(Long but highly revealing article on the political economy of coal-mining.)
‘The Coal Industry Is Back,’ Trump Proclaimed. It Wasn’t.
By Eric Lipton
NY Times, Oct. 5, 2020
PAGE, Ariz. — For decades, waves of electricity poured from this
behemoth of a power plant on the high desert plateau of the Navajo
reservation in northern Arizona, lighting up hundreds of thousands of
homes from Phoenix to Las Vegas as it burned 240 rail cars’ worth of
coal a day.
But as the day shift ended here at the Navajo Generating Station one
evening early this year, all but a half-dozen spaces in the employee
parking lot — a stretch of asphalt larger than a football field — were
empty.
It was a similar scene at the nearby Kayenta coal mine, which fueled the
plant. Dozens of the giant earth-moving machines that for decades ripped
apart the hillside sat parked in long rows, motionless. Not a single
coal miner was in sight, just a big, black Chihuahuan raven sitting atop
a light post.
Saving these two complexes was at the heart of an intense three-year
effort by the Trump administration to stabilize the coal industry and
make good on President Trump’s 2016 campaign promise to end “the war on
coal.”
“We’re going to put our miners back to work,” Mr. Trump promised soon
after taking office.
He didn’t.
Despite Mr. Trump’s stocking his administration with coal-industry
executives and lobbyists, taking big donations from the industry,
rolling back environmental regulations and intervening directly in cases
like the Arizona power plant and mine, coal’s decline has only
accelerated in recent years.
And with the president now in the closing stages of his struggling
re-election campaign, his failure to live up to his pledge challenges
his claim to be a champion of working people and to restore what he
portrayed four years ago as the United States’ lost industrial might.
The story of the complex in Arizona demonstrates the lengths the
administration went to in helping a favored industry, the limits of its
ability to counter powerful economic forces pushing in the other
direction and ultimately Mr. Trump’s quiet retreat from his promises.
In the years after Mr. Trump’s election, the federal government offered
help valued at as much as $1 billion to keep this one power plant and
coal mine up and running by embracing an industry plan to relax costly
air-quality requirements.
A Republican lawmaker from Arizona sought to force one of the state’s
largest utilities to continue to buy power from the plant. Peabody, the
world’s largest coal company, offered to discount the price of the coal
it was selling the power plant from the Kayenta mine.
None of it proved to be enough. By late last year, both the Kayenta mine
and the Navajo Generating Station had gone offline, a high-profile
example of the industry’s broader collapse and the resulting economic
and political aftershocks.
Alvin Long, 61, who spent nearly three decades maintaining the
earth-moving machines at the Kayenta mine before it closed and remains
unemployed, said the past several years have led him to reassess his
political allegiance. After backing Republicans since the 1970s and
voting for Mr. Trump in 2016, he said he was leaving the party.
“We really thought we had a chance to keep it going, when we voted for
Trump,” he said. “But I don’t care to listen to him anymore. All of his
promises went down the drain.”
To some degree, Mr. Trump was defeated by powerful market forces,
primarily, low natural gas prices that made coal a less attractive fuel
for power plants and the increasing economic viability of renewable
energy sources like solar and wind. The pandemic made matters worse,
slowing coal sales as energy consumption in the United States dipped.
But an examination of the administration’s efforts to support coal in
Arizona and elsewhere, including a review of thousands of pages of
emails and other documents obtained under the Freedom of Information
Act, also raises questions about whether the president had any realistic
prospect of saving the industry or whether he mostly wanted to be seen
as trying.
After all of the efforts the administration made in Mr. Trump’s first
three years in office, the White House has offered no big new plans this
year to keep the industry afloat, casting doubt on how much political
capital he is willing to invest to protect coal jobs. The president
rarely mentions it on the campaign trail.
Peter Shulman, a historian at Case Western Reserve University and the
author of “Coal and Empire,” about the history of the industry, said he
suspected that Mr. Trump was focused as much on coal as a convenient
symbol as he was the fate of the industry.
“Trump’s pledges to coal miners were rhetorical appeals to hard-working,
blue-collar Americans like when Nixon put on a hard hat after a meeting
with labor union leaders back in 1970,” Mr. Shulman said. “But there was
no policy Trump could have implemented that would have changed this
situation with coal.”
