Chris Williamson, the assistant secretary for Mine Safety and Health at the U.S. Department of Labor, says participation in the Part 90 program is up 750 percent.
The head of the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration says participation is up in a program that helps coal miners avoid exposure to silica dust.
Chris Williamson, the assistant secretary for Mine Safety and Health at the U.S. Department of Labor, says participation in the Part 90 program is up 750 percent.
Last year, MSHA said it would look for ways to encourage more miners to take part in the program, which allows those who have been diagnosed with black lung disease to continue to work in the industry but in positions where they won’t be exposed to as much silica dust.
The move can slow the progression of a disease that’s affecting miners at younger ages and more severely than it did in the past. That’s in part because miners must grind through more rock to extract coal, and that rock dust contains silica.
Part 90 has been around for decades – it even predates MSHA. But Wiliamson and mine health advocates say the program is underused.
Last year, Williamson says seven miners signed up for the program. This year, he says 34 have opted to participate, most of them in West Virginia and in southern West Virginia in particular.
“If those miners either want to continue to work or they have to because of economic reasons, or whatever the rationale,” he said, “there is this right that’s out there that’s incredibly powerful that can help them preserve what bit of health that they have left.”
As MSHA finalizes a rule to reduce the maximum silica dust exposure for all coal miners – to 50 micrograms per cubic meter per shift – Part 90 is a tool that can benefit those who already have the disease but slow its progression.
“I think it’s hard to argue with a 750 percent increase in the number of miners that are exercising their right,” Williamson said. “We know there’s still many, many, many more miners out there that could benefit from this.”
A Kentucky coal company has been found in contempt for failing to submit court-ordered plans to clean up two polluted West Virginia mine sites.
A Kentucky coal company has been found in contempt for failing to submit court-ordered plans to clean up two polluted West Virginia mine sites.
U.S. District Judge Robert Chambers issued a contempt order against Lexington Coal Company LLC. Chambers wrote last week that the company “shirked its responsibility to satisfactorily comply” with an order to submit a plan by April 16 to address selenium discharges and other pollution at the sites in Mingo County.
Chambers said he will fine the company if it does not submit a cleanup plan within 10 days, the Charleston Gazette-Mail reported.
Environmental groups alleged in a 2019 lawsuit that the company was discharging pollutants illegally at its Low Gap Surface Mine No. 2 and No. 10 Mine.
A 3,000-acre solar energy farm is planned on a former coal mining site in southern West Virginia, project officials said.
A 3,000-acre solar energy farm is planned on a former coal mining site in southern West Virginia, project officials said.
The estimated $320 million project will be built at the Rock Creek Development Park along the borders of Boone and Lincoln County by the newly formed SEVA WV, a unit of Kansas City, Missouri-based Savion Energy.
The park itself will be renamed Sun Park and is expected to include industrial and commercial development, educational facilities and tourism and hospitality venues, officials said at a news conference Monday. The solar panels are expected to provide 250 megawatts of power.
Up to 300 workers are expected to be employed during construction on the solar project. In addition, 80 miles of new trails are planned on the property as an extension of the Hatfield-McCoy ATV system.
Development of the former Hobet surface mine site as a business park was the vision of former Democratic Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin in 2016.
The Mountain State isn’t the only place to reckon with the difficulty of transitioning away from a coal economy into something different.
West Germany emerged from World War II as one of the leading coal and steel producers in the world. Then, in the 1960s, oil emerged as a competitor, and the country found itself in the midst of an economic crisis. But there, the emergency prompted a strange and unusual alliance.
“The state government, the regional governments, the trade unions, and the employers, the industrialists, sat together and tried to find solutions to the problem,” said Stefan Moitra, historian at the German Mining Museum in Bochumin the Ruhr Valley — a densely populated valley in West Germany that’s home to five million people.
On the one hand, the coal employers were motivated to cooperate by their revenue losses. “On the other hand,” Moitra said, “it was in the interest of, obviously, the workers but also of the state to have one of the major industrial regions not falling into the darkness.”
Friedrich Heinrich/Rheinland Mine. Courtesy: Betriebsrat Bergwerk West
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Miners protest against the threat of mass closure in 1997.
