Prospects for Wyoming Town Are Closing Along With Its Coal Mines

The burly, tattooed high school mascot wears a helmet and wields a pick. Monster trucks compete during King Coal Days. A ramshackle diner serves Coal Miner burgers with greasy fries down by the tracks.

Born of the black rock more than a century ago, this south-central Wyoming town of about 1,000 could die by it now that Wyoming’s last underground coal mine is closing.

Nearly one out of 10 residents will lose his or her job. To make matters worse, Hanna’s other coal mine is expected to close next year, costing another 52 jobs.

Talk is anxious, speculative: A new mine might open nearby. Maybe something could spur coal prices from record lows and make it profitable to keep mining. Or possibly some other type of business will come along.

Hanna has seen bust before, as when Union Pacific Railroad switched from coal-fired to diesel locomotives in the 1950s. But the town always averted abandonment.

“There were times when there were many empty houses and destroyed houses and such as that, and something came along to pull it back up. We’ll be hopeful that will happen,” said longtime resident Penny Parr.

The town has few prospects this time.

The nation’s economic boom has zipped past Wyoming. Unlike other Western boom areas like Colorado’s Front Range, businesses are not flocking here.

Another problem is that Wyoming coal has been a victim of its own success. Two hundred miles northeast of Hanna, football field-length draglines and house-sized dump trucks extract coal from vast surface mines that have made Wyoming the leading coal state.

The same mines have been undercutting prices, putting underground mines like the one in Hanna out of business.

“It still comes down to what it costs to produce it and what you get for it, and it’s just more expensive to mine underground. That’s all there is to it,” said Don Warfield, spokesman for the Wyoming Coal Information Committee.

Hanna’s RAG Shoshone underground mine was a holdout because of a large and complex piece of equipment called a longwall, which efficiently cuts away coal by running back and forth along the seam the way some people eat corn on the cob.

Mining will cease this week. Work dismantling the longwall and removing other equipment is expected to keep miners employed through Aug. 31, when the mine will officially close.

But even at Hanna’s other mine, the Seminoe II surface operation, costs are higher than in northeast Wyoming. The simple fact is that the Hanna Basin’s deep coal, reached by scraping at the surface or through a tunnel, is costlier to mine.

Hanna Basin coal averages more than three times the price of northeast Wyoming coal--too high for even Midwest power plants’ insatiable hunger for Wyoming’s cleaner, low-sulfur coal.

The math projects a heavy toll in human terms. The average Hanna mine worker earns $45,000 a year. The town has no other major or even medium-sized employers.

Weston Munns is being laid off for a second time. He helped build the Shoshone mine in 1979 and was put out of work when it closed in 1986. Cyprus Amax Coal bought and reopened the mine a year later.

Munns’ wife, Dawn, a 30-year Hanna resident, said they will remain in town through the mine closing and take things from there.

“It’s going to hurt the town bad,” she said. “A lot of people say, ‘No it won’t,’ but it will.”

Two of the couple’s children are grown and on their own. Their youngest has two years of high school left, but Dawn Munns has multiple sclerosis and can no longer work.

“It’s scaring a lot of the people, and they say, ‘OK, no insurance, no job, and we’ve still got bills,’ ” she said.

Things could get quieter even at the town recreation center, where children bustle off to afternoon programs just a few miles downhill from the mines.

The now-defunct Carbon County Coal Co. spent $3 million on the center and its Olympic-size pool, basketball courts and racquetball courts during the coal boom of the early 1980s. It is the envy of other rural Wyoming towns.

Because the mines still pay part or all of their employees’ memberships, closing part of the day might be unavoidable to keep afloat, according to Parr, the assistant recreation director.

Although troubling to many residents, the town’s predicament has not come as a surprise. The Rosebud Coal Co. surface mine, which during its peak in the mid-1980s employed about 90 people, closed in 1992.

St. Louis-based Arch Coal has reduced its work force at the Seminoe II mine from 90 to about 50 as reserves have been depleted.

Families continue to focus hope on Arch Coal’s plans for a new mine southeast of town, but lagging prices have forced the company to delay those plans from 2001 to 2004--and perhaps not even then if prices remain low.

Plenty of coal remains. It’s just a matter of getting it out economically. Deep within the Shoshone mine, miners extracted all they could without crossing a fault.

The coal seam continues 120 feet deeper on the far side of the fault, but an investment of millions would be required to reach it, according to Kat Allred-Sanchez, human resources assistant for the mine.

“It’s a shame. It is a good work force here,” mine manager Chuck Burggraf said. “There will be some salvage and reclamation, and we’ve been trying to transfer people as much as possible.”

A few Shoshone employees have found work at other mines owned by RAG International Mining GmbH, a company headquartered in Essen, Germany, which bought out Cyprus Amax last year. RAG will do what it can to help the rest find jobs in mining or elsewhere, according to Sanchez.

Jeannine Bell has been a miner at Shoshone since 1985 and plans to get out of the business.

“It’s too hard of work when you’re 57 years old,” she said.

A Hanna resident since 1974, she hopes to stay no matter what the town’s prospects are, but she is uncertain what she will do for a living.

“If we can survive, we’ll certainly give her a try.”