Jack Owens and his "Days of Gold" tour with Kellie Pickler will headline this year's Friends of Coal Auto Fair, which is set for July 18 - 20th at the Paul Cline Memorial Sports Complex in Beckley.  The Fair will again feature the car show, carnival rides, food, vendors, live music, special performance and surprise guests with upwards of 50,000 people from all over the country attending.  

Visit the website:  www.friendsofcoalautofair.com<http://www.friendsofcoalautofair.com> for ticket, sponsorship, schedule and general information on this three-day weekend event.

The 2014 Joint Spring Meeting of the WV Coal Association, WV Coal Mining Institute and the CAS/SME will be held on May 7-9 at the Embassy Suites in Charleston, WV. The agenda and registration information can be obtained from the WVCA offices by e-mailing: sdavison@wvcoal.com. The Hall of Fame induction will be on Thursday evening.

WVCA Member Gary Hartsog and Alpha Engineering Services will hold their annual Underground Surveying and Mapping Seminars on Thursday and Friday, June 12^th & 13^th, 2014 at the Beckley-Raleigh County Convention Center in Beckley, WV. 

Topics will include:

• The safety of your surveying crews
• Latest MSHA Plan and other court decisions
• Latest MSHA Electronic Surveying Instrument Litigation Decisions
• Are check surveys needed in an electronic world?
• How to adjust workings to check survey results?
• Ethics
• Minimum Legal Standards

These Seminars are suitable for Continuing Education Credit acceptable to many PE or PS Boards (please contact Gary or Alpha Engineering regarding specific States). The Seminars are also suitable for training and/or continuing education for entry- and staff-level engineers and surveyors, CAD map-makers, underground surveyors, and those with interest in how mine maps are made, updated and presented in the 21st Century.

If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact Gary at 304-255-4131.  Also, he asks you to check their Web Page for more detail and registration information at www.alphaengineer.com.  Please feel free to pass this on to others who mighthave an interest.

The Environmental Protection Agency came under fire Thursday after new emails surfaced that allegedly show government officials worked in secret with tribal leaders and other environmental groups to preemptively oppose the controversial Pebble Mine project in Alaska before a review was even conducted.

The internal memos published by The Washington Times show EPA officials working behind the scenes as early as 2008 to kill the gold and copper mine project -- two years before any scientific study or survey was conducted looking into the environmental impact.

According to the Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) weekly production report, year-to-date U.S. metallurgical exports for February 2014 were up 3.4% as compared to the February last year (5.5mt v. 5.3mt) and steam coal exports were off by 0.7% (3.27mt v. 3.3mt). Coal imports were up by 51% from last year for the same month (0.583mt v. 0.385mt).

West Virginia’s 2014 year-to-date production, through 4/26, was down 0.5% statewide when compared to the same period in 2013 (38mt v. 38.2mt), with northern WV production down 0.3% (13.8mt v. 13.9mt) and southern WV was off 0.5% (24.1mt v. 24.3mt). U.S. year-to-date production through 4/26 was down 0.5% (313.8mt v. 315.2mt). There were 117,562 railroad cars loaded last week in the United States.