The White House defended Mr. Trump’s record, saying he had reversed
policies enacted by the Obama administration that were strangling the
industry, and other officials said coal now had a better chance of
remaining competitive.
“Our actions have given coal a fair chance in the future,” said Mandy
Gunasekara, the Environmental Protection Agency’s chief of staff.
Since Mr. Trump was inaugurated, 145 coal-burning units at 75 power
plants have been idled, eliminating 15 percent of the nation’s
coal-generated capacity, enough to power about 30 million homes.
That is the fastest decline in coal-fuel capacity in any single
presidential term, far greater than the rate during either of President
Barack Obama’s terms. An additional 73 power plants have announced their
intention to close additional coal-burning units this decade, according
to a tally by the Sierra Club.
An estimated 20 percent of the power generated in the United States this
year is expected to come from coal, down from 31 percent in 2017.
In part because of the coronavirus-induced recession, total coal
production is expected to drop this year to 511 million tons, down from
775 million tons in 2017. That 34 percent decline is the largest
four-year drop in production since at least 1932.
Far from bringing back jobs, the downturn has translated into 5,300 coal
mining jobs, or nearly 10 percent, being eliminated since Mr. Trump took
office.
Nationwide, 12,000 jobs were lost at fossil-fuel burning power plants in
the United States in the first three years of Mr. Trump’s term, despite
efforts by many coal-burning utilities, including the owner of the
Navajo Generating Station, to find work for employees at other plants.
For people like Marie Justice, the former president of the United Mine
Workers of America union local and a Navajo tribe member who worked for
Peabody in two mines in northern Arizona for 31 years, the shutdowns
were a betrayal.
“We were lied to,” Ms. Justice said. “Every time we turned around they
kept telling us coal miners they would save our jobs. That is what we
heard from Trump. But the mines keep closing.”
Arizona is now an electoral battleground for Mr. Trump. But the economic
trauma from coal’s rapid collapse extends to Kentucky and other
coal-mining states. After the shutdown of coal-fueled power producers
like the Paradise Fossil Plant in western Kentucky, the Genesis Mine in
Centertown, Ky., laid off its 250 workers in late February.
Coal’s accelerating decline has produced one of the Trump era’s most
counterintuitive outcomes: Air pollution in the United States related to
power production has declined rapidly despite the administration’s
aggressive rollback of environmental regulations.
The amount of sulfur dioxide coming from power plants, which can cause
health complications including breathing difficulties and heart disease,
dropped by nearly 30 percent nationwide in the first three years of Mr.
Trump’s tenure, a faster rate of decline than the first three years of
Mr. Obama’s presidency. Nitrogen oxide, another hazardous pollutant,
also dropped much faster than in Mr. Obama’s first three years.
Coal-fired power plants are the largest source in the United States of
the carbon emissions that are responsible for climate change. Navajo
Generating Station alone emitted 15 million tons of carbon dioxide a
year, equal to about 3.7 million cars driven for one year.
In northwestern Arizona, the closing of the Navajo Generating Station
means less haze clouding views across the Grand Canyon.
The Promise
A dozen coal miners lined up behind Mr. Trump one afternoon in March
2017 during his first visit to the headquarters of the Environmental
Protection Agency. He was there for a carefully choreographed event to
celebrate a profound shift in federal policy.
The Obama administration had spent eight years rolling out measures
intended to curb climate change — regulatory actions that either
increased the cost of operating a coal-burning power plant or restricted
access to new sources of coal.
Modern mining machines used on the surface mines in the West had already
drastically curbed the number of coal jobs. The fracking boom had
further reduced employment by driving down the price of natural gas to a
point where even newer and more efficient coal-burning power plants
could not compete.
Mr. Trump had come to the E.P.A. headquarters to promise coal miners
that he was going to turn back the clock.
“The miners told me about the attacks on their jobs and their
livelihoods,” Mr. Trump said, moments before he signed an executive
order instructing federal agencies to freeze or reverse many of the
Obama-era measures. “They told me about the efforts to shut down their
mines, their communities and their very way of life. I made them this
promise: We will put our miners back to work.”
