While International Longwall News could not reach company president and owner Cliff Forrest by press time, he told local newspaper the Indiana Gazette that the layoffs of about 225 of his 800 staff are temporary.

He told the newspaper many steelmakers are not taking their contracted coal supplies from producers, and the steel industry was running at about 50% capacity.

While he has opted to keep the company’s Indiana County operations running, cuts were seen among all levels of workers at Rosebud’s complexes in Armstrong, Cambria, Clearfield, Elk and Somerset counties.

It is the company’s first slowdown-related furlough since the early 1990s, he told the newspaper.

Forrest established Rosebud in 1979, and began extracting coal from its first deep mine shortly after acquiring the Queenstown coal-cleaning facility in 1982.

Rosebud now operates 14 underground mines in Pennsylvania and Ohio from the Upper Freeport, Lower Freeport, Upper Kittanning, Middle Kittanning and Lower Kittanning seams.