Company finds life after coal - Palmer Coking Coal Co. marks 70 years of work

By Mike Archbold, King County Journal reporter

BLACK DIAMOND -- Palmer Coking Coal Co. started underground chasing coal seams 70 years ago next week and today is still mining the land values of southeast King County.  Coal is no longer king. They closed the state's last underground mine in 1975 and quit surface mining in the mid 1980s.  Times and markets have changed but so has the private, family-owned company.  The Black Diamond-based company continues to provide sand, gravel, topsoil and specialty landscaping products, such as red cinders, lava rock and streambed gravels.  Since Safeco Field opened in 1999, Palmer Coking Coal has supplied the red cinders and lava sand mixture that makes up the outfield warning track.

All of its products are sold from the company's headquarters off State Route 169 in Black Diamond. Back from the highway is a sand and gravel pit, old coal slag piles and equipment to grind, mix and move their products. The company employs 19 people.  The company office there is a modest one. Black and white photographs of the company's old mining operations as well as other mines from the area cover the walls in the public sales area.

Bill Kombol, 50, is one of 37 owners and the current company manager. He has headed the company since the early 1980s.  Kombol's unpretentious office has two large wood desks pushed together. A large cabinet with thin drawers holds maps of coal mine deposits and every inch of the company's current 4,800 acres of land holdings, some of which are leased out.

He is particularly proud of the company's red cinder products. Their story harkens back more than a century to Black Diamond's mining heyday, he said.  At the turn of the century, miners took only the highest-quality coal and discarded everything else they dug up. Coal seams, unfortunately, are not pure and contain veins of lower-quality coal, shale, sandstone and siltstone, Kombol said.  The poorer-quality ore was called slag and dumped into huge piles next to the mines. Often those piles would catch fire and burn for years. The fires couldn't be put out and the smoldering temperatures could reach 2,000 degrees. The intense heat fused the slag materials together.  “Iron pyrites found in the coal seam caused the burned slag to turn red,” Kombol explained. “This giant oven has been compared to the brick-making process, so our red cinders often are referred to as nature's brick.”

Once discarded, rocks of it are used for special landscaping. Crushed into various sizes, it graces running tracks, driveways, flower beds, pathways and landscaping throughout Puget Sound.  The supply of slag is running out and some day will be exhausted, Kombol said. Today, coal miners use every bit of coal they mine and large slag piles are banned by mining laws.

The company was founded in 1933 by four Morris brothers whose coal-mining roots in the area go back to the 1880s.  The Morris brothers first mined in Pierce County in 1914 and then in 1921 started the Morris Brothers Coal Mining Co., which operated mines in Durham and Occidental near present day Cumberland.  Palmer continued to mine through the 1930s and into the 1950s. In 1953, the company bought the southeast King County mineral holdings of the Pacific Coast Coal Co. That included 6,000 acres of land.  In the late 1950s, a company bulldozer operator named Enoch Rogers discovered the Rogers coal seam, which eventually became three separate portals. It was located just north of Kent-Kangley Road in Ravensdale near 262nd Avenue Southeast. The coal seam was unique because the 16-foot-wide seam was nearly vertical. Miners dug down 750 feet chasing it.

In 17 years Kombol said, 474,083 tons of clean coal was extracted. That clean coal ended up heating places such as the University of Washington, the Rainier School in Buckley, the Shelton correctional facility and the Monroe reformatory.  But other forms of energy competed with coal. The mine closed because of a declining market and growing production expenses.  In July 1975, the company dynamited the portals to Rogers No. 3 mine, the state's last underground coal mine. Palmer Coking Coal continued surface coal mining on the edge of Black Diamond but even that ended in the mid-1980s.  In 1997, Kombol said the company was recognized by the state Department of Natural Resources with its first ever Special Recognition Award for reclamation work done at the company's last surface coal mine, the McKay-Section 12, in Black Diamond.   Today, Palmer leases land to Pacific Coast Coal Co., which operates the John Henry Mine next to Black Diamond. There is little mining there today due to the declining demand for coal.  Since the 1970s, Kombol said the company also has sold land for conservation in the Green River Gorge, the Newcastle area and the Cougar Mountain Regional Wildlife Park. Recently it sold land to the county for Lake Sawyer Regional Park.

Kombol said it is possible the company may one day go back underground.  If the price of world energy sources increase, he said there may yet be another chapter to write in the history of underground coal mining in the state of Washington.  Kombol isn't holding his breath for that to happen anytime soon. With the Northwest enjoying some of the cheapest oil, hydroelectric power and natural gas in the nation, it makes little economic sense to go after the billions of tons of coal in Washington.  But then again, he pointed out that extraction of coal bed methane wasn't being considered 25 years ago. Today there are companies drilling in coal beds for methane in east King County.  “You are talking romance,” Kombol said of a return to underground mining. “People like the romance of it. But if you go back and talk to coal miners ... about the romanticism attached to it, they would say the romanticism isn't there.”

Palmer Coking Coal in Black Diamond is celebrating its 70th anniversary. It has evolved with changing times and is the supplier of red cinders for the Safeco Field warming track.

King County Journal, August 09. 2003 12:00AM