Among those in the audience were lobbyists and top executives from some
of the country’s largest coal mining companies. Mr. Trump and
Republicans had reaped millions of dollars in campaign donations from
those on hand, including J. Clifford Forrest III, the chief executive of
Rosebud Mining in Pennsylvania; Joseph W. Craft III of Alliance Resource
Partners of Oklahoma; and Robert E. Murray, the chief executive of
Murray Energy, the owner of the Genesis Mine in Kentucky.
Just days earlier, Mr. Murray had sent the White House and a number of
cabinet agencies a detailed “action plan” for “getting America’s coal
miners back to work.”
The members of the team Mr. Trump had assembled to carry out his plan —
including Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator, and Ryan Zinke, the
interior secretary — had been carefully selected.
Mr. Pruitt came from Oklahoma, where he had gained a national reputation
while attorney general for defending coal and natural gas companies from
the Obama-era environmental rules. His actions there included an
unsuccessful lawsuit that attacked the same regulation that required the
Navajo Generating Station to spend as much as $1 billion on new
emissions controls.
Mr. Pruitt would also select as his chief of air pollution policy a
coal-industry lawyer named William Wehrum, who had spent the past decade
as a paid advocate for coal-burning power plant owners. Now he would
oversee the dismantling of the coal-industry regulatory system.
Other top advisers on Mr. Pruitt’s team included Andrew Wheeler, a
former coal-industry lobbyist, who would go on to replace Mr. Pruitt.
Mr. Zinke had repeatedly pressured the Interior Department while he
represented Montana in the House to abandon a plan to increase royalties
paid by coal companies for coal extracted from federal and Indian lands.
He had also pressed federal officials to sign off on a new ship terminal
in Washington State to allow a major expansion of coal exports to power
plants in Asia.
“We sit on one-third of our nation’s recoverable coal reserves, which
are valued at more than $1.5 trillion on the global marketplace,” Mr.
Zinke wrote in a May 2015 letter to Mr. Obama’s interior secretary at
the time, Sally Jewell, referring to coal reserves in Montana.
The tables had now turned. Ms. Jewell was out. And Mr. Zinke was in charge.
‘What Do We Do Now?’
At its peak in 1988, coal generated 57 percent of all of the electricity
in the United States, while only 9 percent came from renewables, like
solar, hydroelectric and wind.
In Arizona, coal can be credited in large part for the rise of Phoenix,
now the fifth largest city in the United States. The Navajo Generating
Station opened in 1974 to create the huge amount of power needed to move
1.5 million acre-feet worth of water annually from the Colorado River
down along 336 miles of canals into the once-desertlike reaches of
central and southern Arizona, where golf courses and grass-filled yards
and parks have since bloomed.
The station, built 15 miles from where the Colorado River enters Grand
Canyon National Park, dominates the community of Page. The plant’s
775-foot-tall caramel smokestacks, which are among the largest
structures in Arizona, tower above everything else, including the
region’s famed sandstone formations.
The mines and the power plant became the workplaces of choice for
generations of local families, helping build a middle class in an
otherwise poor region.
Ernest J. Whitehorse, 57, started working at the plant as a welder when
he was 18. His brother Earl also worked there, as did his son Jerome who
took a job in the control room. Attending a high school basketball game
early this year, where one of his grandsons was on the court, Mr.
Whitehorse looked out at the bleachers and counted up the many faces he
knew from the plant.
When the mine and power plant closed, tens of millions of dollars’ worth
of paychecks, local government tax revenues and retail sales
disappeared. The plant and mine directly employed about 850 Native
Americans from the area’s Navajo and Hopi tribes, paying $100 million a
year in wages and benefits. Wages at the mine averaged $117,000 per
employee in a community where nearly 40 percent of the population lives
in poverty.
The plant and mine also made payments worth about $50 million a year to
the tribes for coal royalties and other benefits, including college
scholarships.
In 1920, a typical miner in the United States extracted an average of
four tons of bituminous coal per day. Today in the western United
States, which has the largest surface mines in the nation, that figure
is about 140 tons a day.
This surge in productivity meant huge declines in jobs even when coal
was the dominant source of fuel for power plants, dropping from 862,000
miners in the 1920s to 135,000 by 1990, before leveling off around
50,000 nationwide during the Obama administration.
