Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

by Chris Hedges

  “Children would come in off the school ground covered with coal dust,” Miller says. “The school cooks had to rewash the pots and cooking utensils every morning to get off the coal dust. They put everything in plastic bags the night before to keep them clean. The school was finally closed, mainly because of the coal dust.”

  The citizens were granted a hearing in October 2000 with the Office of Surface Mining. The board of five ordered Elk Run to halt the emissions of coal dust, but nothing changed. The two women, distraught at the inaction, went to the state legislature to try to get a bill passed that would limit the amount of coal dust that could be released in the air. The Division of Air Quality killed the bill.49

  The DEP suggested that the women collect dust samples and take videos to illustrate the problem. The two women collected the data and videos for two years.

  “We had a team of about eight that took turns going,” Canterberry says. “Two and a half years. Every eight days. Faithful. Faithful. Come sleet, snow, rain, hail, or sunshine we did the samples faithfully, filmed, dated, and stored them in Ziploc. The DEP never asked for them.”

  The women got a lawyer in Charleston in 2000 to take their case. They convinced one hundred and sixty four residents, three-quarters of the town, to join a lawsuit against Massey Energy. They asked for compensation, punitive damages, and a cessation of the coal dust emissions. The pressure—and the election of a new governor, who appointed Matt Crum, a more responsive head of the DEP—saw Massey install a dust-monitoring system in the town. The two women and other townspeople took daily readings of the system. When their data did not match the data collected by Massey Energy, the company removed the system.50

  Mary Miller and Pauline Canterberry, Sylvester, West Virginia.

  On October 29, 2001, townspeople filmed a heavy cloud of coal dust as it left the preparation plant at Elk Run and drifted in a dark mass over the town. Dust on the homemade film is seen drifting downward, coating the elementary school playground, cars, houses, lawns, and the road in black grit. When the film was sent to the DEP, Massey was ordered to close the plant or cover it with a dome. The company spent $1.5 million to construct the dome.51 The dome has been ruptured twice. Its presence has reduced but not ended the daily emissions. It was clear the plant was going to stay. The townspeople bringing the lawsuit had appraisals made of their homes. Most homes had decreased in value by eighty to ninety percent due to the coal dust and mountaintop removal.52

  When the townspeople’s lawsuit finally got into court, much of their evidence was tossed out. They were told they could not involve Massey Energy in the lawsuit because Massey was not responsible for Elk Run Mining, even though Elk Run was solely owned by Massey. The court would not let the townspeople submit as evidence thirty-two violations the company had received for contaminating Sylvester’s drinking water. Judge Lee Schlaegel dismissed the violations as nothing more than “parking tickets.” But the court did rule that the plant was releasing too much coal dust and required the company to pay comprehensive damages along with the trial expenses, court costs, and attorney fees. The company was told it could not run more than seven thousand coal trucks through the town a month. It had been running thirty-five thousand. The company was ordered to purchase a vacuum sweeper and clean the town streets once a week. It was told to install dust monitors to measure the amount of released coal dust.53

  The ruling made little improvement. The coal trucks still spewed dust and chewed up the highways, the plant still released clouds of dust, the water was still polluted, and the air was still filled with carcinogens. Four years after the suit, the townspeople got the company to establish a warning system to alert residents if the massive sludge impoundment broke.

  Massey, the third-largest coal company in the country, has, over the past decade, leveled an area the size of Delaware—1.4 million acres—and left behind a poisoned and dead landscape. Coal companies like Massey rack up appalling safety and environmental violations. Yet for such companies, it is less expensive to pay the fines than comply with the strictures of the Clean Water Act or mine safety standards. The EPA office in West Virginia rarely enforces the fines, and when Massey was fined for violations over a six-year period by the federal EPA office, the company paid $20 million,54 less than one percent of what was required under the law. The Sylvester lawsuit brought the town $100,000. In the next six months, Massey amassed another four thousand violations.

  “Our politicians are so indebted to the coal industry, for favors, through campaigns, by the time they run for office, that they can’t make decisions solely on their own,” says Canterberry. “Massey had given a donation of $4 million to the politicians in West Virginia.”

  Elk Run’s coal dust containment dome, Sylvester, West Virginia.

