April 7, 2025 - Mike Critchfield lives close enough to a deep mine in Acosta, seven miles north of Somerset, that dynamite blasts rattled the windows of his aging mobile home with the opening of the mine in 2017.

And until recently, Mr. Critchfield, a retired truck driver, awoke every day to the backup alarms of tri-axles lining up at the mine at 3 a.m. to haul away the coal.

But the 50-acre Jenner Township mine is quiet these days, after its owner voluntarily liquidated the company in January under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, leaving hundreds of mineworkers unemployed at the end of March.

“Everybody said ‘coal’s down,’” the 65-year-old Mr. Critchfield said Saturday about the mine operators. “How are they going to make money?”

“Look at the coal miners,” he added. “Where are they going to get jobs?”

Elected officials are asking the same questions, with the Pennsylvania Department of Labor & Industry’s Rapid Response team scheduled to meet with laid-off mineworkers Tuesday at the Somerset County Technology Center.

The trade school offers training for big rig drivers, practical nursing, automotive repair and other skills as the mine closure sends shivers through a region where more than half of the county has been farmed for generations.

A total of 332 coal miners at 10 sites in Somerset County, about 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, and Garrett County, Md., lost their jobs following Corsa Coal Corp.’s petition for protection from creditors in bankruptcy court in Pittsburgh.

Atlanta-based Norfolk Southern Railway Co. was listed as Corsa’s biggest creditor at $2.8 million.

About 50 laid-off miners will be hired by Kittanning-based Rosebud Mining Co., one of three outfits that acquired Corsa’s assets in bankruptcy court. Included in the deal was the mine near Mr. Critchfield’s home, another mine three miles away in Boswell and a third deep mine in Maryland.

Acosta is a coal patch with narrow grid streets and a history laced with coal dust dating to the early 1900s. Through the decades, mines opened and closed, sometimes sparked by the development of bigger, more efficient mining machinery.

Until recently, about 73 Corsa miners extracted coal at the Acosta site from a quarter-mile underground.

The bankruptcy will sting the economy of Somerset County, located about 70 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, county commissioner Pamela A. Tokar-Ickes said Friday.

“For the immediate, the short term, this is a very difficult day,” Ms. Tokar-Ickes said, “a very sad day for us in Somerset County. They were a pretty big producer and this is going to be a loss that’s going to be felt for a long time.”

The number of coal mining jobs has been falling in Somerset County over the past 25 years, down about 1,000 jobs since 2000, Ms. Tokar-Ickes said.

Absorbing the job losses has not been easy as the county’s unemployment rate has inched up. Somerset’s jobless rate was 5.5% in January, up from 4.9% a year ago, above the surrounding counties’ and the statewide rate of 3.8%.

Somerset County also has an older population, complicating job retraining efforts: One in four residents is 65 or older. Somerset also has its share of the poor: Mr. Critchfield, for example, who hasn’t owned a car in years, gets by on monthly Social Security checks of just $782.

The immediate hit to Somerset’s economy will be the loss of jobs paying between $80,000 and $100,000 a year, said Ron Aldom, executive director of the Somerset County Chamber of Commerce. But losses at small businesses that supported the mines will continue to ripple through the local economy.

Among Corsa’s local creditors were Rockwood Casualty Insurance Co., $346,582; Griffith Excavation Inc. of Boswell, $235,675; and Appalachian Tire Products Inc. of Windber, $189,714. All are in Somerset County, according to the company’s bankruptcy petition.

A sawmill owned by Mr. Critchfield’s uncle, just up the two-lane blacktop from where Mr. Critchfield planted a small American flag in the yard, also got stiffed when the mine went belly up, he said.

“It has an impact, no question,” the chamber’s Mr. Aldom said about the mine closure. “Trucking, supplies, mechanics. What happens going forward, I’m not sure.”

Somerset Coal Co. began digging coal around the patch town of Acosta in 1905, and Mr. Critchfield remembers surface and underground mines dotting the looping hills around the town, even into recent years. Consolidated Coal Co. took over Acosta operations from Somerset Coal and continued digging coal in the area until the 1950s.

Corsa, which was founded in 2007, opened the deep mine in Acosta using room-and-pillar coal extraction, a method that can be traced to Pennsylvania’s bituminous coal fields in the late 1700s. The high-carbon, low-ash coal was shipped to markets in the United States, Asia, Europe and South America, where it was used to make coke for steelmaking.

Even though the market price of exported metallurgical coal rose sharply since 2017 when the mine opened, Corsa said rising costs and declining mine productivity pushed the company into bankruptcy.

Somerset has long been connected to coal, which has fueled the region’s economy.

But Ms. Tokar-Ickes, the Somerset County commissioner, said the county has spent the last year exploring ways to diversify the economy through participation in a competitively awarded program, “not close the book on coal, but maybe turn the page to the next chapter and see what that’s like.”

Seeing what life after coal might look like has occupied Somerset County commissioners as part of the U.S. Commerce Department’s Building Resilient Economies in Coal Communities program. Growing Somerset’s industrial base, supporting entrepreneurship and enhanced workforce training were among the county’s goals.

Sparsely populated Forest County, located about 100 miles northeast of Pittsburgh and a bit player in the state’s broader coal history, was also accepted into the BRECC program last year.

“Nothing’s good around here,” said Mr. Critchfield, spitting on the patio again out front of his house, an occasional pickup truck passing by. “The economy’s bad — that’s all I can tell you.”

But the chamber of commerce’s Mr. Aldom sees reasons for hope.

Last week, a chamber-sponsored job fair drew over 60 employers in “virtually every sector” and 400 job seekers, he said. “We’re quietly doing pretty good here.”

Corsa, which had been selling about 1 million tons of coal a year, reported 23 million tons of reachable coal still in the ground, which Mr. Aldom cited as another reason for optimism.

“You can’t move the coal,” he said. “It’s here. Somebody’s coming back.”