This coalition of stakeholders eventually settled on a surprising idea — they agreed to shrink the coal industry. They merged all the coal companies into one corporation, called “RAG Aktiengesellschaft,” formerly known as Ruhrkohle AG. And the government poured lots of money into helping miners retire early. They invested in emerging industries, like auto manufacturing and tourism, to diversify the area’s economy.
They also built universities.
“Until the 1960s, there was no major university in the Ruhr. Today the universities in the Ruhr are one of the major employers,” Moitra said.
It wasn’t easy, but West Germany survived the contraction of coal and steel jobs. Then in the 1990s, the coal industry that was left declined even worse. And once again the coal companies, the government, and the unions sat down and worked out a plan to completely phase out of coal mining by 2018.
Sure enough, three years ago, the last mine in the Ruhr region, and the last “black mine” in Germany, closed.
It wasn’t a perfect solution. The Ruhr area has still faced high unemployment at times.
Workgroup for Infrastructure Policy (WIP), University of Technology Berlin, “Lessons from Germany’s hard coal mining phaseout: policies and transition from 1950 to 2018.”
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But the earlier transition efforts in the 1960s made this latest shift to close the mines much easier.
No Unified Plan For Appalachia
West Virginia’s economic future may hinge on what leaders do in the next few years to plan for the next 50.
But politics in the United States are different than in Europe. And when people talk about economic diversification in coal country, there isn’t a clear path forward. Should such an effort be funded by the federal or state government? Or, by private investment?
Earlier this year, West Virginia Del. Ed Evans, D-McDowell, pleaded with his colleagues in the House of Delegates to plan for a transition away from coal.
Courtesy W.Va. State Legislature
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Delegate Ed Evans is a state lawmaker from McDowell County
“We’ve closed Walmart. We’ve closed Magic Mart. We’ve closed everything. Y’all have no idea what my people go through,” Evans said in a speech on the House floor.
In the 1950s, his county was booming economically, fueled by coal jobs. Now, McDowell County is filled with ghost towns and ranks as one of the poorest in the country.
“I’ve asked for help many times on this floor. What have I got? Failing to plan is failing to plan,” Evans said, urging fellow lawmakers to invest a chunk of the state’s federal COVID-19 aid into helping coal communities plan for an economic comeback.
His request was denied.
How Pittsburgh Dealt With Collapse Of Steel Jobs
One way to examine this issue is by looking at neighbors to the north.
“The bureaucracies that develop in large corporations are not known for their flexibility and their ability to quickly adapt to new situations,” said Dieterich-Ward.
Smaller companies are more adaptable, and they were a big part of Pittsburgh’s renewal. Aided by lots of government funding, as well as help from philanthropic organizations, entrepreneurs created smaller start-up industries in tech, the arts, and restoration of the city’s historic resources.
“Pittsburgh really [became] a laboratory for what and how to save the past in a way that allows it to be integrated into the future,” Dieterich-Ward said.
Some businesses in West Virginia already are reinventing and reimagining themselves, according to Derek Scarbro, business development director at the Robert C. Byrd Institute at Marshall University in Huntington.
“Companies are definitely more and more interested in learning how they can broaden their base,” Scarbro said.
Photo Mike Friel/ Robert C. Byrd Institute
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An employee with Vintec Manufacturing creates a camera mount, using a laser cutter at the Robert C. Byrd Institute in Huntington, West Virgnia.. The company, which used to primarily work with the coal mining industry, is pivoting to now sell outdoor cameras.
The RCBI opened 31 years ago with funding from the Department of Defense to assist defense contractors in the region, and to support workforce needs for advanced manufacturing.
Today, it works with large scale businesses, as well as small entrepreneurs. Business owners can use 3D printing and other machines at the center to help revamp their business.
A mining equipment company based in Nicolas County uses the equipment to make mounts for outdoor cameras. “And they’re selling them online and they have done extremely well with that,” said Scarbro. “Talk about a pivot, going from mining equipment servicing to outdoor cameras.”
These are small glimmers of signs that entrepreneurs are moving towards retooling. But many are still reluctant, Scarbro said.
