At age 20, Jeremiah Baltzer started working at the Homer City Generating Station in the early 2000s.
He liked his job as a union carpenter building scaffolding inside the cavernous plant.
“You (got) to climb around and be a little monkey and be physical and learn a lot…about the plant and just work hard,” he said.
Baltzer put in many hours maintaining the facility. It burned millions of tons of coal a year to make electricity for two million homes in Pennsylvania and surrounding states. It was the largest coal plant in the state until it closed last July.
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“You’re on call pretty much 24 hours a day,” Baltzer said. “You may not be told that, but that’s kind of how you have to do it in order to stick around.”
Jeremiah Baltzer, of Homer City, Pa., worked at the generating station for over 20 years. Photo: Reid Frazier / The Allegheny Front
These days, Baltzer has a lot more time to spend with his wife and four children. The family regularly takes walks around their neighborhood in Homer City and visits the local park.
The power plant sits a few miles outside of the town, which is an hour east of Pittsburgh. The plant, which was built in 1969, is surrounded by cornfields, forests, and old strip mines. It boasts the tallest smokestack in the U.S.
Baltzer was able to support his family with money he made there. But a few years ago, he began thinking his job wasn’t going to last forever.
“I figured way before a lot of people thought so,” he said. “The political winds, the way they were blowing, kind of gave you some forethought into the future.”
A long time coming but still a shock
Baltzer’s intuition proved correct.
The rapid ascent of cheap natural gas from fracking spelled trouble for the coal industry. On top of that, regulations on coal’s toxic pollution were imposing new costs on plant owners.
Homer City started running less often; its parent company filed for bankruptcy in 2017, and cut down on maintenance. The workforce dwindled to just 129, a far cry from its highest point.
“It went from like, you’re seeing 1500 people a day on a job during an outage, and then all of a sudden, boom, you don’t see anybody all day,” he said.
Homer City Generating Station can be seen behind a waste coal cleanup site at Lucerne Mine in Center Township, Pa. Photo: Reid Frazier / The Allegheny Front
Finally, the plant closed for good last year. Though the news was somewhat expected, it still was a gut punch for many in the area.
“We never really thought it would completely shut down,” said Connie Chimino,who owns a hair salon along Homer City’s Main Street.
She’s had relatives and friends who worked at the plant over the years and worries about how many former workers are faring.
“It provided a lot of good stable jobs in this area. Many, many high-paying jobs. And people prospered when it was here,” Chimino said.
Whenever she drives into town, Chimino notices there’s nothing coming out of its smokestacks.
“You go by and you don’t see the stacks working at all,” she said. “And it’s sad.”
Coal’s human toll
Those stacks meant jobs, but they also meant pollution.
The plant was at one time one of the largest polluters in the country. Coal is still the biggest source of climate-warming greenhouse gasses from the power sector, even though it only provides 16 percent of the nation’s electricity.
But people here have more immediate concerns, like paying for a new furnace at the local elementary school.
Ralph Cecere is superintendent of the 800-student Homer-Center school district, which sits within sight of the power plant.
“We had eight days this past school year where we did not have heat in the elementary building,” Cecere said.
Cecere had to scramble for solutions when an old heating pipe failed beneath the district parking lot in February. His options were limited because of the power plant’s closure.
The plant brings in $750,000 in property taxes a year, which is 4 percent of the district’s $20 million budget.
Homer City Generating Station’s smokestacks peer over the roofs of homes in the borough of Homer City. Photo: Reid Frazier / The Allegheny Front
Cecere knows that revenue could quickly dry up if the plant’s owners ask the county to reassess the property at a lower value, now that it is not running.
“We think about it every day. We are planning cautiously,” Cecere said. “Everything we do is with the reminder that things could change significantly for us.”
Those concerns led the district to take a cheaper, piecemeal approach to fixing the heating and cooling system, instead of a more efficient, more expensive, long-term fix.
“The closure of that plant has made that very difficult to plan,” Cecere said.
A precipitous drop for coal in the U.S., Pennsylvania
What’s happening in Homer City is part of a nationwide trend.
Coal-fired generation around the country declined by 68 percentbetween 2010 and 2020. All of the remaining coal plants in Pennsylvania are slated to be shut down or converted to natural gas by 2028.
This would bring an end to the region’s long history of coal.
In the past 30 years, about 20 coal mines have closed in the county.
Rob Nymick, borough manager of Homer City, said that for years, county officials fought to keep the coal industry afloat. But at this point, it looks like the battle over coal’s long-term future has been lost, he said.
“My thought process is: Okay, what do we need to do to move forward? Because it’s gone,” he said.
He sees one potential answer running through the middle of Homer City — Yellow Creek. Nymick takes his work truck to a spot near the stream and points out the burnt orange coating on the bed.
Homer City borough manager Rob Nymick next to Two Lick Creek, polluted by abandoned mines upstream. Photo: Reid Frazier / The Allegheny Front
“There isn’t a thing alive in that stream,” he said.
The orange is coal mine drainage seeping out of long-closed mines upstream. It snuffs out aquatic life.
Nymick wants to clean it up. He envisions tourists coming here one day to fish, hunt, and paddle this stream and others nearby. A state grant is helping assess the cleanup of Yellow Creek. Nymick envisions a bike trail winding through the area, and a kids’ fishing tournament in the middle of town.
“Wouldn’t this be a wonderful place someday if this stream is clean?” he said.
A future beyond coal
Former plant worker Jeremiah Baltzer is actually looking forward to life after the coal plant. He and his wife had thought about leaving the area but said now he’s looking forward to life after the closure.
Baltzer is working other union carpentry jobs, and his family has a new sense of community at their local church.
“We found a good core group of people that are really caring. So we’re probably going to stick around. So I guess I’ll–we’ll do something else.”
There is a chance the power plant will be redeveloped into another industrial project. The site still has a connection to the valuable mid-Atlantic and New York electrical grids.
Also, the Biden Administration is working with regional officials to access federal incentives, some of them brought about through Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, to help transition coal communities.
County officials say more than 50 developers have made inquiries on the site, but nothing official has been announced.
