Emergency Biohazard Cleanup Near Ewen Pittston, PA

Pittston is a city in Luzerne County in the Wyoming Valley, sitting on the east bank of the Susquehanna River at the mouth of the Lackawanna River, about midway between Wilkes-Barre and Scranton.

Pittston was settled around 1770 by the Susquehanna Company of Connecticut and named for British statesman William Pitt the Elder; it was originally called Pittstown.

Pittston broke away from Pittston Township to become a borough on April 30, 1853, and it was chartered as a city on December 10, 1894.

Pittston's population peaked at 18,497 in 1920 during the coal boom; by the 2020 census it had fallen to 7,591, though Pittston remains Luzerne County's fourth-largest city, with roughly 3,519 households counted in recent Census Bureau figures.

During the Revolutionary War, Pittston's fort was surrendered to the British on July 4, 1778, the day after the nearby Battle of Wyoming, and was later rebuilt and held by Patriot forces until the Treaty of Paris.

Anthracite coal was first discovered in the Wyoming Valley around 1770, and the valley's first mine was opened near Pittston in 1775.

The Twin Shaft disaster struck Pittston on June 28, 1896, when the roof of the Newton Coal Company's Twin Shaft Mine collapsed, killing 58 miners, including the city's acting mayor.

The Knox Mine disaster of January 22, 1959, in nearby Port Griffith effectively ended anthracite mining in northeastern Pennsylvania after the Susquehanna River broke through into the mine workings, flooding the interconnected mines and killing 12 miners.

From the 1930s into the 1980s Pittston was a national center of garment manufacturing, where thousands of workers, mostly women, belonged to the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union.

Pittston calls itself 'The Quality Tomato Capital of the World,' and its annual Pittston Tomato Festival draws roughly 50,000 people to downtown over four days.