Miners at Black Mesa are members of United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) Local 1620. Peabody also owns the nearby Kayenta mine, organized by UMWA Local 1924. The two surface mines are on land belonging to the Navajo Nation and Hopi tribe in northeast Arizona, and employ mostly Navajo and Hopi workers.

Coal from the Black Mesa mine is pulverized and mixed with water to form a slurry that travels through a 273-mile pipeline to the Mohave generating station in Laughlin, Nevada. The Kayenta mine transports coal 85 miles on an electric railroad to the Navajo power plant near Page, Arizona.

Southern California Edison, majority owner of the Mohave station, announced that the coal-fired power plant would be shut down December 31. It said a shutdown of three to four years is “probable.”

The plant closure will affect not only the miners but also the 50 workers at the UMWA-organized Black Mesa Pipeline Co. and the 325 power plant workers.

Built in 1971, the Mohave station provides electricity for more than a million homes and business, mostly in Southern California. The company has never installed equipment for removing sulfur dioxide and other pollutants from the plant’s emissions.

In December 1999 a federal court issued a consent decree ordering Southern Edison to sharply reduce polluting emissions at the plant after several environmental groups filed a lawsuit against it. Although the bosses agreed to install pollution control scrubbers and other equipment by the end of 2005, they have taken no action.

The utility says it will cost $1.1 billion to install the air pollution equipment and to enlarge and replace the slurry pipeline.

“Southern California Edison has stalled,” Marie Justice, president of UMWA Local 1620, said in a telephone interview. “This is to the detriment of the Navajo Nation and the Hopi tribe. We are talking about more unemployment, where there is already 50 percent unemployment on the Navajo Nation and 70 percent in the Hopi tribe. This would be devastating to the tribes.”

Peabody uses 3.3 million gallons of water per day, which it draws from an aquifer running below the coal mines. The aquifer is the sole source of drinking water for the Hopi and Navajo communities in the area. Negotiations are under way between Peabody and the Navajo Nation and Hopi tribes for a contract that will allow the coal slurry to continue by using water from a different aquifer with lower-quality water.
 
 
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