The catwalk sways as the crane swivels, grabs perhaps a dozen logs in its giant claw and then gently places them on the conveyer below. The logs are pulled into a spinning cylinder that knocks off the bark, and from there into the chipper, which uses a dozen rotating blades to turn the logs into chips that will be used for making toilet paper, cigarette filters and other products consumers demand. In addition to the start-up costs, Pittston says the wood plant will generate $10 million a year in wages, timber purchases and other economic activity.
The narrow valley is a link between the coal company's past and future. Once, the site was a surface mine and coal-processing plant. One million railroad cars filled with coal were shipped out of Moss No. 1 processing plant, Crickmer says, before it was shut down in the early 1980s.
Now, Pittston is putting more energy into non-coal ventures -- gas wells and timber -- and the site has a new purpose. The wood plant's chip mill is capable of grinding 250,000 tons of chips a year, and some Dickenson County residents worry it will encourage reckless logging that will damage the region's environment and tourism industry.
Standing on the crane high above it all, Crickmer says the company is a good steward to its forest lands. The chip mill and the company have been the victims of misinformation and misunderstanding, he says.
As vice president in charge of the company's gas and timber operations, Crickmer has endured the brunt of the public criticism. He's been with Pittston since 1976 and says "we've always done a great job environmentally. I don't know about 50 years ago, 40 years ago."
But the company's history is part of the problem. Critics say Pittston's record on environmental and safety issues leaves them suspicious of its intentions in the forest. Over the past year, the mill has been the target of a petition drive and protest rallies.
"They claim that they're going to do the job right," says Ed Reedy, a retired Pittston miner from Clinchco who signed the petition. "I don't know. I've always found you couldn't depend on what they say."
Pittston officials say their company has been good to Southwest Virginia, providing jobs, millions in taxes and gifts of land for economic development. It donated land for Dickenson County's industrial park and for Red Onion Correctional Center, the state prison at the Dickenson-Wise County line that has provided 400 jobs to the coalfields. Crickmer notes that Pittston paid $3 million in coal and real estate taxes to Dickenson County in 1998.
To help put out Pittston's side of the story, Crickmer took a newspaper reporter and photographer on a one-day tour last month, showing off company facilities in and around Dickenson County -- the chip mill, two surface mines and an underground mine.
The Pittston Co. is a $3.7 billion conglomerate headquartered outside Richmond. It is involved in gold exploration, armored cars and air freight, but is best known for coal mining. In 1998, it produced more than 15 billion tons of coal, mostly for export and sale to domestic power companies.
It also has major holdings in gas, with more than 1,000 working wells. A subsidiary, Pine Mountain Oil and Gas Inc., owns or has interests in 390,000 acres in Virginia and West Virginia.
Pittston also owns 144,000 surface acres in Virginia's mountains, and critics fear the company will clear-cut large swaths of that land to feed its chip mill. Pittston officials say they won't cut more than 2,500 acres a year in Virginia, and much of its wood will come from independent logging jobs in Tennessee and Kentucky.
The chip mill
Critics say chip mills encourage clear-cutting because loggers cut less marketable species or smaller trees -- as little as 8 inches in diameter -- that normally would be left standing. Industry spokesmen say chip mills provide a market for sawmill scraps and less valuable kinds of trees that are often left to rot after a logging job is done.
"Nobody cuts a tract of timber to haul up pulpwood," says Randy Toms, Pittston's chief forester.
Toms and Crickmer say the company's forest tracts have been taken over by "undesirable" varieties of wood, such as black gum, beech and birch. For most of the century, they say, loggers cut the prime hardwoods and left less-valuable timber standing.
Crickmer and Toms say the company will work to bring back red and white oaks and other hardwoods that used to dominate the region's forests.
"Some areas you might want to selective cut. Some areas you might want to clear-cut," Crickmer says. "Our goal is to get our property squared away to the way it used to be ... We realized our forest lands are a tremendous asset, we should manage it better."
The company says the chip mill employs six people who earn $9 to $11 an hour. A rough-cut sawmill that will soon be built on the site will employ 25 to 30 more people making $7 to $11 an hour.
Gerald Gray, a Clintwood attorney who helped push the protest drive against the mill, says jobs are important, but the ones provided by the chip mill are too few and too low-paying to justify the damage the mill's hunger for wood will do to the county's tourism industry -- and to the long-term sustainability of its timber industry.
Keith Craigers, 32, worked at a Louisiana-Pacific particle board plant in Scott County for seven years until it closed. Now, Craigers runs the big radial crane at Clintwood Mills. He sits in a padded chair in the glassed-in operator's booth, working a joy stick in either hand to manipulate the crane.
"This is one of the best jobs I've ever had. We've got great benefits, good pay," he says. "This is a good outfit to work for. They're good people. They're trying to do things in a good way."
