Jeremiah Baltzer enjoyed his work as a union carpenter at the Homer City Power Plant, about an hour east of Pittsburgh. The job wasn’t always easy, he said.
“You’re basically on call 24 hours a day,” he said. “They may not tell you that, but that’s what you have to do to keep going.”
As the years went by, Baltzer saw the once-mighty coal industry begin to decline. Cheap natural gas competed with the coal industry, and new regulations were introduced to combat air and water pollution.
The Homer City plant filed for bankruptcy in 2017. In recent years, the plant has operated at only about 20 percent capacity and the number of employees has declined.
“When there was an outage, 1,500 people were on duty every day, and then, boom, you suddenly don’t see anyone all day,” he said.
The plant was permanently closed last year. The owners cited cheaper fuels such as natural gas, as well as warmer winters and stricter regulations as reasons for the closure.
There has been a lot of talk in Washington, DC, about how to help the communities devastated by the closure of hundreds of coal-fired power plants across the country. The case of Homer City is an example of what this kind of disruption can do to a community.
“We never thought it would completely shut down,” said Connie Chimino, a hairdresser who has owned a salon in Homer City for 29 years. “I had friends who worked there – I had clients who worked there. A lot of my friends have now retired there.”
Now, when Chimino drives into town, she always passes the plant’s iconic, unused chimneys.
“You walk by and see that the stacks aren’t working at all. And that’s sad,” she said.
These chimneys mean jobs, but also pollution.
Coal is still the largest source of climate-damaging greenhouse gases in the country’s energy sector, even though it only supplies 16 percent of the country’s electricity.
Now the area around Homer City – once home to dozens of coal mines – must consider a new future. That’s exactly what Homer City District Manager Rob Nymick is doing.
“My thought process is, ‘Okay, what do we need to do to move forward?'” Nymick said. “Because it’s gone.”
He sees a possible answer in a path that leads through the city center.
Nymick parks his work truck in a spot near a stream where the water color is unusual.
“Just look at the orange,” said Nymick. “There is nothing alive in this stream.”
The orange is wastewater from mines that were shut down decades ago, before modern regulations were in place. The acidity of the water kills aquatic life.
Nymick wants to clean up the creek. He imagines that one day tourists will flock to the creek for fishing, hunting and biking.
“Wouldn’t this be a wonderful place one day if this creek was clean?” he said. “We could host the biggest fishing tournament for kids and we have all the space in the world for that.”
But in the meantime, Nymick and others would hardly wait for the work to be replaced by something else.
The Biden administration is working to connect local authorities with federal incentives for former coal communities, including tax incentives for clean energy.
Former coal-fired power plant worker Jeremiah Baltzer and his wife were already thinking about moving before the power plant closed.
“Because I saw the writing on the wall long before some of the people there did,” Baltzer said.
But Baltzer and his family did not move. Since the closure, he has worked other union carpentry jobs, and he and his family now attend the local church and have developed a stronger sense of community.
“We’ve found a good core group of people who are really caring,” Baltzer said. “So we’ll probably stay here.”
There is a lot happening in the world. Marketplace is there for you.
You rely on Marketplace to break down world events and tell you how they affect you in a fact-based and accessible way. To continue to do this, we depend on your financial support.
Your donation today supports the independent journalism you depend on. For as little as $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you.
