A mid-October 2025 weekend bike ride in Morgantown West Virginia with our daughter, a medical resident at WVU.
The forest flashes orange as leaves flutter earthward falling from high branches. Through the trees a billowing white plume boils upward into the crisp blue autumn sky.
A deep rumbling, as if from an angry bear, betrays the raw power generated by the “big, beautiful, black coal” piled high along a bend of the Monongahela River a quarter mile south of the Pennsylvania border.
Around a bend in the trail I caught a clear glimpse of the source: the Ft. Martin coal-fired power plant, churning out a thousand megawatts of energy since 1967.
Coal powered the Industrial Revolution, but the byproduct of burning coal – the invisible carbon dioxide gas mixed within that white smoke in front of me - has led to an environmental crisis over the recent decades. An unintentional conspiracy of generations of coal miners like my mom’s father and coal barge captains like my dad’s great-grandfather. Black lung disease from coal dust killed my grandfather. Lightning from a storm while piloting a transport barge killed my ancestor. Owners of those iron foundries and railroads that profited so massively from coal would never know the names of those men.
Dirty coal as a source of energy is fading, gradually replaced by solar, wind, biofuel, and cleaner burning natural gas. Ten years from now, the facility in front of me will close its boilers to coal forever, replacing the coal that feeds them with natural gas. The imminent end of the coal era rumbled in front of me like thunder from a receding storm.
That resonance – personal, political, technological, and natural – moved me deeply and unexpectedly in the shadow of the rumbling coal power plant towering over the riverbank.