Surface mines
A few years back, Pittston employees came to Freddie Mullins and offered to strip mine on land he owned in eastern Dickenson County. Mullins was skeptical.
Pittston contractors had stripped his family land in the 1950s and '70s and left miles of sheer cliffs all around.
"It was useless," he recalls. "There might have been five or six acres I could mow with my tractor."
Pittston officials promised to reclaim the old damage after they'd taken another cut into the ridges. Finally, he agreed, and Pittston opened the Cane Branch South Surface Mine.
The company refers to the old cliffs as "pre-law walls," meaning they were created by strip-mining before Congress passed the 1977 law that requires coal companies to return strip mine sites to their original contours.
After getting more coal from Mullins' land, the company reclaimed 2 1/2 miles of 80- to 150-foot "high walls" and re-established an old stream channel.
Mullins was so pleased with the results - "It worked out just like they told me" -- that he asked Pittston to do the same to some land he owned across Virginia 83 from the first site.
The second one, called Georges Fork Mine, is now operational. It employs six supervisors and 50 non-union miners, who with overtime earn more than $40,000 a year. John Kegley, who oversees Pittston's Virginia surface mines, says another 15 to 20 contract truckers and maintenance workers also work at the site on any given day.
Mullins, who owns a farm supply store in Clintwood, says the money that Pittston's payroll pumps into the economy is vital to Dickenson County.
"It's tremendous how many times it does turn around," he says. "A lot of these boys are my customers."
The Cane Branch South job won a national award for reclamation from federal regulatory officials. However, the two sites have drawn more than 40 citizen complaints, about fouled well water, dust, blasting tremors and other issues.
State mining regulators took no action on most of them, but did cite the company for three violations relating to erosion and blast vibrations.
Kegley says only a small percentage of complaints against the company result in regulatory action. Critics say that's a sign that the regulators aren't tough enough; the company says it's because it does a good job.
A deep mine
The "man trip" car jerks and then moves down a narrow railroad track into the entry of Laurel Mountain Deep Mine just over the Dickenson County line in Russell County.
The "man trip" is a low-slung vehicle that moves workers in and out of the mine. It looks a bit like a wider roller-coaster car.
The mine is just 500 to 1,000 feet below the surface, but it's a three-mile trip, on a horizontal plane, to get to where miners are working. To break up the trip -- and remind miners to be careful underground -- there are dozens of signs posted along the tracks.
"Careless Actions Can Break Up A Winning Team," one states.
Crickmer, the Pittston vice president, says injuries are infrequent at Laurel Mountain because men working in the mine do "an unbelievable job of communicating with each other, working together."
Laurel Mountain operates seven days a week and employs 66 union miners, 17 salaried supervisors and four communications specialists above ground. The ceiling height averages 4 1/2 feet, so the miners spend their time hunched over or on their knees.
They do the work with continuous mining machines, remote control diggers that use rotating drums with steel teeth that cut through coal and rock, with water sprays that reduce coal dust in the air. The coal is dug in one end and comes out the other, and is dumped into Un-A-Haulers, battery-powered vehicles that can carry six tons of coal and rock at a time (it's usually a 50-50 mixture). A continuous miner can dig and load that six tons in less than 30 seconds.
A Un-A-Hauler's driver sits in the middle, and can use its hydraulic systems to bend the vehicle into an "L" shape to maneuver around corners in the tight passageways. The Un-A-Haulers move quickly. As soon as one takes its load and leaves, another is there to take its place.
Pittston has laid off thousands of workers in the past couple decades, and mine employment in Virginia's coalfields is dropping, even though the state's coal production reached record levels two years ago. Mechanization means coal companies can dig more coal with fewer workers. During World War II, it took thousands of miners for Pittston's corporate predecessor, Clinchfield Coal, to produce 2.3 million tons of coal in a year. Now just 66 miners at Laurel Mountain can produce almost one-quarter of that -- a half-million tons a year -- all by themselves.
Coal jobs "are pretty scarce now," says James Blankenship, a Laurel Mountain miner who's been with the company 34 years.
"At times they've had me laid off," he says. He turns to Crickmer and teases him: "You didn't have nothing to do with that, did you?"
Another Laurel Mountain miner, Nolan Stanley, also has lived with layoffs in the past. But he can't imagine doing anything else.
"It's about all I've ever done," Stanley says. "Back when I started in mines, that was the main thing to do." When you got old enough, "you just went into the mines."
Mine superintendent Barry Compton, who grew up in Dickenson County, is a third-generation company man. His grandfather and father put in more than a half-century of service with the company between them. Compton has been working for Pittston 24 years.
"I think everybody has basically been raised up with this company," he says. "I don't think we'd have too many people in this area if it wasn't for Pittston Coal." |
