The clamor of second graders breaking away from lessons to form lunch lines has gotten quieter in a rural New Mexico community, where families losing coal jobs have been forced to pack up and leave…
It’s rural and remote. Some students ride a school bus for three hours round trip, arriving home well after sunset. Internet service is spotty or nonexistent, and many homes don’t have electricity or indoor plumbing. The poverty rate within the district is four times the national level. The median annual household income is about $20,000, and the unemployment rate hovers around 70%.
Joe Ramone, a 69-year-old pipe welder who worked at San Juan, lives in a Navajo community not far from the Four Corners plant. When the wind blows just right, he said his community is hit with ash and coal dust.“I don’t want to see anybody unemployed and I am in no way in favor of these companies being shut down. But there’s room for improvement,” he said, suggesting more investments could have been made.
Fresh off a night shift as an electrician at the mine for the neighboring Four Corners Power Plant, Christine Aspaas, a Central Consolidated School Board member, said even if those “green” jobs existed now, they would be temporary. And to make up for lost property tax revenue, she said, some families will have to pay up to seven times more.“That’s what others don’t understand,” she said. “There’s culture, there’s traditions, and so it’s not easy.
In the final days, the plant’s spinning turbine sent vibrations through layers of concrete and passing work boots. Heat emanated from the boilers below. “There’s lots of us who have worked 20-plus years and we all know each other and it’s our family,” said plant director Rodney Warner, who will oversee the decommissioning. “It’s who we are.”
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