By Lou Corsaletti
Times Suburban Reporter
BLACK DIAMOND—A faded, mahogany-stained crutch hanging on a wall in Frank Grens’ home is mute testimony to 27 years of work in the coal mines.
He’s been using it off and on ever since suffering a back injury December 6, 1941—“the day before Pearl Harbor”—when a roof beam in a mine tunnel near here slid and pinned him.
Grens said he was intent on quitting the mines then. But he stayed on until after the war. And he hasn’t been far from the area since.
Now Grens, 66, passes the time fishing, hunting, tending a small garden, walking in the woods, and caretaking Palmer Coking Coal Co. equipment at surface-mining sites nearby.
Coal dust has never really been out of Grens’ lifeblood.
He was still a toddler in the anthracite fields of Northeastern Pennsylvania when the family packed up and followed his miner father to the soft-coal pits of Southern Illinois. At 17 he struck out for Black Diamond to join a brother.
And after some 50 years in the area, Grens now is finding solitude, peace, and pleasure living on the edge of a high bank overlooking part of the Green River Gorge.
Grens came to this sylvan setting, the site of a thriving coal mine operation as recently as 1971, about 10 years ago. As far as he’s concerned, he’s here to stay.
Carl Falk, the managing partner of the Black Diamond-based Palmer firm, was operating the Franklin 10 mine here. He said Grens was living in a camper and often would spend weekends at the site.
Everyone knew Grens and he was welcome. Soon Falk took him on as a watchman to prevent trespassing and damage to equipment. After the mine closed six years ago, Grens stayed on at the site, using what was called “the dry” as his home.
Falk feels safe with Grens on the job. It was a mutual union that has worked out very well over the years, Falk says.
It’s probably more than that for Grens—something like a necessity. For he says he couldn’t live in the city, “… not in that rat race.
“Where the hell can a man sit down there? In a tavern? I don’t drink,” he said, almost defiantly.
The 20-by-28-foot wooden building he calls home once served as a cleanup room for miners working the old Franklin 10. After their shift in the tunnel directly across the river, the miners would go to the building to shower off the black grime and put on their going-home clothes.
Before his coal-mining days, Grens labored as a lumberjack, clay miner and, when he first arrived here, a construction worker on the Kummer Bridge which crosses the Green River.
Later he drove mules at the old Lawson Mine and then worked in various mines in the area. That part of it has ended, but the traces—and memories —linger.
Black veins of energy lie ready for mining
King County coal could ease fuel crisis
By Lou Corsaletti
Times Suburban Reporter
BLACK DIAMOND—Two “very large” out-of-state mining companies have expressed “strong interest” in Washington’s 6.2 billion tons of bituminous coal reserves during the past two weeks, a state geologist said this week.
And three or four other companies also are looking at state reserves, including the 825 million tons of coal in King County alone, as an alternative fuel source.
But the “rape, ruin, and run” mining practices of the past are gone, said Ellis Vonhedder, a Department of Natural Resources coal geologist.
Environmentalists, although exerting strong influence on coal mining, are working with mining companies to stay ahead of past problems, he said.
And here in Black Diamond, one of the last outposts in the state for coal mining, the hustling heyday of pre-World War Il could return. Maybe.
King County coal reserves, centered in the vast area from the King–Pierce County line north to the Issaquah area, all are east of highly urbanized population centers.
In the Green River district, which includes Black Diamond, records indicate there are about 357 million tons of untouched coal. In addition, about 309 million tons lie underground in the Newcastle area and another 19 million tons in the Taylor area.
One concern, the Palmer Coking Coal Co., has been mining in Black Diamond since the 1920s. But the days of underground mining are only a memory and the company, operating with 14 employees, only engages in surface mining.
Carl Falk, managing partner of the company, explained that coal left above the underground workings years ago is now being taken out. The top layer of soil and rock is removed and the vein—relatively close to the surface—is exposed. A dragline then scoops the coal out from the generally narrow angular veins.
Falk said digging goes down as far as the vein runs or until old tunnels are exposed. But, he said, this operation is far less extensive than strip mining, where gaping, cavernous pits are gouged out of the landscape.
