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Tracking the DM&E's big dream: Chapter 2 Wyoming's newest town
The next morning, Doug Diedrich is sitting inside a control room at Black Thunder, the nation's largest surface mine, keeping watch over computer screens
A burly man in his mid-40s with close-cropped hair and a beard, Diedrich is dressed in denim coveralls and, like all mine employees, is wearing requisite steel-toed workboots. When he leaves the control room, he puts on a hard hat and safety glasses. When Diedrich moved from his native South Dakota to Wyoming's Powder River Basin 25 years ago, the city of 1,500 he now calls home didn't exist. "There was nothing more than a dirt road there," he says. You could drive nearly 40 miles in any direction without hitting a town. But strip mines, where machines as big as office buildings gnaw away the earth to expose glistening black veins of coal, were springing up in the basin right and left in the 1970s. Geologists had found billions of tons of coal here, much of it of low sulfur content, meaning it burned more cleanly than much of the coal from the underground mines of West Virginia or Pennsylvania. This attracted the interest of power companies, which still rely on coal to provide nearly 60 percent of the nation's electricity needs. And those companies started moving west to harvest the Powder River Basin's ancient black fuel. Diedrich heard there were good paying jobs to be had for the taking. He was hired on at the largest of the 15 mines in the basin, Black Thunder, 40 miles south of Gillette, the city of 18,000 people where Diedrich and many of the miners lived. A few also lived another 40 miles to the southeast in the side-by-side towns of Midwest and Edgerton. The tiny burgs are the nearest clumps of civilization to the Teapot Dome oil fields, which were the subject of a federal leasing rights scandal that marred President Harding's administration in the 1920s. The rest of the miners lived about 60 miles to the east in the railroad town of Newcastle, on the western fringe of the Black Hills. But the miners and workers in the nearby oil fields needed gasoline, food and other supplies closer to their work. In 1985, just nine years after the first houses were built in what had been the middle of nowhere, the city of Wright was incorporated. Wyoming's newest town, which sprouted up in less time than it takes to complete two presidential terms, now has a convenience store, strip mall, cafe, tavern, town hall, medical clinic, hotel, bank, hardware store, recreational center, elementary school and a junior-senior high school that boasts it is home of the 1999 boys and girls state cross country champs. Diedrich says he has put two children through the town's school system. "It's been good for me," he says about Wright as he keeps an eye on Black Thunder's computer screens and video monitors. "We've got everything we need here. I don't need the Gillette night life anymore." Outside the control room, the sky is clear and the wind is brisk. But the breeze fails to mask the deep, earthy aroma of a fire smouldering in an exposed coal vein. Whisps of smoke rise into the air and hang there like thin clouds. "Occasionally, the coal will just spontaneously combust or start burning from a lightning strike," says Paul Barber, the Black Thunder superintendent who is giving me an early-morning tour. The coal might burn for weeks. Barber, driving a four-wheel drive pickup, shows me all around the plant on roads fashioned from a rust-colored rock called scoria. Trucks and pickups keep to the left, European-style. "The key to a successful mining operation is its roads," Barber says. "We build them all from scratch." Then, after the coal is removed, the miners make the roads disappear. Barber shows me the Wal-Mart-sized machines that chomp away soil to expose the coal before it's blasted from earth with explosives. He shows me the shovels that load the coal in trucks as big as movie theaters. And he takes me inside the processing buildings, where the coal is washed and crushed and loaded into open-topped train cars, two by two. In the parking lot I get into my car and look at the palms of my hands. They're black from the thin layers of coal dust that cover the safety railings in the processing plant. As I drive away, four pronghorn antelope are grazing on either side of a mining road. A coal truck rumbles by. The animals don't even look up. 
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