SYCAMORE, Pa. — The one thing all the guys know about Sara Vance is she never cries.
Which is why her co-workers — all men — dropped their tools when Vance suddenly broke down in a flood of tears after she failed to shovel coal into a conveyor belt.
Pregnant with her first child and just weeks before the due date, she was 1,200 feet below the surface of the earth with no easy way out.
“I wasn’t in pain or going into labor,” Vance said. “I was just so frustrated because my belly was getting in my way of shoveling. I take pride in being able to do my job and those tears just started falling the more exasperated I became.”
Within minutes a dozen men were at her side. Vance was placed in the mantrip and driven through the seven miles of underground maze at Harvey Mine to an elevator where a stretcher waited to take her to the surface.
“I told them I do not need a stretcher and I certainly do not need an ambulance because I was not having a baby at that moment. I was just mad I couldn’t do my job,” Vance said, laughing at the memory.
Vance, who is 33 and blessed with thick, curly red hair, striking brown eyes and a rich Appalachian drawl, is standing in the cavernous locker room of the Harvey Mine in Greene County, Pa. It is eleven months since she had her daughter, Alexis, and she is about to descend once again for her daily shift.
The daughter of one of the first female coal miners in the country, Vance is dressed head-to-foot in full protective gear including overalls, hard hat, steel-toed boots, mining light, portable oxygen — and a red, white and blue mask emblazoned with the words “Trump 2020.”
In 2016, presidential candidate Donald J. Trump told coal miners in western Pennsylvania he was going to bring their jobs back — along with the engineers, chemists and geologists who work alongside them. In return, Trump won big around the coal-producing parts of Appalachian Pennsylvania. His oversized turnout in the coal counties of Washington, Greene, Cambria, Somerset, Westmoreland, Luzerne and Fayette helped earn him that 41,000-vote edge over Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania, who famously told a town-hall audience during her campaign, “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”
Four years later, I met with dozens of miners to see if their feelings for Trump have changed. All the workers I spoke to not only still support Trump for reelection, they firmly believe he has done right by their industry.
Those who live outside the hollers point to statistics that show more coal jobs have been lost since Trump took office. And it’s true: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were close to 90,000 coal-
mining jobs in 2012, compared with 46,600 today. In the last five years, 483 coal-fired electric generating units in the US have closed or announced their retirement.
But those who work in the industry said they aren’t blind to the data. Rather, they said that Trump’s shift away from Obama’s policies was the first step toward reversing the trend.
“We in the industry knew when he said he was bringing it back that it wasn’t going to happen overnight, nor was it going to ever look like it once did at its peak,” said Vance, the only female miner at the facility that employs 300 total underground.
In 2008, when candidate Barack Obama ran for president, his mantra of “Hope and Change” was not seen as a threat to the livelihoods of working-class voters. Obama won Pennsylvania by a whopping 10.3 percentage points, with healthy victories in Luzerne and Cambria counties and a close loss here in Greene County.
But in 2015, President Obama unveiled the Clean Power Plan, which aimed to reduce US power sector emissions 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 and switch the country’s electrical grid away from coal-fired power plant dependence. Suddenly, coal miners felt the Democrat Party had abandoned not just their jobs but also their communities, deeply rooted in coal country for generations.
When he announced his Clean Power Plan, Obama snapped at Republicans, saying “they’ll claim this plan is a ‘war on coal’ to scare up votes” yet he only vaguely offered “support for retirement” and abstract, unnamed “better paying jobs” to replace the ones that would be eliminated.
“Those [Obama] rules picked winners and losers in the energy sector and we were on the losing end,” said Vance.
In 2016, many of those same “losers” in the energy sector helped put Trump in the White House.
Drive from the city of Pittsburgh, past its tidy tree-lined suburban neighborhoods, and the landscape soon becomes rolling hills, deep forests, sparkling creeks and bucolic farm scenes where many mines including the Harvey are located.
Coal has two very important purposes: to create electricity and make steel. Currently, thermal coal is used to generate 21.7 percent of the electricity in the US, while metallurgical coal is used to make 70 percent of the world’s steel. The Harvey Mine produces thermal coal, but both types are found in Western Pennsylvania.
