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The state of coal: Toiling in the dark

WAYNESBURG, Pa. - Never mind traffic and weather conditions. The commute for most people who work at the Cumberland Mine gets hairiest after they park their cars.

Dwight Harris operates the protective shields on a machine that carves coal from the walls of the Cumberland Mine, where up to 101 million tons of coal lie.
Dwight Harris operates the protective shields on a machine that carves coal from the walls of the Cumberland Mine, where up to 101 million tons of coal lie.Read more

WAYNESBURG, Pa. - Never mind traffic and weather conditions. The commute for most people who work at the Cumberland Mine gets hairiest after they park their cars.

That's when the coal miners, outfitted in safety boots, hard hats, and emergency breathing apparatus, board a no-frills, steel-enforced elevator that lowers them 700 feet underground.

From there, they climb into tight, steel-plated, diesel-run railcars for a 45-minute ride through tunnels 16 feet wide and 8 feet high. But for the train headlights and the lights on each miner's cap, it's a dark ride at 5 m.p.h.

That is followed by a half-mile walk to the face, the area where coal is extracted. The trek is tricky, along a path strewn with rocks that intermittently tumble from the mine walls, or ribs.

It is a journey that must be repeated at the end of every eight-hour shift just to get above ground and then home.

There is nothing physically or emotionally easy about coal mining, where the work environment is clouded by flammable coal dust and ever-present concerns about methane levels and collapses.

There are no windows, but there are rescue chambers. And monstrous machines of such heft and sharpness that they can shear off 1,400 clean tons of coal with each slice.

The profession is largely foreign to most Philadelphians, who do not live within sight of active coal mines and whose only connection these days to the black rock - aside from ancestors who might have mined - is when they flip the switch and their lights come on.

Yet coal mining remains the backbone of some local economies in Western Pennsylvania, the job of choice for an estimated 7,300 in the state. Related industries, such as makers of mining equipment and shaft-construction contractors, provide work for 33,000 more. Together, they constitute 1.5 percent of Pennsylvania's gross domestic product.

They have also provided more than a solid source of income for generations of families, such as Joe Mazur's.

"You have a sense of pride doing this job," said Mazur, 51, a fourth-generation miner in his 31st year doing work that, one morning in September, had his face streaked with black as he maintained the hulking machines noisily gnawing at Cumberland Mine's coal seam.

The mine operator, Alpha Natural Resources Inc., based in Abingdon, Va., estimates there are 101 million tons of recoverable reserves in Cumberland - conceivably enough to keep Mazur and 738 other employees who work the mine's three shifts busy through 2024.

At another Alpha mine in Greene County, where the coal industry makes up more than 50 percent of the economy, there are nearly 80 million tons of recoverable reserves and a payroll of 669 employees.

In 2009, the last year for which data were available, Pennsylvania extracted 65.5 million tons of coal from 244 mines, according to the state Department of Environmental Protection and the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

According to an April report prepared by the Pennsylvania Economy League of Southwestern Pennsylvania L.L.C. for a coal-advocacy group, the average annual wage for miners in the state was $64,695 in 2007, the last year for which data were available. That exceeded the average for all private-sector industries in Pennsylvania by $21,750, the Economy League found.

Alpha says its average employee makes $70,000 a year.

Jeffrey M. Kukura, president of Alpha's Pennsylvania operation, joked that Santa bringing coal to misbehaving boys and girls is no threat at his house.

"My kids think coal is a good thing," he said.

So do the Pennsylvania businesses that serve the mining industry.

Among them is Bucyrus, an international manufacturer of surface and underground mining equipment with Pennsylvania headquarters in Houston, Washington County.

"It's a big part of life on this end of the state," said Thomas Vehar, project manager in Bucyrus' longwall division, which makes customized systems for underground mining such as hydraulic roof supports, shearers, crushers, and conveyors. Some of its designs are at work in the Cumberland Mine.

Bucyrus has nearly 500 employees in Pennsylvania, headed by William S. Tate, president of Bucyrus America Inc.

In an interview last year, Tate was concerned about proposed legislation in Harrisburg that would require greater use of alternative energy, and the "damage" such requirements could do to Pennsylvania's coal industry.

He blamed the push for those increases, which former Gov. Ed Rendell supported, on "environmental industries that have lots of money to change laws, but they don't have enough money to subsidize an economy."

Tate cited "the numbers of people that are sincerely trying to deal with environmental issues . . . that are too quick to think that dooming coal is the solution."

As senior director of the Sierra Club's Pennsylvania chapter, environmentalist Jeff Schmidt has a drastically different view of the coal industry. He sees the devastation it has caused to "people's homes, drinking-water supplies, and surface streams." And he sees little prospect for improvement, despite the claims of "clean coal."

"There is no such thing as clean coal," Schmidt said in an interview in his Harrisburg office. "It's not as dirty as it used to be, but it ain't clean."

At the Bucyrus factory, Gregg Johnson, a manager in the longwall group, said he found it "difficult to swallow" subsidizing forms of energy that coal will have to augment.

Devices to store power generated by wind turbines for use when the wind is not blowing "will be hooked to a grid, and some coal miner somewhere is going to have to keep cutting coal," Johnson said.

Or so Thomas G. Crooks hopes. He is an executive with R.G. Johnson Co. Inc., mining contractors and engineers in Washington, Pa.

The privately owned company of 150 employees specializes in vertical tunnels, or shafts, so people and materials can get into underground mines.

"These are great-paying jobs that this area needs and Pennsylvania needs," Crooks said. Laborer jobs with his company pay $20 or more an hour, plus benefits, including a pension.

They are not easy jobs, Crooks acknowledged, but the satisfaction comes from "accomplishing things people just wouldn't believe."

At the Pennsylvania Coal Association in Harrisburg, president George Ellis bemoaned coal's "very polarizing" effect in Pennsylvania, with the Susquehanna River serving as the east-west dividing line. He blamed that, in part, on a lack of industry outreach.

"The more people become educated about coal, the more likely they are to support it," Ellis said.

Coal advocates have turned the Pennsylvania Turnpike into their classroom. On billboards along the 360-mile interstate, messages for more than two years have touted coal's advantages.

One proclaimed: "Wind dies. Sun sets. You need reliable, affordable, clean-coal electricity." Another declared: "Without coal, most cities would be dark."

Their sponsor is the same group behind the Pennsylvania Economy League's April report on coal's economic impact in the state: Families Organized to Represent the Coal Industry, which consists of nearly 176 companies and 15,000 individuals.

The group's manager, Jeanine Rainone, who used to work for a mining company, said the primary reason for the billboards - most prevalent as the alternative-energy debate raged in Harrisburg - was "to get attention" for coal, especially east of the Capitol.

"Because out East, some people don't even realize we still produce coal," she said from the group's headquarters in Monessen, Westmoreland County.

Rainone said she wanted all Pennsylvanians to "realize that coal is part of their life."

To further accomplish that, the group has placed in state visitors centers and schools a coloring book titled "Eyes for Frosty."

Guess what was used for the eyes?

Go to go.philly.com/coal for more photos of work at the coal mine.

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