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Prayer for the
coalfields
As coal declines,
the Southwest struggles to reinvent itself with telecom
and tourism
by
Peter Galuszka
Virginia Business
March 2003
Related
Story:
- Virginia coal's tough new
competition
“Dear
God,” says Bobby Shane Breeding as he stands, head
bowed, just past an air lock at the Knox Creek Coal
Corp. mine shaft. “Please protect our miners, our
families and our visitors for your service,” says
Breeding, the mine superintendent who goes by “Shane”
and is a short, trim man of 36. With that, four of us
clamber into a small rail car, called a “man trip,”
for the 45-minute ride that will take us nearly five
miles and 400 feet down into a mountain near Red Ash
in Tazewell County. The journey is not pleasant. I sit
cramped in the vehicle’s box-like metal cage with
a roof to protect against cave-ins. My borrowed rescue
gear and battery pack for my headlamp dig into my kidneys.
I fight claustrophobia as the carrier clatters down
the sloping grade deeper into the narrow tunnel. This
is “low coal” country where geological quirks
make coal seams and passageways not usually taller than
48 inches. Thirty inches is more typical. The seams
tend to be saturated with explosive methane which makes
mining Southwest Virginia coal cramped, dirty and dangerous.
The
ride finally over, I crouch low in the pillar- and post-passageways,
knocking my helmet against the rocky ceiling. There
is little light but lots of noise. A continuous mining
machine attacks the coal seam with 120 super-hard carbide
bits that whiz in a circle. Sparks flash as the bits
rip and scream against the side of the mountain. A water
spray and lots of air prevent gas explosions. Shuttle
cars move in. On each trip, they scoop up 15 tons of
coal that soon scoot to the surface on a 6,000-yard-long
conveyor belt.
The
nine miners in our area go about their jobs in a monk-like
silence. Bending low in the tight spaces, they can last
through entire 10- hour shifts speaking only a few words.
When they do converse, it’s usually with a sardonic
wit and machismo that mocks the dangers of the job.
Coal mining is one of the most deadly jobs around. From
1953 to last year, 324 Virginia miners have been lost
in accidents. Others have lost legs or arms to the heavy
equipment that moves around as if in a strange ballet.
Shane’s helmet has a decal of a viper, fangs flashing,
warning to “Be alert. The third hour can bite you.”
He says studies have shown that the third hour on a
shift is the most dangerous.
So,
why do they do it? Money for one reason. Journeymen
miners at Knox Creek, owned by Richmond-based Massey
Energy Co., typically make $55,000 a year. That’s
pretty good for the remote hills and hollers of Southwest
Virginia and enough to buy a large house and a bass
boat. There’s a certain pride to being a miner.
And, Virginia coal is some of the best in the world,
having some of the highest heat values and lowest sulfur
levels, making it a favorite of electric utilities trying
to limit air pollution. Its steel-making properties
once were so desirable that Japanese mills paid top
dollar to import it through Norfolk.
Yet
coal and the boom and bust economic culture that it
has brought to Southwest Virginia are in the midst of
a slow decline. The easiest and cheapest seams to mine
are gone. Tough competition from Australia, China and
Indonesia has kept prices too low to justify the extra
expense of extracting many of the thin seams of Virginia
coal. A once-huge customer, the integrated U.S. steel
industry that makes steel in blast furnaces, has largely
gone offshore, replaced by rolling mills that merely
melt down scrap. Coal production in the Old Dominion
has dropped from an all-time high of 46 million tons
in 1990 to 23 million tons in 2001, the lowest level
since 1954.
The
handwriting’s been clear since the late 1980s,
when more than 12,800 people were employed in coal mining
in Virginia. Only about 5,000 are in the industry today,
in part because of bad markets. Plus, mechanization
means fewer miners can produce more. Coal operators
such as Westmoreland, United Creek and Island Creek
have vanished by mergers or by simply shutting down
their operations. Even Pittston, one of the biggest
coal companies in Virginia, is now unloading its coal
properties and shedding about 900 coal jobs. Only Consol
Energy based near Pittsburgh, Pa., and Massey Energy,
plus a few others, still maintain operations.
