neville.

Washington responded by sending peace commissioners to western Pennsylvania to negotiate with the rebels, while at the same time calling on governors to send a militia force to enforce the tax. Washington himself rode at the head of an army to suppress the insurgency, with 13,000 militiamen provided by the governors of Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

The rebels all went home before the arrival of the army, and there was no confrontation. About 20 men were arrested, but all were later acquitted or pardoned.

At the end of the day, it was much ado about nothing . . .

Here’s a shot from Wiki of a tax collector being tarred and feathered in western Pennsylvania:

Also from Wiki – this painting of George Washington reviewing the troops he was leading to put down the rebellion:

Shanksville is well-known solely because it was near Shanksville that United Flight 93 crashed on 9/11.  Flight 93 originated in Newark and was headed to LAX when it was hijacked.  The hijackers intended on crashing the jet into either the White House or the Capitol (I bet it was the Capitol).  Flight 93 was the last of four flights hijacked, and the passengers had time to communicate via phone with loved ones who told them about the World Trade Center and let them know what was going on.  We all know the story:  the passengers decided that they had no choice but to rush the cockpit and at least attempt to retake control of the jet. 

Here’s the flight path:

And a video put out by the National Park Service about the Flight 93 Memorial:

I’ll close with this shot posted on GE by J. L. Ruthig of a barn about a mile north of my landing:

That’ll do it

Greg

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