Presentation to Mr. Buck Harless

On September 29, Danielle Bray and Kellie Wood represented our group in a presentation of the Cabell County Coal Project to Mr. Buck Harless. Kellie and Danielle drove to the headquarters of International Industries with Dennis and I and met Buck and Dr. Stan Maynard of the June Harless Center at Gilbert, WV.
Our two ambassadors had prepared an excellent PowerPoint presentation for Mr. Harless then gave a compelling narrative of the project. Mr. Harless was very impressed and would love to see the success of the project shared with other school districts as well as coal organizations around the state.
Please give Danielle and Kellie thumbs up for being such positive advocates of the collaboration among Cabell County Schools, Marshall University College of Science, College of Education and the June Harless Center.

Fall Follow-Up

As Pat and I have indicated in prior email contact, our WV Coal Project fall follow-up is scheduled for Wednesday, September 14 at the Cabell County Central Office from 4 - 6 pm. At that time, we will distribute CD copies of all the unit plans that have been submitted. If you do not see your unit plans posted to the project blog, please notify me so we can add your contributions to the body of knowledge that we have created.

We are very interested in how you will be implementing your coal units in your classroom. You will be asked to briefly (1-2 minutes) describe the major features of your unit plans. Pat plans to review procedures for posting to your blogs and cleaning up your blog entries from the summer trip. He will also go over ways to upload your photos to the shared Flickr site that he created.

Dennis has purchased some additional LabQuest probes for you to enhance the infusion of probeware into your classrooms.

Please be thinking of potential topics for the 2012 project and ways we can improve on the experiential learning initiatives that we have been doing to maximize the impact that our efforts have on the classrooms of Cabell County. As fun and enlightening as these projects have been, we must not lose sight that the goal is to bring richer experiences to the students.

Thurmond & Matewan

In keeping with our study of coal in West Virginia, the Huntington High GigaPan group and I took an outing to Thurmond and Matewan on August 13. Following discussions on the summer trip, we wanted to shoot some high resolution images of the two towns:

Thurmond - http://gigapan.org/gigapans/84262/ (Steve)
Matewan - http://gigapan.org/gigapans/85303/ (Josh)
Matewan - http://gigapan.org/gigapans/84291/ (Pat)
Matewan - http://gigapan.org/gigapans/84246/ (Steve)

Wingfield Pines

I made another visit to a great area that was a former mine site. Wingfield Pines is in the southwestern corner of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. This area was the former site of both underground and surface mines. I was pleased at the beauty and biodiversity of the area. The trails were well utilized by locals for walking, jogging and dog exercise. There are treatment pond where the drainage from the mine areas are being treated. Ponds on the property are magnets for waterfowl and a diverse wildlife community.
If you are every travelling up I-79 toward Bridgeville, PA you owe it to yourself to take a side trip by the Wingfield Pines area to see what can be done with abandoned mine land by a people with vision.

Forks of Cheat Winery

While attending the state technology conference in Morgantown, we had some time before the sessions on Monday. My wife, younger daughter and I decided to visit the Forks of Cheat Winery nearby. This vineyard is built on a former surface mine! The thin mountainous soil of this area is not unlike the volcanic soils of the wine regions in much of Italy.

The vineyard has been at this location since 1981 and grows over 95% of the grapes and other fruits used in the making of their wines at this location. They have several types of grapes, apples, pears, blueberries, blackberries and peaches. Their wines have won many awards and are another great example of a repurposed abandoned surface mine.

The winery owner, Jerry Deal, was very pleasant, giving us a nice personal tour of the vineyeard and facility as well as giving us seeds for some of the many plants in the rock gardens.

Rock Springs Deep Mine

On Friday morning, we left the Best Western Logan Inn early to drive to Rock Springs deep mine near East Lynn, WV. Rock Springs is part of Alpha Natural Resources. We were given a safety course then we were taken about three miles underground to observe a continuous mining process in operation. It was quite impressive to see the coal removed, loaded into transfer cars and dumped onto a belt that delivers the coal to a nearby prep plant. No one in our group had ever spent much time underground so the trip was very informative. We were all impressed with the speed with which the mining machine can fill a 15 ton cart. The roof bolting operation was also a sight to behold. Two holes are drilled, a two part epoxy glue and six foot long roof bolts are inserted within two minutes. The roof bolting machine is manufactured by J. H. Fletcher Mining Equipment of Huntington, WV. The miners report that these are the best machines in the industry.
We concluded our trip with a stop at the prep plant for Rock Springs. Their plant is much like the one we visited earlier at Mountain Laurel but was about twice as large.
The drive back to Huntington on Friday evening was bittersweet. While everyone was happy to be back at their homes and with family, we were sad to see the trip come to an end. Everyone learned about the science, technology, history, economics and culture of coal. In addition, we made many friends not just among our group but with our hosts at each location we visited. Everyone was anxious to infuse their knowledge and experiences with coal into their classrooms.

Singing Bear

Here is the infamous singing bear from our closing dinner at the Logan Country Club in Chapmanville, WV.