The coal deposits in this area of the state overlay each other and rise to the surface at steep angles, rather than in flat beds, Falk said. Called “pitched veins,” they always have been costly and difficult to mine, particularly underground, he said.
In other parts of the nation, most coal is in flat beds where sophisticated extraction methods are employed. Most of the tunnel mining here has been done by hand labor, Falk said, but new technology and machinery has been devised for pitched-bed mining.
“The potential for renewed mining is here,” Falk said. “With a good drilling program—the first stage in any mine development—investors would be able to determine locations of the biggest and best coal beds.”
Large capital investments would be necessary to revive mining, Falk said, and new federal and state environmental regulations will result in additional expenses.
The Palmer Co. sells about 97 percent of its yearly output of 20,000 tons to the state for heating purposes at the reformatories in Shelton and Monroe; the State Soldiers Home in Orting, Pierce County, and the Maple Lane School in Centralia.
“In the past, several other customers who used coal converted to gas, but they now face the distinct possibility of reconverting to coal because of rising natural-gas costs,” Falk said.
He said the company, a family operation, is not interested in mass production at this time. He explained that only enough coal is mined to fill orders and to earn a living for his small crew.
An interesting aspect of coal mining in this area is nature’s own recovery process, Falk said, pointing to several high hills covered with heavy undergrowth and dense stands of alder. In each instance the hills were abandoned mining sites that had been all but stripped clean of growth years ago.
Although there was no restoration by mining interests in those days, the weather here contributed immensely to natural recovery.
An essentially moist climate, Vonhedder explained, allows most of the rock to break down chemically and form a soil blanket. This doesn’t occur often in other parts of the nation, he said.
Falk also pointed to an area where his crews had recently completed surface mining. The hilltop above the Green River Gorge had been reseeded and replanted with evergreens.
As for the future, Falk said the potential is in mines with a life of 40 to 50 years. The old “black collar” miners are a thing of the past, and technicians now would be required to work the modern equipment for underground mining, he said.
Large investments would be necessary — Carl Falk
Max Geer, who worked for the federal Bureau of Mines for 35 years and is now a mining engineer and coal consultant, agrees with Falk on the availability and potential value of local coalfields. The bituminous and sub-bituminous coal in the state is ideal for industrial and commercial space-heating and production purposes, he said.
In February, Seattle City Light was given permission to study coal as a supplement to the city’s primary energy source, hydroelectricity. The first two phases of the four-part analysis is to determine coal reserves in Black Diamond and Roslyn, another coal-mining center of past years.
A Seattle consulting firm, Shannon & Wilson, working in conjunction with Kaiser Engineers of Oakland, are to do the initial work under a $180,000 contract. If all goes well, the city will spend $2.5 million for preliminary drilling and other exploratory work during the two-year program.
Coal mining in this area would be—and has been—costly, one of the reasons for its decline, Geer said. It actually is cheaper to mine coal in Utah, Wyoming, and Montana because modern machinery can be used in the flat beds there.
“With machinery you talk in terms of tons a minute. With manual labor you talk about tons a day,” he said.
“The coal is here and if the demand materializes and if nuclear energy cannot be brought on line for any reason, then I think we’ll have to import innovative methods of other countries to get at our pitched veins,” Geer said.
“Right now, it virtually is a dollar trade-off whether to mine coal here or ship it in from Wyoming or Utah. But it takes energy to ship the coal and that may change the thinking a bit.”
Only a few reminders of the numerous mining ventures remain in the area around Black Diamond. The former company houses have been remodeled and now blend with other homes in the community. Most of the coal miners either have retired, moved away, or died. Sons no longer follow their fathers into the cold, dark underground tunnels to eke out a living.
No longer does the litany of mines in this vast coal area ring out with names like Franklin 10 and 12, Cannon, Hyde, Black Knight, Big 4, Occidental, Lawson, or Gem.
The huge mountains of stockpiled coal are gone, as are the miners and their sons who trooped off to work each day and the hubbub of an active mining community—at least for now.
Still, the Palmer Coking office, on the edge of rural Black Diamond, is a gathering place for retired miners. Almost every day a few show up to sit around and talk about the old days.
And they invariably gaze now and then at a high slanting hill on the site—a dark shadowy image against the sky.
It was the dumping place for the rock which was separated from those billions upon billions of black diamonds.
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