That number dropped to 42,000 in April, as coronavirus shutdowns spread
nationwide, federal data shows. The industry has started to rehire some
of those workers, but employment is not expected to reach 2019 levels
again, with long-term consequences for local economies built around
mining and coal-burning power plants.
“What do we do now?” Mr. Whitehorse said, as he looked out at the crowd
during the Page Sand Devils basketball game. “What is next? I don’t know
the answer for this town.”
A Rush to Save the Plant
When the levers of power flipped in Washington on the day Mr. Trump was
sworn in, there was an immediate sprint among the cabinet agencies to
prove who could move the fastest to help the coal industry.
The Interior Department moved first, lifting a moratorium on new coal
leases on federal lands that was imposed under Mr. Obama. Mr. Zinke, the
department’s chief, also repealed a plan to increase the royalties paid
for coal extracted from federal lands. And with the help of Congress,
the agency nullified a rule restricting coal companies from dumping
waste from coal extraction into area streams.
At the E.P.A., work began to reverse the Obama administration’s highest
profile climate-change effort, called the Clean Power Plan, which was
projected to cut carbon emissions from power plants by a third. Mr.
Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator, then moved to further cut costs at
coal-burning power plants by delaying deadlines for a rule that required
them to stop the discharge of toxic metals into rivers.
Inside both agencies, another effort got underway with a more targeted
goal: saving Navajo Generating Station and the Kayenta mine.
The Interior Department’s 24 percent stake in the power plant was under
the control of a federal agency called the Bureau of Reclamation, which
had helped settle the West by delivering a steady supply of water.
The bureau was told by Mr. Zinke to work with the power plant, as well
as with Peabody, the owner of the mine, and leaders of the Navajo and
Hopi tribes to find a way to save Navajo Generating Station, known as N.G.S.
“One of interior’s top priorities has been to roll up our sleeves with
diverse stakeholders in search of an economic path forward to extend
N.G.S. and Kayenta mine operations after 2019,” Mr. Zinke said in a
statement in 2017.
Ray Shepherd, a former House aide who had gone on to work as a lobbyist
for Peabody, repeatedly intervened with officials to develop a rescue
package that would include the repeal of the costly air-quality
requirements.
Mr. Shepherd worked most closely with Scott Cameron, a top political
appointee who then supervised the Bureau of Reclamation.
“Is Peabody eligible to take this tax credit at NGS?” Mr. Cameron wrote
in an email, suggesting a tax break that the company could take on its
sales to the power plant.
Yes, Mr. Shepherd responded, assuming Congress extended the tax break.
Shortly after Mr. Trump signed an executive order calling for agencies
to curb regulatory costs on energy companies, Mr. Shepherd wrote again
to Mr. Cameron.
“Given the President’s recent EO,” Mr. Shepherd wrote, “I wonder whether
we couldn’t fashion some regulatory relief for NGS.”
Mr. Shepherd soon offered a more detailed plan. In an effort in 2014 to
reduce haze that plagues the Grand Canyon, the E.P.A. adopted a rule
that most likely would have required the Navajo plant to spend as much
as $1 billion to install devices that curb the release of nitrogen on
two of its three coal-burning units, and to shut down the third.
Eliminating that upgrade, which had been projected to avoid nearly 800
asthma attacks each year in Arizona among other more serious ailments,
would make it much easier to find a new buyer who could keep the plant
and coal mine in business.
“This requirement is a significant obstacle for new ownership,” Mr.
Shepherd wrote.
Mr. Shepherd also pushed a top E.P.A. official, Ms. Gunasekara, the
agency’s chief of staff.
“Happy to discuss further, but the key is $1 billion in value from
regulatory relief,” he wrote in a May 2017 email, forwarding her a slide
presentation that detailed a rescue plan.
Agency records show at least two dozen meetings or conference calls to
discuss the Arizona plant, including trips to Arizona by E.P.A., Energy
Department and Interior Department officials to meet with plant
executives and local leaders.
Mr. Cameron made clear that he was willing to push other federal
agencies to help, asking Mr. Shepherd for his “wish list” of regulatory
rollbacks.
“I’ll then explore options on those items with other agencies,” he wrote
to Mr. Shepherd.
