Nov 24, 2002 By Steve Ostrosky 11 min read

When Ron Adams first went to work in a coal mine a quarter-century ago, teachers were leaving the classroom for jobs underground and the supply of coal that had yet to be mined seemed unlimited. Twenty-five years later, Adams walks through the Carmichaels-Cumberland Township Fire Hall, meeting with prospective employers for a job that might not come close to the $18 an hour he was making as an employee of Consol Energy’s Dilworth mine in Jefferson Township, Greene County.

Adams, a 1974 graduate of Laurel Highlands High School who lost his job at the mine in July, collects unemployment and continues to search for work while his wife of 11 years, Christine, works part-time. He is also taking on the role of Mr. Mom, caring for 8-month-old daughter Kaitlyn Rae.

“When you are the main breadwinner, you can’t go out and take a minimum-wage job,” he said. “You can’t make ends meet.”

It’s a position he admits he is unaccustomed to, but it has become a fact of life for more and more husbands and wives, mothers and fathers in the region as the market for coal changes and technology has enabled companies to extract coal from the earth more rapidly every year.

Adams, 46, said that in the past 10 years he kept hearing the life expectancy of the mine get shorter and shorter, from 40 years to 20 years until an announcement in March that Dilworth had reached the end of its production cycle and the mine would close by year’s end.

“You don’t know exactly when it’s coming, but you have to live your life and go on,” he said. “You just can’t fold up.”

At the beginning of the year, the mine employed 416 hourly and salaried personnel, with another 80 people working at the Robena preparation plant.

Three rounds of layoffs have occurred to date, coming in April, July and, most recently, Nov. 8. Seventy-five employees still remain at Dilworth, but all are expected to be out of work by the end of the year.

Adams was part of the second round of layoffs and recently sat through a meeting at the United Mine Workers of America hall in Crucible to listen to all of the options before him, including a chance to join a panel of dislocated workers that could be called to work at other mines in the region if a need arises, in particular at other Consol mines.

He has spent much of the past few months working with the UMWA Career Center to assess his skill level, in an attempt to match him with employers who need people. He can’t afford to wait for a phone call that may never come.

To date, he has taken a few tests and is exploring all of the options that are available to him, including returning to the classroom for the first time in almost three decades. He has made contact with several local schools, including Penn State Fayette, about improving his computer literacy, a skill he didn’t need when he entered Dilworth at age 21.

“These are the first tests I have taken in 28 years,” Adams said.

Along with taking tests and exploring new employment options, miners like Adams are forced to make choices now that they have had a change in income. Instead of planning for a vacation next summer, Adams is keeping a close eye on finances while attempting to save money for Christmas presents.

Today, a high school diploma does not go as far as it did 30 years ago, but Adams remains hopeful that all the skills he has taken from Dilworth will make him marketable in an area where the unemployment rate hovers between 5 and 6 percent in both Fayette and Greene counties.

“I don’t look at this layoff as a bad thing. Actually, it is an opportunity to look at different job fields I never thought about while I was in the mine,” he said. “I hope to find something by the time my unemployment runs out.”

The last Christmas party

This year’s most likely will be the last Christmas party for UMWA Local 1980, and after the year most of the miners have had, there won’t be much of a celebration.

Local President Larry Martelli has presided over four “rapid response” meetings over the past six months.

At these sessions, officials from the state and UMWA discussed unemployment compensation, pension and health care benefits, job training and other options that are available to unemployed miners as Consol began laying off its Dilworth work force.

For Martelli, none of the meetings has been easy to sit through, but the most recent one, held Nov. 13, was perhaps the most difficult: It was the first session he attended since he was laid off from the mine a week earlier.

“I knew it was coming and I accepted it in July, even though I was retained until November,” he said. “Being laid off is never easy, and most guys don’t want to accept it.”

Although almost 150 miners were let go in the most recent round of layoffs, Martelli said not even a third of those affected come to meetings like the one held at the Crucible union hall. He said many miners are clinging to the possibility that work awaits them at other mines, preferably in Greene County, but the reality is that only a handful may find underground work.

Most of the people leaving Dilworth have more than 25 years in coal mining but fewer than 30 years, which means they will face a 3 percent penalty on collecting their full pension until they turn 62. Some miners will apply for their pensions, take health-care benefits that take effect when they reach age 55, and collect unemployment. For others, that approach will not suffice.

“I feel bad for a lot of these folks, because coal mining is all they know. It’s their way of life and it has been for 20, 30 years,” Martelli said. “All they have done is work in coal mines, and now they have a lot of important decisions to make. It’s sad.”

At least one more rapid response meeting will convene at the union hall before the end of the year, by which time the miners still working should be laid off.

In the meantime, Martelli has been giving some thought as to what his future will hold. His plans include a visit to the UMWA Career Center, and he will spend the next few weeks narrowing his choices before moving forward.

