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Sun coke plant sets a shining example
Sunday, August 02, 1998 By Tom Barnes, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
GRUNDY, Va. -- This hardscrabble mining town in the tree-covered Appalachians of southwestern Virginia was riding high during the boom times of King Coal in the 1970s and '80s.
But during the past decade, the area's economic fortunes have fallen off dramatically, as coal sales have declined with the demise of many American steel mills and with electric utilities under pressure to switch to other fuels.
"This economy is at rock bottom," muttered Raymond Matney, a recent retiree who spent 36 years in local mines run by giants like Island Creek, Jewell, United and Consol. "There's nothing for our young people."
Well, not quite nothing. There's still the Jewell Coal & Coke plant, a key fixture on the local landscape that has kept 200 to 300 folks working since the 1960s. The plant still is going strong, baking coal into coke, a key ingredient needed by the remaining steel manufacturers.
"That plant's been good for the area," said the local postmaster, Linda Shreve, whose father and grandfather were miners. "When everything else shuts down, you know that Jewell will still be going. It's been real stable. It's been our backbone."
While the connection between a rural Virginia town and Pittsburgh may seem remote, it's not -- Jewell's parent company, Sun Coke Co. of Knoxville, Tenn., is considering building a $350 million coking facility in Hazelwood.
Sun Coke is a subsidiary of Sun Co. of Philadelphia, which this year opened a $350 million state-of-the-art coking plant in Indiana, outside Chicago.
The Pittsburgh coke plant, which would go on the site of an LTV coke facility that closed a year ago, could employ 150 to 300 people. Much bigger and more modern than the Virginia plant, the proposed Hazelwood facility could make three times the coke -- up to 1.94 million tons a year in 366 coke ovens.
The plant in western Virginia, which dates to the 1960s but was modernized in 1989, has 142 ovens and makes about 600,000 tons of coke a year.
A 40-member delegation from Pittsburgh, led by City Council President Bob O'Connor and Councilman Jim Ferlo, traveled here Thursday for a tour of the plant and discussion with Sun Coke officials, led by President Michael Dingus.
Both sides came away impressed. Dingus said the trip showed the high degree of interest and involvement by Hazelwood residents in the proposed facility.
He said he believed Pittsburgh was "the right place" for the new plant, although a decision won't be made for another month. There are several other cities, some in Ohio and Kentucky, under consideration for the plant.
O'Connor and several of the Hazelwood residents, on the other hand, came away impressed with the lack of noxious fumes and noise from the Sun Coke plant on Route 460 in neighboring Vansant.
A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter and photographer traveled to Grundy, a town of 10,000 people, two days before O'Connor and his party arrived to observe the plant and see what townspeople thought of the coking operation.
Almost to a person, the verdict was favorable. That wasn't surprising, since a town that needs jobs isn't about to thumb its nose at a plant that employs 300.
But the affection seemed to be real, from the restaurant owner who serves take-out meals to plant workers, to the department store manager whose sales of clothing are boosted, to the sporting goods store owner who sells guns and fishing gear to the coke workers.
Ray Matney, a quiet man with a deeply lined face and thinning hair, sat behind the counter at the Grundy Outdoorsman, a hunting and fishing store on Route 460, the main road into town.
Matney and his friend, Roger Coleman, a miner for 38 years, are clearly worried about the way things are headed here.
"The only ones who'll be left in Buchanan County in a few years will be people on fixed incomes," Coleman said as he spit chewing-tobacco juice into a paper cup.
"The mines have been shutting down, and it's hard for people to find work," said Denise Blankenship, manager of Watson's department store, a sort of Hills without the frills, just down the road.
Dozens of trucks loaded with coal from local mines rumble into the Jewell coke plant on the banks of Dismal Creek.
The plant has 300 employees and 142 coke ovens, in which temperatures reach 2,000 degrees or more, baking coal into coke, which is shipped out by train.
"Anything that brings in business is good to me," said Eunice Keen, a platinum-haired waitress at Apple Annie's, about a mile from the plant.
The area around Grundy and Vansant is rife with conservative Protestant churches, mostly Baptist or Pentecostal or Church of Christ.
There are also a few branches of the Miners & Merchants Bank, and a county hospital in the center of Grundy. But, on the whole, things are down.
Roger Coleman said 20,000 mining-related jobs had been lost in Buchanan County over the past decade. The county has five high schools, each of which used to have 500 to 600 students, but now have 100 to 200 apiece.
A local gift shop owner, Tivis O'Quinn, knows about young people moving away. His son, Ryan, 25 and handsome, whose pictures adorn the office, left town several years ago for the lights of Hollywood. He's landed parts in two dozen TV shows and some nonspeaking roles in movies, including the hit, "Jerry Maguire."
"Our economy has been completely dependent on coal," O'Quinn said. "People assumed coal would never play out. My dad mined coal all his life. There's still some coal in the ground, but the market for our coal isn't strong."
Even the opening of new prisons is seen as a welcome event, because they produce jobs, too, he said.