In response, Mr. Cameron received a 12-item agenda titled,
“Peabody/Lazard’s N.G.S. Asks,” which he passed on to his boss, James
Cason, a deputy Interior Department secretary.
“Attached are what Lazard and Peabody have asked us to do, based on two
very long phone calls this week,” Mr. Cameron wrote. “I think these are
reasonable requests that don’t put us at risk.”
The administration then moved to grant Peabody what it wanted. Mr.
Pruitt wrote a letter to Peabody’s financial adviser confirming a tactic
the plant could use to avoid the $1 billion project to install new
emissions controls. He called the shift “compliance flexibilities.”
Representative Paul Gosar, Republican of Arizona, also floated a plan
that would have waived additional Clean Air Act requirements and
exempted the plant and mine from federal environmental reviews if a new
owner took over.
‘Yes to N.G.S.’
“We were lied to,” said Marie Justice, the former president of the
United Mine Workers of America union local and a Navajo tribe member who
worked for Peabody for 31 years.Credit...Christie Hemm Klok for The New
York Times
In Arizona, a campaign to save the Navajo Generating Station was funded
by Peabody and other mining industry players, who formed an alliance
with the Navajo tribe and the United Mine Workers union to create a
movement they called “Yes to N.G.S.”
The plan was to put pressure on the Central Arizona Project — the agency
that runs the canal system providing water to the region — to continue
to buy power from the plant. The group would also push officials in
Washington to follow through with the cost-cutting regulatory rollbacks.
But the Central Arizona Project board refused to back down, after
concluding that its customers would save $14 million in 2020 alone by
stopping all power purchases from the plant.
Ms. Justice, then the union president, and other miners went to
Washington — with the cost covered by the coal industry, she said —
seeking help from Congress.
“If these operations shut down a quarter-century before Congress
intended, the impact will be devastating,” she said at a House hearing
in April 2018. “For Navajo, this represents our children, our
grandchildren, grandparents, aunts and uncles.”
But Nicole Horseherder, a Navajo tribe member and the leader of a local
environmental group promoting a shift to solar and wind energy, was
there, too, with a very different message. The coal miners and the
administration were trying to hold on to a “fairy tale,” she told lawmakers.
“There is nothing that will halt the decline in coal,” she told the
House committee.
Ms. Justice began to wonder if the whole pro-coal effort was a charade.
Little actual progress had been made, she said, to line up customers who
wanted to buy the electricity the plant produced. “We were getting a lot
of lip service, but not enough action,” she said.
She was hardly the only one doubting that the government would deliver
on Mr. Trump’s promise.
Environmental groups like the Sierra Club had been pressuring officials
in California and Nevada to stop buying coal-powered electricity from
the Navajo station and even consider selling off stakes they owned in
the plant, which Los Angeles did.
George W. Bilicic, the vice chairman of investment banking with Lazard,
the firm hired by Peabody to find a buyer for the plant, also grew worried.
“There needs to be a discipline and sense of urgency applied to the
process around the various sides of the octagon-shaped table,” Mr.
Bilicic wrote in one email to officials at the Interior Department. “We
are having lots of discussions but limited concrete progress.”
The message was becoming clear, Mr. Bilicic warned: “There are clearly,
in our mind, some folks who would be quite pleased to see the plant
shut-down.”
But Peabody kept pushing ahead, at least until a surprising turn: The
Navajo tribe, an ally until that point, switched sides. Tribal leaders
decided to embrace a new clean-energy future, in effect ending the
effort to save the plant.
“Our people, our sovereignty and our right to self-determination predate
the first coal seam found on Navajo, and we will endure and thrive
together,” Seth Damon said in announcing the decision last year, shortly
after he was elected as a new leader of the tribe.
What Happened to Paradise?
A different fight was playing out in Kentucky over the Paradise Fossil
Plant, owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority, the federally chartered
company created during the Great Depression to help bring jobs and
electricity to much of the rural South.
By the 1960s, the T.V.A. had become the biggest consumer of coal in the
United States, eventually operating 12 coal-burning plants, including
Paradise, which had the largest coal-burning units in the world when it
opened in 1963.
Mr. Trump sought to buttress the T.V.A.’s commitment to coal, filling
four vacancies on its board with his own appointees, including Kenneth
Allen of Kentucky, a former executive at Armstrong Coal, whose customers
included the Paradise plant.
