MOUNT STORM, WEST VIRGINIA

By JAMES L. GRAFF

All mines close eventually, of course, but until recently the Potomac Complex in West Virginia's Grant County seemed protected by its solid marriage to Virginia Power's Mount Storm generating station. It was built on a tortured, windswept plateau in the mid-1960s only because abundant coal was nearby. The coal was worth mining, in turn, only because Mount Storm would burn it. Tipple and boiler were linked by a two-mile covered conveyor belt that carried coal from the east portal of the mine straight to the storage silos of the power plant. The miners still marvel at the sheer handiness of the setup. "That coal never touched the ground," they say.

But that tidy conveyor has been idle since January in favor of a more invasive coal-delivery system: a fleet of bottom-dumping trucks making more than 200 trips a day, at 80,000 lbs. per trip, to the Mount Storm plant from the nonunion Mettiki mine, 17 miles away and across the state line in Maryland. Some of the old miners claim that the switch is an old-fashioned union-busting effort, but it's both more and less than that.

As dirty and archaic as it may seem in an age of microchips and gene maps, coal has a curiously upbeat future. Not so the union men who mine it. Deregulation in the electric-utilities industry generally favors the cheapest means of making power, and on average, that is still coal. But deregulation also means the arrival of cost cutting as religion, the stern faith that has propelled the U.S. economy to its current world-beating performance. The strongest economy in the world is as strong as it has ever been. But as the brutal tale of the Potomac mines illustrates, this prosperity is not about abundance but about taking bigger risks with smaller margins in a winner-take-all competition. This is a story about pennies--about how a difference of cents on a ton of coal in a local bidding war can imperil a small town in West Virginia's eastern panhandle.

Until the beginning of this year, Consolidation Coal Group of Pittsburgh, owner of the Potomac mines, had a contract to sell 1.5 million tons of coal a year to Virginia Power. Mettiki, the only other high-volume producer in the area, had a contract for a million tons, including some extracted from right beneath Highway 50. With both contracts due to expire on Jan. 1, the utility saw a chance to pit the two against each other in an all-or-nothing bid to be the plant's major coal supplier. It asked both Consol and Mettiki to bid for a five-year contract, with a buyer's option to renew for an additional two. Word went out in August 1995 that Consol had won, apparently assuring the future of the Potomac mines through the end of the century and beyond.

But that was not the last word. Virginia Power had also offered Consol and Mettiki the option of devising any other kind of bid they wanted, and the Maryland mine came through with a 10-year bid that Consol couldn't match. With coal prices still on a downward trend that began 19 years ago, fuel contracts of that length are all but unprecedented. But Mettiki vice president for operations Tom Wynne insists there was nothing nefarious about this. "We invested every inch of our effort for two years into getting this contract," he says. "We did our homework."

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.