One, the Keen Mountain Correctional Facility, is in Buchanan County and holds 800 prisoners. Just this month another prison, Red Onion Correctional Facility, named after a local mountain, opened in neighboring Dickenson County.
No one knows the problems better than Roger Rife, who heads the seven-member board of supervisors that runs Buchanan County. He's also a 30-year teacher of history, Spanish and driver education at Garden High School, as well as being the school's football coach and athletic director.
With the dropping enrollment at the county's five high schools, mergers seem to loom, not a happy prospect. Grundy High School has a particularly proud past, having won (according to a big roadside sign out front) the last 10 state wrestling championships.
"Coal's been good to us ever since the first mine opened here in 1936," said Rife, a ruddy man with closely cropped white hair who chews Red Man Tobacco.
Besides the many good-paying jobs in coal, a "severance tax" is on each ton of coal taken from the ground, forming the mainstay of the county's annual budget.
Rife's office is in the Buchanan County Courthouse, a four-story stone structure in the center of Grundy. Its tiny downtown is marked by empty storefronts and a life-size statue of a miner holding a pickax.
"For years coal was the only thing around here," Rife said. "But nothing lasts forever. You have to diversify."
Rife said the coal boom began in the early 1970s and lasted until 1988.
"Union miners were making $15 an hour. Some of them made $70,000 or $80,000 a year.
"My father was a coal miner. One day he said to me, 'Do me a favor. Get an education. Don't go to the mines'," Rife said. "Mining is a rough job -- cave-ins, accidents and things."
Rife said that just a few years ago, four of the 10 wealthiest men in Virginia were from Buchanan County.
Ken Potter, still called by his boyhood nickname of "Pooch," said $100 bills were so common in those days, "We called them Island Creek tens," after the mining company, which eventually sold out to Consol.
"Everybody had a pocketful of money then," Potter said. "People were working seven days a week."
Potter knows both the highs and lows of living off of coal. He went to work at 14, learning how to make mining equipment for a company called Knox Creek Coal, and then in 1973 set up a small company and began mining.
He worked seven days most weeks and made a bundle before selling his mining business in 1985, when, he said, he could see the downturn about to occur, as steel mills closed and utilities switched to less-polluting fuels.
Potter likes to drop in for breakfast at the Rainbow Restaurant, a drab eatery hard by the side of Route 460.
He still complains about "too damn many environmental rules and regulations" that have led to a drop in coal usage.
"It's caused some utilities to go to nuclear power," he said.
And the state government in Richmond is no help, he complained.
"We ain't never going to get jack," Potter said. "Virginia stops at Roanoke (150 miles to the east) as far as those lawmakers are concerned."
Sitting at a nearby table at the Rainbow is Elmer Hagy, a lanky, 74-year-old retired miner, who's talking to three friends about changes in the coal industry -- changes both good and bad.
Hagy, who lost his right lung to black-lung disease, spent years digging coal from the mines and then transferred to the Jewell coke plant before environmental safeguards were installed in the late 1980s.
Hagy meets often for breakfast with his buddies -- Eddie Hubble, a railroad worker and sometime pool shooter who has long hair and a brown beard that hangs eight inches below his chin; Clarence Carr, a laconic construction worker; and Burton Dialen, who also retired after working more than 20 years in the mines.
When he worked at the coking plant from 1971 to 1979, Hagy was a "door spotter," someone who opened the doors of the fiery-hot coking furnaces, where coal is burned to coke, giving off gases that are burned away inside the facility.
"I pulled them doors off when the smoke was as yellow as gold," he recalled. "I'd have to run away and get my breath."
Things weren't so good at the coke plant back then, either for the workers' health or the surrounding environment, the men said.
"The heat and smoke (from the plant) killed everything around it," Hagy said.
Hubble added, "It even killed the polkweed -- and that will grow anywhere."
A lawyer with offices just down Route 460 from the Rainbow, Gerald Coleman (no relation to Roger Coleman), recalled those days.
"The Jewell plant, in the mid-70s, was very poor as far as the environment was concerned," he said. "It was bad. Fumes killed every piece of vegetation around."
But things drastically improved after Sun took over and put in modern coke ovens nine years ago.
"They have (smokestack) scrubbers now," Hubble said. "The government made them clean it up."
The plant sits in a long, narrow valley between two tree-covered hills, which seem to show no harm from the white clouds of steam and the heat that rises from the smokestacks attached to the coke ovens.
"They've had their act cleaned up for years now," said Gerald Coleman, who does title-search work occasionally for the coke plant.
About the coking operation, "I've never heard no kick against it," said one of the area's elder statesmen, C.A. Wood, the 96-year-old retired county revenue supervisor, who lives a few miles from the plant.
There are occasional complaints about smoke or odors from the Jewell plant, said Rife, the chairman of the county board of supervisors, but he looks at it philsophically.
"You have to take some bad with all the good (the plant) has meant in wealth for the economy," he said. "Sun Oil's been good for Buchanan County."
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