By the summer of 2018, the president was talking as if he had
successfully completed his work in reviving the industry.
“We are back. The coal industry is back,” Mr. Trump declared to a crowd
in Charleston, W.Va., including miners in their hard-hats holding signs
that said “Trump Digs Coal” and “Promises Made. Promises Kept.”
But that was hardly evident in the postage-stamp-size town of Paradise,
Ky., made famous by a 1971 song by the folk singer John Prine, whose
family was from the area. The town of Paradise no longer really exists,
except for a small cemetery that overlooks the power plant’s three giant
cooling towers.
“The coal company came with the world’s largest shovel,” Mr. Prine sang
about the town, adding, “Mister Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away.”
Despite Mr. Trump’s reassuring words about the industry, Bill Johnson,
then the T.V.A. president, was having second thoughts about continuing
to burn coal there. Paradise was built to provide so-called base load
power, meaning once its coal-burning units were running, they rarely
shut off. But modern power needs are increasingly cyclical, rising at
one point, then dropping at others.
“To get these plants to run on Thursday, you have to start them on
Tuesday,” Mr. Johnson explained to his board last year.
Natural gas prices had also fallen so low that the authority could get
power cheaper from gas plants. Maintenance issues at Paradise were also
causing increasingly frequent “forced outages.”
A T.V.A. staff report had concluded that if the agency closed Paradise
and a second coal-burning plant it owns, its ratepayers would save $320
million by turning to cheaper, gas-fueled plants and other alternative
sources, including solar power.
Murray Energy, which operated three Kentucky coal mines that delivered
more than one million tons of coal to the Paradise plant in 2018, joined
with plant workers, business owners and even teachers to protest the plan.
One plant employee called Mr. Johnson an “anti-coal Obama appointee.” A
second said he was in “disbelief when I look at the massive number and
cost of upgrades that have been done to this plant in the last couple of
years, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, and T.V.A. wants
to shut us down.”
Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader,
along with Kentucky’s governor at the time, Matt Bevin, and other top
elected officials, joined the campaign.
“It is wonderful to imagine on a sunny day that the sun is going to
power our electricity and the wind is going to blow,” Mr. Bevin said
early last year during a Kentucky rally organized by the coal industry
to save the plant. “But it is not real.”
For weeks, there was silence from the White House, until Mr. Trump
weighed in on Twitter just after that rally.
“Coal is an important part of our electricity generation mix and
@TVAnews should give serious consideration to all factors before voting
to close viable power plants, like Paradise #3 in Kentucky!” Mr. Trump
tweeted.
But just three days after Mr. Trump’s tweet, the T.V.A. board, including
three of Mr. Trump’s four appointees, voted to shut the plant down. The
T.V.A. as recently as 2007 drew 58 percent of its power from coal. As of
2020, it would be 15 percent.
“It is not about coal,” Mr. Johnson said. “It’s about keeping rates as
low as feasible.”
Drifting Toward Death
“Alpha Silo Ratchet Gate Closed,” came the call on the radio from the
coal unit controller at the Navajo Generating Station back in
northwestern Arizona. The controller’s job was to make sure the plant
had a steady supply of coal.
But this was not a normal day, according to interviews with many of
those who were present and a later visit to the site. For weeks,
employees had been watching as the mountainous pile of coal they keep at
the site — delivered by rail cars from the Kayenta mine 78 miles away —
was slowly shrinking, leaving a black-stained, muddy field. By last
November, they were ready for the closing act.
“Bravo Silo Ratchet Gate Closed,” the call came back.
The act of turning coal into power is cacophonous, with high-pitched
steam releases from the boiler after it heats the water to 1,001 degrees
and 3,500 pounds of pressure, the deafening roar of the steam-driven
turbine, and the piercing hum of the generator, a bus-size rotating
electromagnet surrounded by a large coil of wires that produces the
electricity.
But it all starts in the so-called firebox, where pulverized coal is
blown into the boiler and ignited in a fireball more than 25 feet tall.
The firebox has seven separate levels of coal dust that can be ignited
at once. So turning off the plant means carefully shutting down seven
levels of fire. That is what the coal-unit controller was announcing on
the radio, as he closed off the gates, starving the boiler of fuel.
