Merchants Coal, and the related Orenda Coal, were subsidiaries of Hillman Coal and Coke Company of Pittsburgh, the same firm that built the neighboring town of Jerome, Pennsylvania.
On 20 February 1959, the infamous "Black Friday", Żurakowski, along with the approximately 15,000 employees of Avro and Orenda plants learned that the Diefenbaker government had precipitously cancelled the Avro Arrow program and its Orenda Iroquois engine.
By 1958, the Iroquois had completed more than 5,000 hours of ground running, and many thousands of hours had also been spent testing the engines' principal components, at the Orenda testing facilities at Nobel, near Parry Sound, Ontario.