Word: coaling
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Department of Energy predicts that by 1985, Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah will produce 316 million tons of coal a year, compared with 22 million tons in 1967. After the digging is finished, the whole landscape will have to be rebuilt. "We'll just widen the valley some and drop the hills," says George Larsen of Arco, "and the land will just be 40 feet lower...
...coal and oil shale are only part of the Mountain West's buried wealth. Ninety-one percent of the nation's uranium lies in the Mountain West, with New Mexico and Utah supplying most of the region's ore. From Arizona comes more than half of all the copper dug in the U.S. each year; the Kennecott Copper Corp.'s Bingham Canyon open-pit mine in Utah, at two miles wide and a half-mile deep, the largest excavation in the world, alone has produced copper-over 11 million tons-than any other mine in history...
...craft shops flourish and stores sell wooden tubs for outdoor bathing. Newcomers may even revive an entire town in their image. Twenty-five miles south of Santa Fe, in the Ortiz Mountains, lies the hamlet of Madrid (pop. 250). Until 1955, the community scraped together a living from nearby coal mines, but when the coal business fizzled, Madrid faded away. In 1975 an enterprising group of outsiders began buying the hillsides and the abandoned, ramshackle miners' cottages. Today the sound of power saws and drills echoes through the valley as the new pioneers rebuild their ghost town. Melvin Johnson...
...early signs are not encouraging. Towns across the Rockies are suffering from what Psychologist Eldean V. Kohrs has called the "Gillette syndrome," named after a once bucolic ranching town in northeastern Wyoming. As oil and coal developers moved in to exploit what lay underneath Gillette, the town ballooned from a population of 3,580 people in 1960 to 12,125 in 1975. House trailers crowded in among the billboards and ramshackle storefronts, water supplies dwindled, the schools bulged with students. Crime, alcoholism and violence were commonplace. The town officials were simply unprepared to cope with the ugly side...
Boomtown officials find little sympathy in Washington for their plight. Washington is providing about $50 million a year to help towns disrupted by coal and uranium mining build new sewers, water lines and schools and hospitals. Westerners claim the funds are not enough, but Administration officials blame that on Congress. "Congress is still dominated by the East," says Paul Petzrick, director of the Office of Shale Resource Applications of the Department of Energy...