Attracting Investors
Avinandan Mukherjee, interim provost at Marshall University, said he sees an increasing number of venture capitalists looking to Appalachia to invest. “And there is a lot of interest in our part of the country in terms of what these ideas are, and which ones can win.”
When West Virginia Public Broadcasting interviewed Mukherjee in July, he pointed to a company called App Harvest, which specializes in growing hydroponic vegetables on former strip mines and has attracted investors from all over the country. A month after the interview, AppHarvest reported a net loss of $32 million in its second quarter. Following this announcement, stocks in the company plummeted.
Courtesy AppHarvest
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A farm worker at a hydroponic tomato farm in Kentucky, operated by AppHarvest
West Virginia also falls behind in other aspects of infrastructure, including roads and bridges. One national study gave the state a D. A few communities, like Keystone and Northfork, in McDowell County, even lack access to potable water.
Mukherjee also mentioned Ascend West Virginia as an effort that could have lasting impacts. The program offers virtual workers $12,000 to relocate to West Virginia. About 7,500 people applied to the program this year, and 53 were selected.
Over the next 20 years, Mukherjee said he expects West Virginia to see an increase in virtual jobs like cyber security and software engineering.
Employers are already hiring in these sectors, said Natalie Roper, executive director for Generation West Virginia. But “very often they have job openings and are struggling to get qualified applicants.”
When Roper’s organization created a fellowship program to match qualified employees with employers, half of the jobs were in software development, and most were virtual. That poses a problem in some areas of West Virginia, where there is a lack of high-speed broadband.
According to the West Virginia Broadband Enhancement Council, the Mountain State ranks third-lowest for broadband access, and 30 percent of rural residents are without an internet connection in their homes.
A Bottom-Up Approach
West Virginia also falls behind in other aspects of infrastructure, including roads and bridges. One national study gave the state a ‘D.’ A few communities, like Keystone and Northfork in McDowell County, even lack access to potable water.
Courtesy American University
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Priya Bascaran, assistant professor of law at American University
Priya Bascaran, assistant professor of law at American University and director of the school’s Entrepreneurship Law Clinic, said she thinks that without these essentials in place, the state won’t be able to keep people from fleeing.
“If we give them an employable skill, and they don’t have good, safe water, or a decent road, of course, they’re going to take this skill and leave town,” Bascaran said.
Bascaran has worked with communities across the country that are dealing with a hollowing out of jobs, and people.
She said leaders often neglect to ask people what they actually need and want.
“And when you turn that conversation internally, you really see that, maybe, what people really want is a grocery store,” Bascaran said.
She wonders if helping people get grocery stores, or better water infrastructure, could be where economic development begins.
“What if instead of training people to be coders, we trained people to be wastewater engineers, or water system operators,” Bascaran said. “Because there’s a real need for that in West Virginia and greater Appalachia.”
Not Enough Investment In Appalachia
Jim King is the president and chief executive ofFahe, a network of more than 50 nonprofits that funds about $330 million each year in projects throughout Appalachia. But he says much more investment is needed, and he adds that philanthropy and other institutions of wealth lag behind.
“There is a historic disinvestment in West Virginia and Appalachia,” King said. “And not only was the coal taken out, but the wealth went with it. And other parts of the country benefited.”
King estimates that it would take nearly a billion dollars a year just to get West Virginia at the same economic playing field as the rest of the country.
Janet Kunicki/ West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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Lavender growing in Boone County W.Va. in 2018 on top of a reclaimed strip mine, as part of a grant funded project to train people to become lavender farmers. Follow up reporting by West Virginia Public Broadcasting found that the project did not result in permanent job creation.
Jobs In Mine Land Cleanup
The coal industry in West Virginia has also left behind thousands of acres of land in need of reclamation. In Germany, years of ongoing work to undo environmental damage, and infrastructure decay, have provided needed jobs, said Christian Wicke, assistant professor in political history at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
Wicke specializes in communities that have moved away from an industrialized economy, like in the Ruhr region of Germany.
“You have to imagine the Ruhr region as is hollowed out like Swiss cheese with lots of mines,” he said. “And it’s incredibly difficult to organize a water system.”
Wicke said Germany hasn’t buried its coal and steel history. In fact, they’ve built museums about it. Artists have built steel statues on former mining sites, that now attract millions of tourists a year.
