Word: coal
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...several years they have been a fixture of downtown Scranton and Wilkes-Barre in the old hard-coal country of northeastern Pennsylvania. They wear pins that say GET SMART, GET SAVED. Abstemious, straitlaced, pushy in their missionary piety, they work the streets, buttonholing teen-age passers-by with provocative zeal...
...Cadillacs line the streets, two new shopping centers have risen outside town and a resort community has opened in the rolling country beyond. And that may be just the start of the boom, which could extend to many other communities. President Ford has called for a doubling of coal output...
...Veins. Can that ambitious goal be met? For all coal's advantages, the answer is far from certain. The industry can assemble the men, money and machines to do the job. It nonetheless faces severe problems of geography, technology, labor relations and, above all, ecology-how to burn more coal without unacceptably fouling the nation...
Though more than half of the nation's coal lies west of the Mississippi, the industry still concentrates heavily on working the old veins of Appalachia and the Midwest. They are still rich enough to support what has become an industry of corporate giants. Some 1,200 companies work small mines, but they account for only 40% of output. The other 60% comes from 15 companies, led by Peabody Coal of St. Louis and Consolidation Coal of Pittsburgh. Only three of the 15-Pittston (No. 5), North American (No. 10) and Westmoreland (No. 13)-are independent; the rest...
...companies extract half of the coal by surface mining, using gigantic 20-story shovels that can crunch 120 cu. yds. of earth in one bite, exposing the coal veins for an army of other machines to attack. Mechanization has come to underground mines, too. In the big ones, miners no longer loosen the coal with explosives and pry it from the seam with pickaxes; they work continuous mining machines that cost $200,000 apiece and look like a cross between a chain saw and a lobster. The machines nose up to the coal vein and rip out ten tons...