I feel pretty much like crap today and had no intention of even getting on the blog until I realized the date. February 29…
“February 29 is a date that occurs only every four years, and is called leap day. This day is added to the calendar in leap years as a corrective measure, because the earth does not orbit around the sun in precisely 365.000 days.”
“Because seasons and astronomical events do not repeat at an exact number of full days, a calendar which had the same number of days in each year would, over time, drift with respect to the event it was supposed to track.”
from - Wikipedia
Since I can only write on this day once every four years, I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity. Naturally I’m going to take this opportunity to talk a little about the coal industry.
Over the past few weeks I have had a few different friends stop by who are unemployed. Not because they don’t want to work or are lazy or anything. Because for one reason or another they can’t - or are having a very tough time getting a job in the coal industry. There was a new coal processing plant built at Eccles not long ago by a company called *ICG (International Coal Group). While the plant was being built all of my friends who are unemployed looked to the new plant as hope for a job. If you were to drive by the front of the building today you would see a banner out front that says Hiring Taking Applications (or something to that effect). If two cars were parked bumper to bumper this banner would cover them both like a blanket.
Two of my friends stopped by yesterday after going to this plant to try and get a job. Sorry - we are not hiring red hats - only black hats. A red hat miner is someone that is inexperienced or new to the mining industry. A black hat miner is an experienced miner. The crazy thing about one of them getting turned down is that he is an experienced electrician on mine equipment. I think the new coal company is not looking to bring jobs to this area but is instead trying for other companies already employed miners. So in other words - you’ve got two or three coal giants in the area and all of those are passing back and forth the same miners.
I think it should be a prerequisite that a new plant hire a certain percentage of inexperienced miners. If we have to live with King Coal then a lot more than a select few should benefit. With all the money floating around in the coal industry - there shouldn’t be an able bodied willing worker unemployed on Coal River.
That makes me think of something else. Keep in mind, in the coalfields, the coal industry is the only industry. What do you think some of these able bodied unemployed workers do to make money? They hunt ginseng and various other roots from the mountains. What’s happening to the mountains? Mountaintop removal - so now the same industry that is keeping these people unemployed is also taking the only means for them to make money legally. By doing what West Virginians have been doing for generations digging ginseng, yellow root, blood root, black kohosh - to name a few.
And they call coal a win win for everybody. If that is the case then I think the term everybody needs to be revised -
eve·ry·bod·y, pron. - Every person; everyone. REVISED ADDITION - every person; everyone except in the coalfields.
I guess I can’t complain too much, as long as I am able to scrape up the money to pay my power bill each month. Because we all know - coal keeps the lights on…
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*More to come on ICG and the Eccles mine. There is actually a lot of history concerning the mine and I’m going to tell you about a tragic event that happened there once upon a time. I have to get a photo of a memorial first.
