Educators take tour of mine
WEST FINLEY – Alisa Steele, assistant principal at West Greene Junior/Senior High School, had never been 600 feet underground before. But then again, neither have most people.
However, now Steele and a group of educators from Greene and Fayette counties and Penn State Fayette, the Eberly Campus staff and faculty can say they have.
The group donned knee-high rubber boots, florescent yellow vests, safety glasses and the iconic hard hat with the light on the front and toured CONSOL Energy’s Enlow Fork Mine on Friday morning.
“I think unless you experience it, you really can’t appreciate working down there,” Steele said after the group finished a walking tour the equivalent of two football fields underground.
The visit to parts of the 6.8-mile-long mine was part of an effort to raise awareness of PSU-Fayette’s new associate degree in mining technology program, which companies like CONSOL hope will train the next generation of mine supervisors.
“We wanted to bring administrators and educators together to help us to get a work force built for now and the future,” said Joe Cerenzia, public relations manager for CONSOL. “Us old guys are going to be gone soon, and we’re going to need to keep these mines open.”
Because lean years for the coal industry in the past caused a “dumbbell effect” on hiring in the mines, Cerenzia said there aren’t many current miners who are in the middle of their careers. Most are either nearing retirement or relatively new to the job.
That’s where the associate degree in mining technology offered by PSU-Fayette is expected to come in. As the only two-year degree of its kind in the country, the program is aimed at preparing students to work as mine management or supervisors and be versed in the most up-to-date mining procedures.
The university discontinued a similar associate degree program in 1984, but the need for a more educated workforce prompted coal companies to push for its return. The first 24 students began classes in January and 20 students are already registered for the fall semester, according to Nancy Dorsett, coordinator of the mining technology program.
Those enrolled are a varied group of skill levels, ages and experience. Some are straight out of high school, others have mined for years and some already have master’s degrees.
Dorsett said two other universities offer a two-year degree, but neither has had students enrolled for the past three years. “Essentially, they don’t exist,” she said.
So Friday, administrators and faculty from PSU-Fayette and teachers, administrators and counselors from area high schools and vocational-technical schools donned their safety gear for a closer look at where the program would take students.
After taking a elevator down 600 feet to the mine’s main passage, the roughly three-hour tour started with a 40-minute underground tram ride down the several miles from the Enlow Fork Portal to the E14 longwall section. There, the group trudged through a sludgy mixture of coal, rock dust and water along a long conveyer belt of coal speeding off to be crushed on their way to the longwall face being mined.
Then, the group got a firsthand look at a longwall mining machine as it chewed away 3-feet-deep chunks of coal from the earth. The machine, which removes the coal in a manner somewhat akin to a huge deli slicer, is set on a huge mobile trough that moves the newly mined coal out on a large double chain conveyer.
As each pass of the mining machine cuts three feet deeper into the coal, the miners position huge 6-foot-wide hydraulic sections of roof – “shields” if you’re an experienced miner – so they abut the newly exposed coal face. As the mining proceeds so too does the entire operation. As the hydraulic shields move forward in step with the mining, the swath behind the shields, where the coal was removed, collapses as they advance.
Between seven and eight workers operate the machinery from control panels on a pathway between the machinery and the shields that is barely wide enough for two people to pass and just not high enough to comfortably stand upright.
“The technology level is very high,” Steele said. “I think everyone has this image of mining that is very ‘pick and shovel’ but it’s not, it’s really very automated.”
Karen Cosner, a counselor at the Greene County Career and Technology Center, came on the tour to get a better understanding of what the students she advises would need for a career in the mining industry.
“I think we have to take it very seriously when they say you need self-discipline,” she said. “And I can see where you need to take the coursework seriously.”
“I’ve heard a lot of people say that if you’re not very good at academics you can go to the coal mine, but that’s not true, not any more,” Steele added.
Though no one on the tour did anything other than walk through the areas where work was going on, everyone on the tour had muck on their boots and their clothes and faces were smeared with coal dust by the time they left the mine.
“Still, I expected it to be dirtier,” Cosner said.