Centralia, WA

Like Loretta Lynn, my girlfriend is a coal miner's daughter; her dad works as an engineer for a Canadian coal concern in western Washington. So while I was in Centralia this week, I just had to see the mine in action. I was very surprised by what I saw. I came expecting the stereotypical scene of blackfaced men being lowered in a cage down a dark hole but instead encountered scenes reminiscent of old photographs of the building of the Panama Canal. Rather than evoking George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier, the coal mine looks like the face of the moon. Gigantic hills are cut away by similarly gigantic machinery in an unbelievably mechanized, noisy, dusty, and immense operation. This is strip mining writ large.
The sheer size of the enterprise is shocking in and of itself. Super-sized Tonka trucks with twelve-foot-tall wheels (which costs around $15,000 apiece) raced around gravel roads carrying payloads of as much as 100 tons of rock. These machines, racing at speeds as high as 40 miles per hour, made an obscenely large Ford F-350 look miniscule. But even bigger than the supersized dump trucks are the "Drag Lines," humongous cranes capable of lifting 200 tons of earth at a time, that extract the coal from below and drop it into the beds of the dump trucks. In my life, I have only seen one piece of machinery that compares to a Drag Line: the gigantic Crawler that hauls a Space Shuttle from its hangar to the launching pad. And like NASA's gigantic machine, the Drag Line is similarly slow moving. The Drag Line picks itself up and ambles forward as if it were on crutches at a pace of 1 mile per 6 hours. Rashmi and I were able to get inside one of these machines as it did its work, and there is no other way to describe their power other than "awesome." These machines can pick up 10 normal dumptruck's worth of earth in less than 5 seconds. The motion is so effortless that you almost forget how much earth is being moved (as much as 400,000 lbs. per scoop).
It's a truly miraculous process. Once the coal is scooped up, it is dropped into the bed of one of the giant Tonka trucks, which then races down the road to the steam plant, where it is converted into electricity. More than 5 million tons of coal are extracted from this mine every year, generating more than 1,400 megawatts of electricity (enough to power Seattle for a year). Some of this power makes its way up to Seattle, some to California, creating jobs for roughly 750 people. The steam escaping from the plant creates a long, trailing cloud that seems to climb for miles. Much of the toxic dioxides (sulfur and carbon) are "scrubbed" away by spraying liquid lime on the gases as they escape out of the smoke stack. My guess is that the Calcium in the lime steals the dioxide from the other atoms.
I hope the pictures included in this post and my explanation do some justice to the magnitude of Centralia's coal mine, but it really is something you have to see for yourself (as the Grange sign we saw on the way there seemed to say).