IN THE BLACK Posted on May 12th
WAYNESBURG, Pa. - All night and day, trains rumble through the hills and valleys of Greene County, where coal is king and the rails carry away the crown jewels, 42 million tons of black bituminous a year, now fetching double its price of just two years ago.
Waitress Tonya Woodring, 38, pours coffee at Lavern’s Place, a breakfast spot for miners coming off the overnight shift.
Taking a break, she lights a cigarette and lists her family’s “toys” - all purchased with the $80,000 a year her husband makes working a mandatory six 10-hour days a week in a job that bears little resemblance to the pickax mining of the past.
“There’s a truck,” Woodring says, then pauses. “Well, two trucks, the four-wheeler, a boat - and we’re looking for a new home.”
No other county in Pennsylvania produces more coal than Greene, population 39,808, about an hour’s drive southwest of Pittsburgh. And few places feel coal’s impact like this county, where growing numbers of people thrive on the commodity while the rest struggle in its shadow.
It’s a peaceful place where folks talk in a drawl, cows meander through pastures, and posters on store windows advertise a future appearance by a troupe of brawny strongmen testifying to the power of Jesus.
Tranquil on the surface, rural Greene County is roiled by global economic forces: factories in China, floods in Australia, the rise of the euro, the fall of the dollar, stunning and disturbing developments in mining technology, discoveries of huge natural-gas reserves, the aging of American baby boomers, and, most important, the skyrocketing price of coal - now about $105 a ton on the spot market.
That’s macro.
Gary R. Bowers, president of Producers Supply Co., provides the micro.
“Coal has been our livelihood forever,” said Bowers, 38. His father and a grandfather were miners, and now his business in the county seat of Waynesburg supplies mines with everything from pipe valves to black tape.
In 1990, Bowers, who never went to college, got a $6.25-an-hour job behind the counter, the only employee. Three years later, he bought out the owner. Now he employs 18. “We’re good,” he said, smiling and leaning back in his chair. “We’re very good.”
Except for those who aren’t.
“We have a dichotomy of economies,” said Barbara L. Cole, administrator of the state’s workforce program, CareerLink, in Greene County.
One-fifth of the county’s labor pool of nearly 12,000 work in mining, earning $74,206 on average, more than miners elsewhere and Pennsylvania workers in general.
The rest of the county’s labor force works mostly in retail, health care and local government, earning less than $32,000 a year, according to the latest state statistics.
“All the other jobs are just minimum wage,” said Woodring, at Lavern’s, where hungry miners can dig into a scrambled mountain of eggs, potatoes and sausage known as a garbage plate.
No wonder Bituminous Billy, a miner, is the county mascot. The sheer scale of coal mining is mind-boggling.
Nowhere is it more evident than from a hilltop vantage point in the middle of Consol Energy Inc.’s coal-processing complex.
On one side tower four huge silos of coal, each holding an average of 25,000 tons and connected by a warren of conveyor belts that swoop and climb like roller-coasters from the mine to the silos and onto a processing plant capable of sorting 6,500 tons an hour.
Seven 105-car trains a day pull through the complex, each car stopping under a chute to receive 110 tons of coal.
Together, Consol’s two Greene County mines, Bailey and Enlow Fork, produce 20 million tons of coal a year.
On the other side is an entire valley. Consol owns most of it. Massive earth-moving machines - each one eight times the size of an ordinary pickup truck - crawl across the landscape. In a year, the valley will be more than filled - mounded - with refuse rock drawn from the mines. Consol will plant grass on top.
Inside the mines, using a technique known as longwall mining, seven men can produce in one shift as much coal as a crew of eight to 10 could mine in two weeks in 1984, nearly a quarter-century ago, when Larry Grayson was a mining supervisor in Greene County.
“Technology has been changing considerably,” said Grayson, now a professor of mineral engineering at Pennsylvania State University. “The machinery has gotten bigger and more powerful.”
In six months, working round the clock, six days a week, the seven-man crews will remove a six-foot-thick layer of coal nearly a quarter-mile wide and more than two miles long.
Mining 400 to 1,000 feet underground, they’ll use a shearer to slice back and forth across the 1,100-foot face of the coal as if it were a giant hunk of bologna, with the mine roof collapsing behind them as they go.
Aboveground, the land can settle in a process called subsidence. Sometimes there’s no damage. Other times foundations fracture and wells crack, the water draining away. “Water buffalo” - the local term for replacement water tanks wrapped in white insulation - graze in backyards and side lots.
There are constant disputes between mining companies and property owners over subsidence damage.
While many disputes are resolved amicably, the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources has sued Consol, accusing the mining company of causing a crack in the dam that held back Ronald J. Duke Lake in Ryerson Station State Park.
“That’s our lake - we can mow it now,” said Holly Carpenter, a retired medical assistant from Greene County, as she walked on a little rise above the former lake, now a mix of grass and mud. “The mining companies are just running right over people.”