With its office building sitting atop a mountain, the casual observer would have no idea coal is being dug at the Harvey Mine. And while climate-change activists blogging in their homes believe they care more about this land and water than miners, the people who work here beg to differ.
“We are the people who hunt, fish, swim, hike and live here,” said Eric Schubel. “We drink the water, we build on the land — more than anyone we want what we do to not hurt the environment.”
Schubel began his career digging underground and has since earned his way to the top. He now serves as CONSOL Energy’s vice president of operations overseeing the entire Pennsylvania Mining Complex that includes the Harvey Mine.
Of Trump’s promise to bring back coal, Schubel said he never expected a miraculous resurgence. “How we looked at it was, he was going to put a stop to overregulation on our industry. That’s how we read it,” he said.
“The Obama administration’s intent was to phase the coal industry out. Trump’s pledge meant he would stop the bleeding,” he added.
The Trump administration eventually replaced Obama’s Clean Power Plan with the Affordable Clean Energy rule (ACE), which aims to lower power sector emissions by 11 million tons by 2030, or between 0.7 percent and 1.5 percent. And while Obama’s plan set strict rules for how plants had to lower their emissions, with measures such as switching to cleaner power generation fuels or capturing carbon dioxide emissions, Trump’s rule insisted on just one method: efficiency. Under his plan, power plants had to draw more energy from the same amount of fuel.
Since then, many plants have implemented new technologies that make them more productive and competitive. But critics say this is a problem in itself — that by making coal burning more profitable, Trump has encouraged the burning of even more of it, leading to greater environmental damage.
Schubel said his industry knows it must cut emissions, and Trump has made it easier to do that. “He was successful over the last four years in rolling back some of the regulations and stopping that harm that was being done to our industry,” he said. “Although in my opinion, the harm was almost irreparable. You can’t turn back the hands of time. The best that you can hope for is that it either slows or stops. That’s why I voted for Mr. Trump the first time, and that’s why I’ll vote for him again.”
A recent study by the Allegheny Conference found Pennsylvania’s coal industry supports about 17,000 jobs either directly or indirectly. In addition, Pennsylvania’s oil and natural gas industry fuels more than 322,000 direct and indirect jobs and contributes $45 billion to the state’s economy, according to a PricewaterhouseCoopers analysis.
Those voters and their families could swing an election.
Trump’s Democratic opponent Joe Biden has his own unique baggage here: As Obama’s vice president, he was part of the administration that killed coal and is as much a turn off for these miners as Hillary Clinton was in terms of trustworthiness and respect. “He has been in the government for almost 50 years and he really hasn’t done anything to help our industry in all of that time,” said Todd McNair, superintendent at the Harvey Mine. “I don’t see how he’d do a good job now.”
And, at Thursday’s presidential debate, Biden didn’t help his cause when he admitted: “I would transition away from the oil industry, yes.” A Reuters/Ipsos poll shows Trump cutting into Biden’s lead in Pennsylvania, with 45 percent saying they’ll back the president for reelection compared to 49 percent who support the former VP.
While many Americans believe coal is dead, miners argue the country depends on the survival of their industry, and that sense of belonging to something meaningful and important will energize them to vote this year.
“I’m a fourth-generation coal miner,” McNair said. “In May of 1942, just months after Pearl Harbor, there was a massive mine explosion [and] my great-grandfather was killed along with 55 other men. My grandfather was underground when it happened. He tried to enlist to serve in World War II but the military wouldn’t take him. Why? Because he was a coal miner. FDR knew that the industrial surge to support World War II was going to come from what they dug in the mines.”
Vance agreed.
“I look at my job as patriotic. What I do powers office buildings and homes, the grocery stores where people get their food, as well as schools and churches and companies that build things that build our country. We help keep the lights on and keep people warm as well,” she said.
“Down there,” she added, pointing to the earth below her, “this isn’t about us. This is about who we serve, about our work being part of something much bigger than ourselves.”
Salena Zito is the author of “The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics” (Crown Forum).