In coal country, in Trump they trust to bring back mining
BUCKHANNON, West Virginia: Bill Nesselrotte owns a coal company that doesn’t mine coal anymore.
Still, a few days each week, he straps on a backpack and pushes through the brush to collect jars of water from streams, ponds, wells and springs - samples to prove to the government that he’s not a polluter.
There has been no drilling, no blasting for more than two years on the 150 acres Nesselrotte leases here - not since the bottom dropped out of a market that once provided a good livelihood for him and a couple dozen other people in West Virginia’s dramatically narrow valleys.
These days, his mine is nothing but a rock- crushing business, selling limestone to anyone who shows up with a dump truck, US$ 150 ( RM675) a load, barely enough to keep one man employed.
But to keep crushing rocks, Nesselrotte must keep his coal permits active, and that means collecting water samples, 48 trips a month.
A slew of other new rules keeps him at his dining-room table, slaving over paperwork deep into the night.
Such burdens are, he says, a major reason 76 per cent of Upshur County voters last month put their trust in the man who promised to slash government regulations and bring back coal - Donald Trump.
Coal country offers a counterweight to the palpable anxiety about Trump in some parts of the country. Here, people said they are “euphoric” and “thrilled” about the incoming president, even in the valley where Nesselrotte has no customers for his coal.
That optimism is pervasive even after Trump last week chose as his commerce secretary Wilbur Ross, the Manhattan billionaire who in 2006 owned the mine just down the hill, where an underground explosion killed 12 miners, the region’s worst coal disaster in decades.
“West Virginians are realists,” said Nesselrotte, a mining engineer by education and a serial entrepreneur by virtue of living in a place that still depends on coal, even though nearly every mine within an hour’s drive has closed in recent years. “The mines have been shut down, the railroads have been torn up, the preparation plants have closed. A lot of stuff has been done that can’t be undone.
“But I’m really looking forward to this president,” he said. “It’s kind of refreshing to see people come into government who know how business works.”
Still, for some, especially for families who felt the mine disaster firsthand, the naming of Ross has dulled the thrill of Trump’s victory.
“I don’t like that choice,” said Vickie Boni, 74. “I always felt the company was responsible.”
Boni’s ex-husband, John Boni, was the fire boss, in charge of checking safety at the Sago Mine. Five days before the explosion, he alerted superiors to a leak of dangerous methane gas. A freak lightning strike ignited the methane, investigators later said. Right after the explosion, John Boni retired after 36 years in the mines. A few months later, he put a bullet in his head.
Still, Vickie Boni remains optimistic that Trump will live up to his promise to restore coal jobs.
“That’s people’s livelihoods,” she said. Her father went into the mines at 14 and was killed in a mine at 44. Her son might have ended up mining, too, but there was no work, so he moved to North Carolina, a story that many older parents here tell about their now- distant children.
Ross did not respond to a request for comment about the Sago disaster. An inveterate buyer of deeply troubled companies, he had bought the mine only a couple of months before the explosion and was not on- site when the men were killed.
In a televised interview in 2006, soon after the tragedy, Ross told ABC that he knew the mine had been cited with 208 violations, that he accepted responsibility for the disaster, that he had not made a personal contribution toward a fund for the miners’ families, and that his company “never scrimped on safety expenditures.”
Several investigations concluded that the mine’s owner, International Coal Group, was responsible for the safety violations but that the violations did not cause the explosion. Only one miner who was trapped survived.
Helen Winans’s son Marshall died at Sago, and although she blames the company for what happened, she does not see Ross as culpable.
“It wasn’t his fault,” she said. “It was the people here. People went into the mine unprotected because they’d been drinking.
The company should have had better safety, and the inspectors should have the sense to shut them down and slap fines on them, but it’s dangerous work.”
Dangerous, but essential, she said: Before the price of coal collapsed, before the number of working miners in the state fell to a 100-year low of 15,000, miners could make US$ 60,000, even US$ 75,000, a year without a high school education. Walmart money doesn’t come close. — WPBloomberg