He can move on and, at age 50, pursue a new career, or he can find new work in the industry he knows well, one he said faces many challenges, one that some people don’t want around.

“Mining doesn’t have a lot of friends, and we have gotten a lot of bad publicity about longwall mining and polluting the environment. And, as coal is depleted, the cost of getting coal becomes important,” he said.

“A lot of people just want to see this industry go away.”

For sale

For Bernie Gresko of Carmichaels, news that Dilworth mine was closing brought a “For Sale” sign in front of his Bailey Avenue home.

Gresko, 47, has worked in coal mining since 1974 and worked at Dilworth since October 1978, losing only a year of time when the mine laid off workers in 1982.

“Mining has given me a great life. I liked my job and I enjoyed the people I worked with, but I knew this day was coming,” he said.

Gresko, who originally was scheduled to lose his job in July, was retained until the beginning of this month and is now busy packing up the rest of his belongings in advance of the Dec. 6 sale of his home.

While he expected that the mine would reach the end of its production cycle before he could retire, he suspects the longwall process, which greatly accelerates the rate at which coal is extracted from underground, and alternate scheduling may have cut short the life of the mine by a year or two.

Now, his future awaits.

“Maybe I could have gotten my 30 years, but I have no control over that. But, I can control my own destiny,” Gresko said.

Between submitting resumes to Mylan Laboratories in Morgantown, W.Va., and looking for other work, Gresko said he feels financially secure and in a better position than some of his colleagues. With 28 years in coal mining and expecting to receive $1,608 monthly in unemployment benefits, he said his options for the future are unlimited.

He may choose to stay in Carmichaels, but he has also looked into relocating to West Virginia, Florida or Nevada for work. Every time a new contract with the UMWA and the Bituminous Coal Operators of America was approved, Gresko would check the contract’s end date to see how many years of service he would have and what benefits he would qualify for at that point.

But too many of his colleagues never looked ahead, he said, and may now be paying the price for their lack of foresight.

“I worked because I wanted to work, but a lot of guys needed to be there just to get through,” Gresko said. “I never wanted that to happen to me.”

Regardless of where he ends up, Gresko said any job he takes must provide benefits, because his health-care coverage through the union will not begin until he turns 55 and the health benefits from Consol will last only for a year after his layoff.

Gresko, a divorced father with an 18-year-old son, said the loss of income many families will face after a layoff could be serious, and many families cannot afford for one wage-earner to be without a steady job for the full six months the state pays in unemployment compensation.

“Hopefully, they have another source of income; hopefully, they have their home paid off, because they are definitely going to have to change their way of life,” he said. “There’s going to be a strain, and they will definitely feel the pinch.”

But for Gresko, what the future holds is still undetermined, but he continues to look at his layoff as an opportunity and not a hardship.

“I want to do something I want to do, and I want to see how far I can go and where it takes me,” he said. “This year might be the last snowfall I see.”

You can’t go back again

On a chilly mid-November afternoon, Rich Pechatsko is busy inside his Masontown home, preparing dinner for his wife and son, who will soon be home from work and school.

Pechatsko, 53, is unaccustomed to having so much free time, and after spending 25 years at Dilworth mine, he is still adjusting to the fact that he doesn’t have to be at work this afternoon or that he doesn’t have to go to bed soon so that he can be awake later for the midnight shift.

It’s been only a few days since his last shift at Dilworth and the reality of the situation is still settling in, but Pechatsko said he doesn’t have time to be bitter.

“Dilworth’s been very good to me,” he said. “I worked there 25 years and only lost six months from a layoff. I was able to build up savings and work toward a pension. I was able to put my wife through nursing school and my son through X-ray technician school, so the mine provided me and my family with a good life.”

He has already given thought to life after coal mining and has already taken tests to see if he could work at the soon-to-open State Correctional Institution at Fayette in Luzerne Township. He may opt to go back to school for some training, but right now he has made no commitment to anything.

Pechatsko said the loss of a job is like a death to some men, who have given decades of their lives to coal mining and are now faced with trying to find out what happens next.

“We knew the mine was closing and we knew our separation date, but the reality of it didn’t hit until the day after our last day there,” he said. “All those years guys were saying, ‘I have to go to work,’ but today they are saying, ‘I wish I was going to work.'”

A member of the Air National Guard, Pechatsko is considering a 39-day or 120-day deployment now that he is no longer working at Dilworth.

He began preparing for the day of Dilworth’s closure several years in advance, when rumors began circulating about the end of the production cycle, and while he may be better off than others, he is still affected by the loss.

“We won’t go hungry and we won’t go without clothes on our backs, but I will be fine, even if I have to survive on my pension,” he said.

He said he would go back to the mine if called back, but he won’t wait around for that to happen. He plans on looking forward, never forgetting all that his time in coal mining has provided him and his family.

“Once the coal is gone, you can’t wish it to come back,” he said. “It takes millions of years to form it and it won’t be there again.”