Up
on the surface, coalfield folk are trying to reinvent
themselves. It’s not an easy process because of
the region’s remoteness and lack of an efficient
road system. Regional leaders are pushing to retrain
the work force of about 85,000 in such areas as computer
technology and telecommunications. But doing so usually
just ends up with jobs at telephone call centers that
pay much less than coal did. The region snared several
new state and federal prisons, but that’s really
just a form of a government subsidy. Bright spots are
a ready and hard-working labor force and other attributes
that might build up a strong tourism industry. Unemployment
ranges from a fairly normal low of 4 percent to higher
than 10 percent in places such as Dickenson County —
about the worst in the Old Dominion.
With
the lack of jobs, many young people leave the region
as soon as they can, although this is not a new phenomenon.
“When you graduate from high school around here,
they just give you a bus ticket,” says Pat Daniels
who grew up near Grundy and left for Ohio shortly after
she got her diploma. Missing the area, she returned
to Buchanan County 15 years ago and runs a ramshackle
clothing consignment shop, called the Miner’s Friend,
on U.S. 460 near Grundy.
One advocate of keeping young people at home is bluegrass
music patriarch “Dr.” Ralph Stanley, leader
of the renowned Clinch Mountain Boys. The band won new
national popularity in 2000 by providing some of the
soundtrack for the hit movie “O Brother Where Art
Thou?” A Dickenson County native and resident,
Stanley served on the county school board in the early
1990s and keeps up with civic affairs. “I’ve
thought about this problem for years,” says Stanley.
“When young people can’t make a living, they
are hard to keep.” One solution, he says, is tourism.
Completing the Coal-fields Expressway, a new, four-lane
highway from Beckley, W.Va., to an area near Pound in
western Dickenson County, might pull in more visitors.
“There’s talk in (the town of) Clintwood of
putting up a museum in honor of me. Along with the scenery
around here, well, that might be something to see.”
One
big plus for the region, says Frank Kilgore, a lawyer
in St. Paul, is the tough-minded, hard-working temperament
of the labor force. So self-disciplined are local workers
that absenteeism in coalfield jobs is 1 percent compared
to 6 percent nationally. The job turnover rate is a
tiny 1/2 of 1 percent, he says. Kilgore has made a career
of standing up against big coal interests. In the 1970s,
for example, he was an activist for stricter state rules
against renegade strip miners and lobbied for a 1977
federal law that mandated that surface mines be reclaimed
after the coal had been extracted. At that time, many
hills were left pockmarked by ugly brown gashes and
streams were polluted from the untended mine runoff.
Kilgore also defended miners arrested during strikes.
He handled more than 1,600 cases during job actions
against Pittston in 1989. Strikes, he says, are devastating
for the local economy. “We cannot afford such a
fight anymore. It would just kill the union and the
companies.”
He
sees bright opportunities with new educational facilities
and tourism. The six-year-old Appalachian School of
Law in Buchanan County, he says, has created so many
jobs that Grundy, the county seat nearby, is experiencing
a rare housing shortage. The University of Virginia
College of Wise has expanded, adding to the mix in Wise
County. And, the Clinch River Valley has opportunities
for eco-tourism since it has 13 rare and endangered
plant and animal species. “It’s the biological
hot spot in the continental U.S.,” Kilgore says.
Only Hawaii has more diversity.”
The
command center in reviving coalfields’ economy
is on the first floor of a small, modern building in
an industrial park outside of Lebanon. Inside is the
headquarters of the Virginia Coalfields Economic Development
Authority, founded in 1988. It’s been trying to
lure new services and manufacturing industries in Lee,
Scott, Wise, Buchanan and Tazewell counties and the
city of Norton. From there, the authority markets the
region and helps launch new businesses with low-interest
and low-tax bonds, loans and grants. Some of its funds
come from a coal severance tax that coal companies pay
and from the Virginia Tobacco Indemnification and Community
Revitalization Commission, which helps distribute the
state’s share of a legal settlement from four major
cigarette companies to areas in Virginia that grow tobacco,
including the Southwest.
