HOMER CITY, Pa. — Eighteen months ago, Shawn Steffee stood in a field in Indiana County and watched the smokestacks of Pennsylvania’s largest coal-fired power plant fold into a cloud of dust, then told anyone who would listen that the wreckage was not a funeral.

“This isn’t the end, this is the beginning,” said the business agent for Boilermakers Local 154.

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This Labor Day, that prediction is unfolding.

Homer City Generation announced Friday morning that more than 1,800 direct-hire tradespeople and skilled contractors are currently working at the site of the largest natural gas-powered plant currently under construction in the United States.

Those workers are from nine local union organizations. Roughly 95% of them are local. More than 135 are apprentices and learning the trade at the elbow of journeymen. By New Year’s Day, the company expects 2,000.

Watch how fast that curve moves. When I first walked this property last spring, the count was 1,000, and the steel had not gone vertical. By May of this year, when Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA) toured, that number had hit nearly 1,300.

Over the life of the project, the company projects more than 10,000 construction jobs and about 1,000 permanent positions.

They are boilermakers, carpenters, electricians, ironworkers, laborers, millwrights, operators, pipefitters, and teamsters — all the same trades that their fathers worked when the coal plant ran three shifts here. And now all are able to stay close to their families, close to the woods........

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