MOUNT STORM, WEST VIRGINIA: COAL WAR

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On the day before he submitted the bid, Wynne says, he got cold feet and slashed an additional 50[cents] a ton off the delivered price: it came in at $24.85, 19% lower than last year's. Wynne says he trimmed the bid to the bone because the jobs of Mettiki's 260 non-union workers, 30% of whom live in West Virginia, were every bit as much at stake as the jobs across the Potomac River. The men who actually work at the face of the mine (as 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."

The union thus seems reduced to skirmishing, an 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 when it increased weight limits on public highways for the mine's trucks. Along with several state legislators and environmental groups, Leone and his fellow miners opposed West Virginia's preliminary decision last March to double the visible-emissions limits for the Mount Storm plant, considered to be one of the 12 dirtiest in the Southeast. Those actions may keep lawyers for Mettiki and Virginia Power busy, but they are not likely to revive the Potomac mines.

So it appears inevitable that by the end of summer, the mine will close and the last 120 miners will lose their jobs. It will be the latest in a series of hard-luck hits for the area, which lost 30 or 40 businesses, its only hospital and the CSX railroad when the Black Fork River flooded in 1985. Another flood in early 1996 provided sufficient excuse for a shoe plant employing 135 to close down and move abroad. That makes a small charcoal plant with 150 workers the largest single employer in Tucker County, where many of the miners reside. Beyond that, most of the jobs are seasonal and part-time in ski resorts or fast-food joints that serve more than 2 million tourists who flock here annually.

The miners are scornful of that kind of work. "These are proud people, and they've been paid well," says Tucker County Commissioner Jerry DiBacco. "They really resent the prospect of having to slave away for tourists who still have good jobs." Until that day comes, miners can be found idling away the hours at the Italian Supper Club in the sleepy town of Thomas, nursing far-fetched hopes that better times will return, even if the mines do not.