IN THE BLACK

On the other side is an entire valley. Consol owns most of it. Massive earth-moving machines - each one eight times the size of an ordinary pickup truck - crawl across the landscape. In a year, the valley will be more than filled - mounded - with refuse rock drawn from the mines. Consol will plant grass on top.

Inside the mines, using a technique known as longwall mining, seven men can produce in one shift as much coal as a crew of eight to 10 could mine in two weeks in 1984, nearly a quarter-century ago, when Larry Grayson was a mining supervisor in Greene County.

"Technology has been changing considerably," said Grayson, now a professor of mineral engineering at Pennsylvania State University. "The machinery has gotten bigger and more powerful."

In six months, working round the clock, six days a week, the seven-man crews will remove a six-foot-thick layer of coal nearly a quarter-mile wide and more than two miles long.

Mining 400 to 1,000 feet underground, they'll use a shearer to slice back and forth across the 1,100-foot face of the coal as if it were a giant hunk of bologna, with the mine roof collapsing behind them as they go.

Aboveground, the land can settle in a process called subsidence. Sometimes there's no damage. Other times foundations fracture and wells crack, the water draining away. "Water buffalo" - the local term for replacement water tanks wrapped in white insulation - graze in backyards and side lots.

There are constant disputes between mining companies and property owners over subsidence damage.

While many disputes are resolved amicably, the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources has sued Consol, accusing the mining company of causing a crack in the dam that held back Ronald J. Duke Lake in Ryerson Station State Park.

"That's our lake - we can mow it now," said Holly Carpenter, a retired medical assistant from Greene County, as she walked on a little rise above the former lake, now a mix of grass and mud. "The mining companies are just running right over people."

Consol denies causing the damage. "We were more than 1,200 feet away from the area," spokesman Thomas Hoffman said.

Mining companies lift houses on blocks and move them to new locations. That's normal. Or they simply pay to build something new. The mines built a steepled sanctuary for South Wheeling Baptist Church in Greene County a hill or two away from its old location - now a youth building.

Sometimes mining companies buy up whole hamlets to avoid dickering with homeowners over damage.

"People take the money and run," said Cindy Bailey, editor and publisher of GreeneSpeak, a feisty monthly newspaper. Sometimes mining companies rent the houses. Sometimes the houses sit, boarded up, paint peeling.

It all concerns environmental groups such as the Center for Coalfield Justice in neighboring Washington County. "It's impacting the quality of the groundwater," said executive director Raina Rippel, who also pointed to larger issues of pollution and asthma-causing particulates in the air.

Coal companies acknowledge some problems, but say technology has made, and will make, tremendous strides in overcoming them.

In Greene County, even the dead are affected by coal.

Worried that their loved ones' coffins would crack as mining companies culled coal below the grave line, lot owners in a local cemetery sued the cemetery's board, saying it shouldn't have sold the mining rights.

"The way they described it, you thought it would be Poltergeist," said Mary Jane Kent, a school board member and county employee on the cemetery board. Ultimately, the mining company stepped in, buying the cemetery additional land and cushioning the tombstones with hay bales during the mining.

Half a world away from the cemetery, China's factories and power plants are voraciously consuming the world's coal - and the coal companies in Greene County notice.