“One might argue if you have a good job that the region is more livable than ever before,” Wicke said.
Back at the museum of mining, Moitra, the historian, said that some of the older miners in West Germany say they miss what mining was.
“But they all they are also very aware the times are changing,” Moitra said. “What many find important is that they can be sure that their kids and their grandkids can work and live without having to move away.”
Those words ring true in Appalachia as well, where many worry about sustaining the next generation.
The losses in both places go deeper than economics. Cultural identities are deeply woven into the fabric of societies in places that have predominantly been fueled by coal. Finding new realities and retooling the economic landscape means these cultural ties also have to be reimagined.
“One might argue if you have a good job that the region is more livable than ever before,” Wicke said.
Back at the museum of mining, Moitra, the historian, said that some of the older miners in West Germany say they miss what mining was.
“But they are also very aware the times are changing,” Moitra said. “What many find important is that they can be sure that their kids and their grandkids can work and live without having to move away.”
Photographer, Frank Martin. Photo courtesy Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum
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The front of a small mine in Neukirchen-Vluyn, Germany, in the early 1980s.
A former miner in the Ruhr region of West Germany told historian Moitra in 2017: “You cannot turn everything into a museum, that’s for sure.”
Said Gottfried Clever, who began working in the coal industry in 1977: “In the beginning we joked with bitter irony: ‘Well, we can create new jobs if we travel the Ruhr region as museum miners. So we’ll all be a museum ourselves. And people can visit us as a vanished reality.’”
Clever worked in several coal mines in the Ruhr, including the Walsum colliery in Duisburg, Consolidation and Hugo in Gelsenkirchen, and Ewald in Herten.
As in Germany it will probably take many decades, or even generations, for Appalachia to get through this transition to the other side — and what that other side looks like is still unknown. But what’s certain is that planning for that future will probably help the state have a better outcome.
In 1986, the city of Essen in West Germany closed its last mine.
Now, 35 years later, this region has a labor participation rate of 71 percent, more than 25 percent higher than West Virginia’s workforce rate of 55.2 percent, the lowest in the United States.
The highest number of employed people in Essen today work in the service sector, followed by manufacturing, forestry and agriculture.
If people in West Virginia decide to follow Germany’s lead, it’ll mean those from different industries and leadership roles agree on a plan. Most importantly, they’ll have to figure out a way to support coal miners, and their families, in the years to come.
Tom Hansell from the After Coal project and West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s David Adkins contributed to this report.
This summer marks the 100th anniversary of the largest armed uprising in America since the Civil War, and a major event in West Virginia history: the Battle of Blair Mountain. The battle came in 1921, several months after the Matewan Massacre, a shootout that’s also been immortalized in stories, song and film.
In these conflicts, the coal companies hired Baldwin-Felts private detective agency as henchmen to fight their battles.
Inside Appalachia co-host Mason Adams spoke with historian Bob Hutton about his research into the Baldwin-Felts agency, which started in the Virginia coalfields.
***Editor’s Note: The following has been lightly edited for clarity.
Mason Adams: For folks who may not be familiar, do you mind briefly recapping the role of the detectives in those incidents?
Bob Hutton: Well, sure.
In the so-called Matewan Massacre, a number of agents of the Baldwin-Felts organization were evicting women and children from miners’ houses in downtown Matewan. They were prevented from doing so by the local police chief and the local mayor, who commenced a gunfight that ended up working not in the interest of the Baldwin-Felts agents. They weren’t on the winning side of all this.
The police chief in question was a guy named Sid Hatfield. He was later put on trial for another incident, and he was assassinated on the courthouse steps in Welch, West Virginia, by agents of the Baldwin-Felts detective agency. That’s nearly 100 years ago, coming up soon.
Later in 1921, you had the Battle of Blair Mountain. Agents of the Baldwin felts detective agency probably did play a role in that, although their role in Blair Mountain is somewhat more obscure. Certainly, they’re the antagonists. In the so-called Mine Wars, going back to Paint Creek and Cabin Creek in 1912, 1913, going up to 1921 — they’re the primary bad guys in both cases.
