Word: coaling
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Until the beginning of this year, Consolidation Coal Group of Pittsburgh, owner of the Potomac mines, had a contract to sell 1.5 million tons of coal a year to Virginia Power. Mettiki, the only other high-volume producer in the area, had a contract for a million tons, including some extracted from right beneath Highway 50. With both contracts due to expire on Jan. 1, the utility saw a chance to pit the two against each other in an all-or-nothing bid to be the plant's major coal supplier. It asked both Consol and Mettiki...
...that was not the last word. Virginia Power had also offered Consol and Mettiki the option of devising any other kind of bid they wanted, and the Maryland mine came through with a 10-year bid that Consol couldn't match. With coal prices still on a downward trend that began 19 years ago, fuel contracts of that length are all but unprecedented. But Mettiki vice president for operations Tom Wynne insists there was nothing nefarious about this. "We invested every inch of our effort for two years into getting this contract," he says. "We did our homework...
...opposed to some maintenance and support workers on the "outside") receive wages and benefits comparable to those of Potomac's union men. But Mettiki was able to undercut the union mine's costs by contracting out some labor and by hiring trucks from Savage Industries to haul the coal. That Utah-based company, for its own part, had been eager to expand in the east and, according to Andrew Blumenfeld, who studies coal contracts for the energy research firm of Resource Data International, "came in with very aggressive prices...
...effort waged largely by miner Frank Leone Jr., 53. He has gone on the midnight shift and stopped attending his beloved archery meets to make time for a series of rearguard actions against the deal. He has dogged the heels of state bureaucrats to block Mettiki and its coal-carrying trucks from getting what the union miners consider regulatory breaks. He protested when the state issued new permits to allow for airborne dust generated by more truck traffic to the power plant; he protested when the state granted permission for Mettiki to use a private haul road, and he protested...
...affirmative action in Sacramento, we saw glimmers of potential accord, but there remains a conflict between two basic approaches: giving no special preferences based on skin color and finding ways to ensure that all citizens share equally in the American Dream. We also met people, like those in the coal mines of West Virginia, being left behind by the new economic forces...