ShareThisWHITESVILLE, W. Va. - When Manuel Arvon's father opened a meat business here in 1911, the town lacked paved streets and running water. Over the ensuing decades, Arvon, owner of a flower shop, watched the emergence of a boom town
"There were 23 beer joints in this town," he said. "Two theaters. Two drugstores. Five food markets."
All of it fueled by coal.
Arvon's shop, which opened in 1949, is still going strong, a striking exception on the town's ghostly main drag, Route 3, which is pocked with blight, boarded buildings and vacant lots.
"We are in the richest county for coal, but yet look at our town. Our town looks like something you would see in a horror movie," said Nancy Platt, who operates Nuttin' Fancy, a homespun restaurant down the street.
Mines that operate up and down Route 3, including the Upper Big Branch mine that was the scene of tragedy last week, continue to churn out tons of coal but produce only a trickle of commerce for once-thriving towns like Whitesville.
"I don't get a lot of the coal companies' business," Platt said, noting that many of those who work in the nearby mines drive in from towns far away.
The deadly mine explosion April 5 that claimed 29 lives, an ongoing controversy over the environmental damage from mountaintop strip mining, and the disappearance of good-paying unionized coal mine jobs have some questioning the economic equation that has been West Virginia's mainstay almost since coal was discovered here in Boone County in 1742.
"Coal is a finite resource, it's not always going to be here," said Chuck Nelson, a retired miner of 30 years who has been urging lawmakers to diversify the region's economy to include renewable energy jobs. "What are we going to do when coal is gone? We need to start transitioning right now."
Nelson, of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, is specifically concerned with extracting coal from Coal River Mountain by using the mountaintop-removal method. An alternative, he said, would be building a wind farm there instead.
"It wouldn't be a lot of jobs, but it would be lifetime jobs," he said.
Others doubt there is an alternative.
"That's the only thing that's here," said Arvon, 80, mayor of Sylvester, W.Va., and former Boone County school superintendent. "And if it wasn't for coal, we wouldn't be here either.
"We need to find some other alternative. But what are you going to do? Plant corn? Not very likely. Raise cattle? Not very likely. What is the future of West Virginia, not just Boone County?"
A study by business and economic researchers at West Virginia and Marshall universities suggests that such diversification talk might, indeed, be tilting at windmills.
"The loss of just property tax revenue from coal companies would be fatal to local governments," concludes a study of the state's coal economy released in February.
"West Virginia is a low-income state. Reduction in the use of coal would worsen an already bad situation particularly in those areas which are most in need of jobs and income," said the report, which estimated that coal accounted for $5.7 billion, or 9.2 percent, of the state's gross domestic product, in 2008.
But there is no question that coal has lost much of its oomph as a jobs generator. Only about 20,000 of the state's 1.8 million residents hold mining jobs, down from a peak of more than 130,000 in 1940.
Still, some see coal as their only viable employment option.
"You can either work in the mines or flip burgers, and I can't support my family like I want to flipping burgers," said Ricky Campbell, who used to work at Upper Big Branch but now works at another mine.
"You can either go to college for a couple years or go into the mines and make good money. Most of us end up going into the mines."
While underground mines still dot West Virginia's coal country, much of today's coal harvest is being carved from the tops of mountains by giant machines.
"Mountaintop removal is a mining technique designed, from the very start, to take the labor force out of the mining operation," says the nonprofit group Appalachian Voices. "What used to take hundreds of miners employed for decades now takes a half-dozen heavy equipment operators and blasting technicians a couple of years."
"We need options for those who need to support their families," said Lorelei Scarbro of Whitesville's Coal River Mountain Watch, who also is pushing for the construction of a wind farm.
She said miners continued to risk their lives underground, but they wouldn't if they could find other jobs locally that paid just as well. Moving elsewhere for work is impossible for many and would devastate the community.
"So many of us are rooted in the community and connected with the land, we're not going anywhere."
(E-mail reporter Jon Schmitz at jschmitz(at)post-gazette.com and Sadie Gurman at sgurman(at)post-gazette.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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