BILLINGS, Montana – In a collapsing coal industry, thousands of lost jobs could be replaced through removal of mine waste that is polluting tribal and other rural lands, according to a new report called “Coal Mine Cleanup Works” released October 29.

For starters, the Navajo Nation could benefit by 1,301 jobs and the Hopi Nation by 416, according to the 35-page report by Kate French, a public administration specialist and regional organizer of Western Organization of Resource Councils (WORC).

“The collapse of the coal industry is devastating small communities across the Western United States, but reclaiming tens of thousands of acres of mined lands could quickly create between 6,000 and 12,000 full-time equivalent jobs over a two- to three-year period,” according to updated findings in the report released by WRC, which is headquartered in Billings.

For comparison, surface mines in the West employed 8,540 workers in 2019.

“These findings offer a rare bright light of opportunity for the coal communities facing massive lay-offs and lost revenue as the coal industry continues to decline,” WORC said.

“Reclamation is one of the few immediately available job opportunities for local workers after a mine shuts down, and the report finds that these jobs are ideally suited for current or former miners.”

About 350 miners lost their jobs at Kayenta Mine last year when Navajo Generating Station shut down. “This report shows up to 200 of them could be back working full time on efforts to reclaim that land over the next few years,” said Nicole Horseherder, director of the Navajo community advocacy organization Tó Nizhóní Ání.

“Navajo and Hopi workers who have been out of jobs for more than a year could be working to restore our lands and waters, but they’re not because since the mine closed last August, Peabody Energy is trying to push off its reclamation obligations for two to four more years,” she said.

“Peabody is just leaving big open pits sitting on our land, and people are still out of jobs at a time when we need it most.”

For nearly 50 years, Kayenta Mine served as the sole supplier of fuel for the largest coal-burning power plant in the West, providing around 8 million tons of coal annually to ship to Navajo Generating Station, or NGS, located 90 miles to the west, according to the report.

In early 2017, as coal was becoming an increasingly uneconomic source of electricity, the owners of NGS decided to close the plant. Kayenta loaded its last trainload of coal to NGS in August 2019 and closed its doors for good several months ahead of NGS’s retirement, it says.

In the year since Kayenta ceased operations, its owner, Peabody Western Coal Co., has done “almost no reclamation work at the mine,” the report finds. The active mining pits have been left idle, with no significant backfilling or grading taking place.

As of September 2020, some 350 miners who worked at the mine were still out of jobs, with Peabody unable to come to an agreement with the United Mine Workers of America to put them back to work on reclamation activities.

In what the author terms “even more egregiously,” Peabody submitted an application to the federal Office of Surface Mining, Reclamation and Enforcement (OSM) to delay 70 percent of major reclamation for another two to four years, which would keep the workers idle even longer.

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Contact Talli Nauman at talli.nauman@gmail.com

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