A Coal Miner and A Poet:
Our Very Own Don Vass
Loss Control, Virginia Office

Don Vass at his 15th Anniversary

1. How long have you been involved with the mining industry? I’m starting my 35th year. I started doing general inside labor with Pittston Coal Group. They've sold out and aren't in business anymore. I started out with doing shoveling and cleanup on dead work crews (the name given to crews that pretty much do anything that doesn’t produce coal—the people that lay the track, etc.). From there, I moved up to being a machine operator and finally a foreman. All my working years in a mine were underground. But the last 22 years have been spent in loss control. Those years I spent working in a mine have really helped. Now, when I go in and do loss control, I've done what the miners are doing. I understand how they work. I know what to look for. When you've been around mining as long as I have, you've pretty much seen it all and you can tell good from bad.

I’ve been with AMIC going on my 16th year. When I started out, we did loss control and the auditing. That was a real experience. We had the crash course in the Dominick school of auditing. Dom, John (Ameno) and I went to a mine site in Tuscaloosa. Dom got the accounting books out and he showed us how to go through them. Then, we had lunch and drove to Montgomery for our second audit. When we got there, Dom asked us if we understood how to do an audit and then quickly did the audit. Then, the next week, we were turned loose to do audits on our own. We stopped doing auditing in-house about 6 or 7 years ago. The audits are now outsourced.

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