In the control room was Fred Larson, who started working part time at
the Navajo Generating Station when he was 22. He was now 64 and standing
along with a dozen other workers as the alarms started to go crazy,
warning that the plant was running out of coal.
Bells were ringing. Lights were flashing. Warnings were popping up on
the computer screens, as the machinery there all but begged for more
coal. Gauges measuring throttle pressure, boiler temperature, feed pump
suction pressure and water flow all began to slope down.
Mr. Larson had perhaps the most important job still to do. He watched as
the power output slowly dropped, as the seven levels of fires burned out
one at a time, as the Navajo Generating Station drifted toward its death.
The plant was built to produce as much as 2,250 megawatts of power. It
was now producing 20. Then 15. Then 10. Mr. Larson’s boss walked over
and made sure he was ready.
“This is the moment you have been waiting for,” he said, which Mr.
Larson thought to himself was the entirely wrong thing to say.
The power output dropped to just five megawatts and Mr. Larson reached
out to put his hands on the pistol grip-shaped handle of the two main
breakers that connect the power plant to the grid. At once, he flipped
them both open. The plant was now offline. In fact, to keep the lights
on at the plant, as well as the flashing strobes atop the exhaust
stacks, the power plant started to pull electricity from the grid.
An eerie silence took over as the crew members on this last shift
gathered their personal items and prepared to walk out.
On a visit early this year, the lights were still on in the plant, and
the equipment was still in place, including operating manuals in the
control room and the clipboard recording the final load of power.
In the room where the workers had gathered at the beginning of their
daily shifts, hard hats rested atop open lockers, and leftover lunch
supplies, like a jar of kosher dill pickles and a can of cannellini
beans, sat inside, waiting for crews that will never return.
Three months later, in western Kentucky, Paul Stalker headed into work
at the Genesis Mine on a Thursday night. Once there, he took the
45-minute shuttle ride through a tunnel for about five miles until it
reached the well-lit spot, about a quarter-mile below ground.
Crews there used a machine to rip coal from the face of the mine, before
it was carried to a feeder that cut it up and then to the surface on a
conveyor belt. It was a normal shift for Mr. Stalker, he later
recounted, until the day shift supervisor showed up.
“I just heard from the surface,” said the supervisor, according to Mr.
Stalker. “They said, ‘Square the unit up.’”
Mr. Stalker knew what this meant.
A notice had been sent out on the day after Christmas to all of the
Genesis mine workers informing them that “there will be a mass layoff
and subsequent plant closing.” It added that “this layoff will be
permanent.”
Genesis had long been one of the mines that helped fuel the Paradise
plant, which had shut down in early February. Having lost a major
customer, a wave of coal mines were closing in Kentucky.
Squaring the unit up meant making sure there was a clean, straight line
on the underground wall of coal they had just cut. The foreman wanted
this last cut to be neat.
“I guess this is it then, ain’t it,” Mr. Stalker told his boss.
The night shift of about 30 men assembled in the locker room and were
told to wait for a boss to come in.
“‘You guys know this has been coming,’” Mr. Stalker recalled the Murray
Energy executive telling them. “‘You are the best group of men I have
ever worked with. You never slowed down. But we are going to stop
producing coal here. And unfortunately some of you guys are going to get
laid off. It has been good working with you. You have all done a good job.’”
There was not much show of emotion, according to several of the miners
there that day.
But in the employee parking lot, Mr. Stalker, 45, ran into a fellow
miner, who was much newer in his career — still in his 20s. He had some
advice for him.
“Man, get out of this industry,” Mr. Stalker said. “Don’t be like me, 45
years old and looking for a new industry to start out in.”
“Yeah, my dad has been telling me the same thing,” his colleague responded.
In 2017 and 2018, the Trump administration had granted Murray Energy
several of the changes it had sought in the “action plan” submitted by
Mr. Murray, but the power plants and mines still closed.
Murray Energy itself filed for bankruptcy, and its assets were sold last
month to a new, smaller company.
Bruce Summers, 45, who has been on unemployment since the Genesis Mine
closed, said he was fed up and unsure who to vote for this year.
“I did not believe in the beginning. Honestly I really didn’t,” he said.
“You really can’t change what was already in motion.”
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