ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, May 19, 1996 TAG: 9605170028
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BIG STONE GAP
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
Industrial diversification is more than just an important idea to people such as 44-year-old Gary Kennedy. He was laid off last year from his job at the Bullitt mine at Appalachia in Wise County, when Colorado-based Westmoreland Coal Co. closed the mine along with the rest of its Virginia operations.
Kennedy - who worked 23 years as a miner and who, as a United Mine Workers member, sits on the state board of the AFL-CIO - now studies waste-water plant operations at a local community college. He has a wife, who works for the local power company, and a daughter at Emory & Henry College.
The coal Kennedy once helped mine underlies more than 90 percent of the surface of three counties, Wise, Dickenson and Buchanan, which share borders with either Kentucky or West Virginia. In four other adjacent counties, Tazewell, Russell, Scott and Lee, coal accounts for less than one-fifth of the total land area but is still important to local economies. These seven counties, along with the small city of Norton within Wise County, comprise Virginia's southwest coalfield region.
The Norfolk and Western Railway, predecessor to the Norfolk Southern Corp., launched the coal industry in Southwest Virginia in 1883 with a line from Radford to Tazewell County. By 1891, NW had extended its track from Bluefield into Norton in Wise County where it met the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, arriving from the west. At the same time another forerunner railroad of the Norfolk Southern completed track from Bristol to Big Stone Gap.
While Virginia's coal production hit its peak of around 47 million tons just six years ago , employment in coal mines was at its highest level - 19,416 miners - during World War II. With the switch from hand labor to machinery in the mines during the 1950s and '60s, the number of miners dropped until it fell below 10,000 in 1966. The crises that beset the competing oil industry in the 1970s brought mining employment back up to 15,742 in 1977 but for the most part its been on a steady decline since.
In 1994 and 1995, the Pittston Co. of Greenwich, Conn. closed some of its largest underground mines in Dickenson and Wise counties, citing low prices and foreign competition for the steel-making coal. In 1990, right after the much publicized strike by the United Mine Workers against Pittston, the company had 28 mines and employed 1,925 office workers and miners in Virginia. Today, the company has 14 active mines and 1,159 workers.
Westmoreland, which along with Pittston had for many years been among Virginia's top three coal producers, closed all of its Virginia mines and coal plants at the middle of 1995, throwing 800 people out of work. The company said it had lost nearly $16 million on its Virginia operations during the first half of the year.
Last week, Westmoreland said it has agreed to sell two of its idle facilities, both in Wise County.
The Wentz Complex would be sold to Stonega Mining and Processing Co. and Pine Branch Mining Inc. to Roaring Fork Mining Co.
In addition, Westmoreland said it was selling back coal reserves to Penn Virginia Corp. for $10.7 million and other considerations.
The headquarters of Westmoreland's Virginia operations, one of the largest buildings on Big Stone Gap's main thoroughfare, can be seen from the road leading to Wallens Ridge, where the site for a new state prison is being prepared. From up there, too, can be seen the Hardee's restaurant where Jerry Quillen, a stout, serious man, recently sat over a cup of coffee and talked about the impact of the Westmoreland closing on members of the United Mine Workers local union, which he serves as president.
Most of the 185 men at the Bullitt mine and coal preparation plant, where Quillen worked as an electrician, are in their mid-40s and are 20-year veterans of coal mining. Union meetings, he said, are better attended now with men looking for job leads and information about potential buyers that might reopen Westmoreland's Virginia mines.
Some men have found coal mining jobs in Alabama. Others, like Gary Kennedy, have gone back to school, taking courses to become truck drivers, air-conditioning and refrigeration repairmen, teachers and para-legals, Quillen said. But even if they get the schooling, he said, jobs are scarce and jobs at the many prisons being built in Southwest Virginia are two to three years off.
"Our people aren't looking for miners' wages," he said, "because they know they aren't there." Some of the former miners, he said, are working at jobs paying around $6 an hour compared with the roughly $18 an hour they made as union miners.
Quillen, himself, has plans to take a computer course. He's 54 and a year away from his UMW retirement. His wife works and his son is grown and on his own. Like many of the veteran workers, Quillen was well established financially when the mines closed. His savings have helped, but his unemployment benefits, like those of most of the other miners, ran out in February.
Quillen said he and other union officials have met with companies interested in taking over Westmoreland's Virginia property. They have talked about taking cuts in wages and health care benefits in return for the jobs the companies would bring. But one thing that may have scared potential buyers off so far is Westmoreland's liability for the benefits of more than 3,000 retirees, Quillen said.
The Westmoreland closing has had its impact on business in the area.
At Ed Phillips' used car sales business in Big Stone Gap, sales are down from 30 to 10 a month. "People aren't working; they aren't spending any money," Phillips said.
Phillips, whose son and daughter work for him, said he's had to cut back on his own purchases. He believes the Westmoreland mines will eventually reopen but as nonunion operations. "At least, I think everybody will be working; it may be less money," he said.
A few miles up the road in Appalachia where Carmon Gilley runs Abie's Gun and Tackle Shop with her husband, John, things have been "just slow" since Westmoreland shut down, she said. After the first of the year, the effects of the closing began really showing up, said John Gilley, who was, himself, laid off by Westmoreland in 1988.
One thing that hasn't dropped off though, he said, is license sales. "These guys are going to hunt and fish, if they don't do nothing else," he said.
LENGTH: Long : 112 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: STEPHANIE KLEIN-DAVIS/Staff. Jerry Quillen says unionby CNBmeetings are better attended: More people are looking for job
leads.