State and federal officials have cleared the way for deep mine operations in Rhea County, Tenn., to begin extracting coal from Dayton Mountain.
Officials with Dayton, Tenn.-based Iron Properties LLC said on Tuesday that the coal mine at the larger of the two sites, the 127-acre Liberty Mine, could be in operation by 2017 and initially employ a little less than 100 people. That’s one-third of the anticipated 300 jobs the Rhea County operations are expected to eventually create.
The salary for an underground miner is more than $50,000 a year in a county where the median household income in 2012 was $34,842.
But Dave Fortner, partner in Iron Properties with owner Jason McCoy, says the world coal market is down and the company is hoping for improvement down the road as the primary mine is developed and readied for opening.
“If the economy changes for coal, that can be accelerated a little bit. But the earliest we could be mining would be about two years,” Fortner said.