Coal news and updates

The day the layoffs came, a cigarette and a cold beer could do only so much.

Thursday could have been a normal day at Hank's Roadside Bar and Grill in Wright, Wyo. ESPN and Fox News were on the TV screens, a midday crowd sipped Coors Light. But the folks inside who still had jobs didn't want to talk about friends who were now out of work — or the mine they'd soon have to go back to.

Instead, they talked about how working in a coal mine was like working with family, and that times had been tough before, and that if they were down now, they could come back again.

They were the lucky ones, that they knew.

Both Peabody Energy and Arch Coal announced Thursday they were cutting more than 460 jobs, or about 15 percent of the workforce at the North Antelope Rochelle and Black Thunder Mines in northeast Wyoming.

"It's just devastating for a community," Wright Economic Development coordinator Brandi Harlow said. "We're such a small, tight-knit community. Everybody in Wright is touched by coal mine jobs."

Wright was started as a coal mining town, and continues to be a place in the heart of the Powder River Basin that depends on the minerals industry, Harlow said.

But life in a coal town doesn't stop at the mines. There are the schools, the bars, the hotels, the mom and pop shops whose livelihood comes from the mine's success or failure.

The mood was dark the day before the pink slips came out at the mining facility where Jason Johnson works as a janitor.

"Everybody's families are going to be impacted dramatically," Johnson said. "People are going to have to buck up, get any job they can take."

Shelby Vinot spent most of his life in the town and now works as a field technician at a mining machine repair company. They'd seen the cuts coming and have work lined up through the summer, but after that the unknown returns.

"Are we still going to be here or not?" he wondered, "Or do we have to move and find some other work?"

Big D gas station assistant manager Sandy Willison said people have already been leaving town. Her husband works in a mine. They haven't been through layoffs like this before.

She tried sounding upbeat Thursday, but she said most of the customers were depressed. They asked one another if they knew anyone out of a job.

"This town, if it keeps going, is going to end up being a ghost town," Willison said. "If the mines are gone, the town's gone."

In Gillette, about 40 miles up Wyoming 59, mayor Louise Carter-King also tried to sound positive. The layoffs leave the town with a pool of skilled laborers to go with its good schools and advantageous location along a major interstate.

"Maybe we were all complacent a little bit. Maybe this can wake us up," Carter-King said. "Wyoming has heard all along, diversify, diversify. But when you don't have much of a labor force it's hard to start a whole new ballgame."

Coal will remain vital to the region's future, the mayor said. She pointed to the Integrated Test Center at the Dry Fork Station in Gillette, where teams of scientists will compete to find economic uses for the carbon in the power plant's emission stream.

Thursday's announcement nevertheless represents a grave blow to the community, she said. Carter-King's husband works at Peabody's Caballo mine, where 20 people were recently laid of.

"It is difficult and heartbreaking to hear about these layoffs," she said. Then she added a defiant note: "Gillette is a city that rallies around our neighbors. We'll make it."

And at the Fireside Lounge in Gillette, the layoffs meant a second pint of beer from Black Tooth Brewing was on the house. It's always been a family owned bar frequented by employees in the energy industry, said Scott Edwards, the restaurant's manager.

One of the men having a drink at the bar knew he had an uncertain fate.

Clint Hoffman had to be up early Friday to head to Wright. He said he had worked at Black Thunder for about 10 years. He'd had friends laid off already. In the morning he would find out if he'd join them.

"I don't know what I'm going to do if I get laid off tomorrow," he said. "I don't know."

Source: Denver post