The
goal is to bring in more diverse industries to take
up the slack as coal declines and to make it easy for
companies to locate in coal country. The authority helps
erect industrial parks and shell buildings for such
uses as call centers and renovated public and privately-owned
buildings — an effort that didn’t really exist
in any meaningful way before the authority was created.
“In 1988, we had one regional industrial park,”
says Charles S. Yates, authority executive director.
“Now we have 12 industrial parks.” Only one
is still empty.
The
authority can boast of some successes with big telecommunications
and information technology companies including Travelocity.com,
a Web-based travel company, Verizon Directory Assistance
and VeriSign, a Web domain registrar. Ten such call
centers are now in the area and Verizon just announced
another near the city of Wise. The authority also helped
land a wheel covering factory owned by Alcoa and Swedish-owned
foam mattress maker Tempur-Pedic, among others. Plus,
the authority played significant roles in locating three
state prisons and one new federal penitentiary in the
area.
One
big problem, however, is that there’s still a long
way to go to make up for the loss of mining jobs. Since
1988, mining has lost more than 6,200 positions, but
over the same period the service sector has added only
4,011 more, with up to 200 more new jobs expected with
the recently-announced Verizon call center in Wise.
Manufacturing is a tougher nut to crack. The area has
added only 200 more manufacturing jobs for the period.
Another
issue is that call center jobs don’t pay nearly
as much as mining jobs did. Starting salaries are about
$18,000 a year — at least $15,000 a year less than
starting mining salaries. Authority statistics do show
that the annual payroll for services is now $2.4 million
more than from mining. But back in 1988, mining’s
payroll was much more than that from services —
$277 million. With the economic downturn, many isolated
and economically-depressed regions throughout the U.S.
are jumping over each other to snare call centers. And,
says Yates, “Call centers are not going to bring
diversity alone.”
The
city of Norton, which has several call centers, nabbed
one of them after a year-long effort that involved renovating
a blighted downtown hotel and lots of tricky financing.
The Norton Hotel, a six-story, red brick building with
lots of flourishes such as a tiled lobby, was built
in 1921 to handle passengers from a then-busy railroad
station across the street. Period advertisements from
the Norfolk & Western Railway proclaimed to east-west
passengers that they no longer needed to stop in Roanoke
or Cincinnati on their journeys to overnight in a decent
spot. But over the years, rail and coal declined and
so did the building.
By
the late 1980s, engineers told city officials that the
building was structurally unsound. But rather than tear
it down, the city launched an effort to renovate the
building in phases, gutting it and buttressing its foundations,
says Assistant City Manager Fred Ramey. “It took
six months just to get the elevator going,” he
says. All in all, it cost about $2.8 million, including
grants from the Coalfield Authority to finish the project.
Today,
newlyweds rent the tiled lobby for receptions, and the
building has attracted new tenants. The top two floors
are now occupied by a call center operated by Logisticare,
an Atlanta-based health services company which consolidated
its Virginia operations at the Norton location, expanding
its Virginia work force from 60 to 100. On one recent
afternoon, workers were busy installing computer monitors
along rows of desks. A flashing sign on an exposed-brick
wall told employees the status of incoming telephone
calls. Logisticare handles Medicaid contracts from the
states of Virginia and Delaware. When Medicaid recipients
need such services as ambulances or taxis, they call
the center where operators make arrangements.
While
the hotel is an attraction, a bigger one was the work
force, says John Shermyen, chairman and CEO of Logisticare.
“The hotel was a perfect project and I took a personal
interest in it,” he says. “They were attempting
what I think is a great way to recycle resources.”
Of his firm’s 27 operating sites, including five
network centers that includes Norton, “it’s
the prettiest one.” But that wasn’t the major
reason for picking Norton, Shermyen says. Community
colleges in the Southwest region began offering more
courses in telecommunications work and call centers.
