Coal Washing In Washington, Oregon, And Alaska

Coal washing assumed an important role in the mining industry of the Pacific Northwest long before washing practice became firmly established in the Appalachian field. A Scaife washer was operated in the state of Washington in 1887; and by 1927, the fist year for which complete statistics were compiled, nearly a third of the state's coal production was washed, in comparison with only about 5 pct for the country as a whole. Mechanical preparation was adopted in Alaska in 1922 in a plant constructed by the United States Navy at Chickaloon to provide bunker coal for naval forces operating in northern waters. Many of the coal beds mined in Washington and Alaska contained more impurities than those mined elsewhere, and this circumstance contributed to the early interest in mechanical cleaning. A much more important factor, however, was the inclination of the coal beds. With steeply pitching beds, hand sorting by the miner at the face is impossible; consequently, all material must be loaded and dealt with on the surface, just as is now proving the case with mechanical mining of flat beds. Thus "full-seam" mining afforded the same stimulus to the early development of coal washing in the Northwest that - it is providing under mechanization in the rest of the country today.