Adams: I think a lot of us have an understanding of Baldwin-Felts as sort of the Appalachian version of the Pinkertons. Tell us a little bit more about this detective agency. Where was it formed? Who were Baldwin and Felts?
Hutton: William Baldwin was actually named “the Pinkerton of the South” at a policeman’s convention in about 1905. The most important thing to remember about both William Baldwin and Tom Felts was that they were both natives of Appalachia. Both of them were born and raised in southwestern Virginia. Both of them had gotten into the detective profession way back in the 1800s.
Baldwin had gotten a job working for an older detective in Charleston, West Virginia. He later turned that employment into his own agency. By 1895 or so, he’s the primary detective for the Norfolk and Western Railroad, and he’s got Felts working for him. Over the next few years, Felt’s position in the agency grew, and eventually they became partners.
Over the course of that time, they hired dozens of individuals as henchmen, as spies, as patrol guards — all sorts of different kinds of private security or investigation capacities.
Adams: We’ve talked a little bit about the Baldwin-Felts detective agency’s role in the Mine Wars, but that entire period is also remarkable in history for the sheer amount of upheaval, racial terror, and establishment of Jim Crow laws in the South. What role did the Baldwin-Felts agency play with that?
Hutton: I’ve found that Baldwin-Felts was an enforcer of Jim Crow. Beginning in the 1880s, there’s a massive African-American migration to both West Virginia and southwestern Virginia. They’re all being driven there by the availability of jobs in the mines and the railroads. It’s a huge demographic change.
This being the era of Jim Crow, the enforcement of the color line and the attempt to maintain white supremacy: This ultimately was Baldwin-Felts’ job on the railroad and in the rail yards. There was a demand to make sure that these Black workers stayed in line. William Baldwin and Tom Felts often saw that as their job.
Adams: Does your research support the casting of the Baldwin-Felts detectives as the bad guys in these narratives?
Hutton: Frankly, it does.
There’s very little good that seems to come from their work. For instance, going back to the 1890s, there were a lot of railroad accidents. Lo and behold, the Baldwin-Felts agency would always find some sort of individual to blame for these accidents. Very often it happened to be a Black worker. This mythology of the Black train wrecker becomes basically their bread-and-butter by about 1900. Anytime there’s some sort of railroad accident that the insurance companies might be trying to blame on negligence, or that families might want to try to sue the Norfolk and Western, they always happen to find someone — sometimes a child —that they can say, “Well, this person put something on the tracks and tried to derail the train.”
There’s so many other incidents where they would rough up individuals to try to get a confession out of them, probably very often a false one. That’s to say nothing of the years of their decline in the early 1930s, where essentially their primary job is harvesting hobos, and selling them to a workhouse in northern North Carolina. These are not good people. One person around 1913 referred to them as “the gunmen of capitalism.” I think that’s an apt phrase.
Adams: That is a jaw-dropping story — the fact that it’s homegrown.
Hutton: Precisely. They did work for companies that could be termed as “invasive.” But a very important thing to remember about Baldwin-Felts is the organization was founded by mountaineers. It was run by mountaineers. And most of the gunman they hired who shot miners or beat up Black railroad workers were native mountaineers. So they’re getting their gun thugs from the same labor pool as the people that they’re torturing. And that’s that’s a dynamic that really needs to be explored.
On March 11, 1939, the West Virginia Legislature passed the state’s first law regulating surface mining. Once referred to as strip mining, surface mining strips away earth, rock, and vegetation—known as overburden—to expose coal deposits.
Coal companies began surface mining commercially in West Virginia as early as 1916. However, the state’s rugged terrain made it unprofitable in most places. The arrival of diesel machinery, trucks, and highways allowed the industry to break from its reliance on railroads and to develop surface mines.
As the practice increased, its environmental impact became more apparent. It turned into a political hot topic starting in the late 1960s. Governor Hulett Smith appointed a special task force to address the issue, and other politicians, including Jay Rockefeller, stridently opposed the practice.
In the 1990s, a new form of surface mining, mountaintop removal, became more common. This more invasive method provides access to coal that would’ve been left behind by traditional strip mining. In recent years, tensions over mountaintop removal have risen between those wanting to boost the state’s diminishing coal industry and activists wanting to protect the environment.