And, workers from small towns and the countryside want
to stay in the area and not move out. “That was
important to us, to have a highly-skilled and loyal
work force.”
Despite
such bright spots, however, the coalfields are plagued
with problems that usually don’t beset other areas.
The terrain is made up of steep, up and down slopes,
rather than rolling hills. Car travel takes much longer
than in other areas, saddling residents with a feeling
of isolation. When it comes to emergency services, such
isolation can be dangerous.
A
case in point is the Dickenson County Medical Center
in Clintwood. On a Friday afternoon in December, the
hospital — the only emergency treatment center
for miles — abruptly shut down because of the bankruptcy
of its parent firm, Ohio-based RX Medical Service. Not
only did 200 people lose their jobs, but a sign was
posted on the front doors. It directed emergency patients
to other hospitals in Norton, Grundy or Big Stone Gap,
each at least an extra 30-minute-drive away. The hospital
remains closed.
Mountain
folk are used to hardship, however. In some ways, coal’s
demise may not be a bad thing. When the Industrial Revolution
finally came to the jagged hills in the late 1800s,
hucksters from big cities started picking up mineral
rights on the cheap from gullible mountain folk. Coal
brought railroads, banks and stores. While some got
rich, a lot didn’t because most of the wealth was
hauled away thanks to one-sided rights agreements. “Back
in the 1890s, companies from Pennsylvania paid five-cents-an-acre
for mineral rights. If they had been charged royalties
on all of that oil and gas coming out of here, this
place could have the best school system in the U.S.,”
says Charles White, dean at the New River Valley Community
College in Dublin. His father was a coal miner.
Coalfield
residents have been shortchanged in other ways. They
endured the ecological ravages of “shoot and scoot”
strip miners who often would rip up land for coal to
within five feet of their houses, at least until new
federal laws got tougher. Besides mine fatalities, there
were instances of “black lung” sicknesses
that miners got after constantly breathing coal dust.
And, the demise of Virginia coal could mean that the
Old Dominion will be spared the controversy of “mountain
top removal” common in neighboring West Virginia
and Kentucky in which entire mountaintops are lopped
off for coal.
Massey
Energy, the country’s fifth-largest coal producer,
has had its share of environmental trouble. A Massey-owned
mining operation in Inez, Ky., not far from the Virginia
border, used a large reservoir to dump sludge. Two years
ago, the reservoir broke and spilled more than 300 million
gallons of sludge into two creeks. Officials at the
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency pronounced it one
of the worst ecological disasters in the Southeast.
Trying to improve its image, the coal company is running
television ads in the Central Appalachia coalfields
portraying it as a good neighbor.
Back
underground at the Knox Creek mine, Shane Reedy and
Knox Creek president David Cramer walk around the shafts,
worrying about a continuous miner that has hit an unusually
tough section of rock. The problem solved, the machine
grinds in about 20 feet and then backs away. Another
low-slung machine swings in, and its mechanical arms
bore deep into the ceiling. Then roof bolts are inserted
to hold up the wall to prevent cave-ins, and the bolts
are sealed by a metal dish that looks like a car hubcap.
Shane’s
been at mining since 1986 when he started at $7 an hour.
Now he makes more than $60,000 a year. As we climb back
into the man-trip for the welcome ride to the surface,
Shane explains that “there’s just something
about mining that gets into your blood.” Noting
that “the generation before us got the best coal,”
he says mines will still operate in Virginia because
electric utilities need it. More than half of the electricity
in the U.S. is generated from coal.
He’s well-aware of the dangers of mining and what
they might mean for his young family that includes a
16-year-old daughter and an 11-year-old son. Last July,
for instance, nine miners in Somerset County, Pa., hit
an unexpected underground river and were trapped for
three days before being rescued. Shane, a deeply religious
man, says he and his men prayed for them at the start
of every shift. He prays for the people of the Virginia
coalfields, too.
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