  “Not only coal mining, but timberin’, and gas—there’s gas in these mountains—and yet we’re the poorest state in the nation. Something’s wrong. Something’s drastically wrong,” Canterberry says. “But you know why they want to keep the people down and under their thumb. What, the first thing they do when you go to the doctor is that they want to throw dope atchya.

  “When people moved into this town, it was as near to Camelot as you’d want it to be,” Canterberry continues. “You knew that everybody else would look after your children the same as you did, and you looked after their children. All the children that grew up here will tell you the same thing. But they all had to leave because there was no work or anything here for them. Mary’s children ran away from here, my children went away from here ’cause I told them, ‘There’s nothing here for you.’ ”

  “There’s a lotta sickness around here,” Miller says. “We’ve had a lot of people that’s got kidney problems . . .”

  “Bronchitis . . .” Canterberry adds.

  “Dialysis . . . There’s a lot of Alzheimer’s . . .” Miller says.

  “And cancer is rampant here,” Canterberry says. “What was it, two weeks ago, four died in one week with cancer? You look at our prayer list for church, it lists cancer, cancer, cancer, cancer, cancer. Kidney problems, dialysis. We never used to have that here. We’d swim in that river, as clean as any well water you’d ever want to drink. But it sure isn’t now.”

  From 2000 to 2010, Don Blankenship was chairman and CEO of Massey Energy. He is the personification of the coal companies’ indifference to human life. Blankenship refused to recognize unions or hire unionized miners. His retirement was triggered in part by the death of twenty-nine miners on April 5, 2010, in an explosion at Massey’s Upper Big Branch Mine, which had accumulated four hundred and fifty-eight safety violations that year.55 It was the worst mine disaster in forty years.56

  Blankenship grew up in poverty—he had lived for a time in a trailer—in Stopover, Kentucky, where his divorced mother ran a convenience store and gas station for forty years. He trained as an accountant at a local college and clawed his way to the top of Massey.

  When Massey coal slurry contaminated the wells near Blankenship’s palatial hilltop home, the company built a water line to his house from a neighboring town, bypassing all of Blankenship’s neighbors. A photograph of Blankenship vacationing on the French Riviera with West Virginia Supreme Court Justice Spike Maynard was taken shortly before November 2007, when Maynard voted with the majority in a three-to-two decision to reverse a $76 million judgment against Massey Energy. The photograph was published in 2008 in the New York Times.57

  Coal trucks on the mountain roads of southwest West Virginia.

  In 2004, Blankenship helped rid the state of a West Virginia Supreme Court Justice, Warren McGraw, whom he considered too friendly to workers. Blankenship contributed $3 million to the And For The Sake of the Kids PAC, which highlighted a case in which McGraw had been part of a three-to-two majority that had freed a mentally disturbed child molester, who then went to work in a school. McGraw was defeated and replaced by Blankenship crony Brent Benjamin.58

  “It’s like a jungle, where a jungle is survival of the fittest,�
�� Blankenship told a documentary filmmaker in the 1980s. “Unions, communities, people—everybody’s gonna have to learn to accept that in the United States you have a capitalist society, and that capitalism, from a business standpoint, is survival of the most productive.”59

  The destruction of the water supply has left households dependent on bottled water. Joe and I drive up a narrow mud road in Prenter, where the water was poisoned by mine waste a few years ago. We park next to a small, dilapidated house with a tattered Marine Corps flag flapping from the front fence. We knock on the door. Patty Sebok, who was raised on the other side of the road, answers it. We enter her living room, leaving our muddy boots by the door. She says that when she was a child, the water in her parents’ home was oddly colored and had a strange odor. She finally moved out of the holler when the water became so fetid she could not drink it. The state piped in water for some of the residents in the lower end of the holler after several, including Sebok, made repeated trips to the state capital carrying glass jars filled with the murky water from their wells.

  “It was what they call iron water,” she says, “turns everything red, spots it yellah, that rusty look. But, everybody always said, ‘Well, you know, that’s just the geographical nature of living around here.’ ”

  She and the other residents in the impoverished hollow in Prenter were unaware that thousands of gallons of contaminated coal slurry were being pumped by the mining companies into abandoned mine shafts around them and leeching into the groundwater.

  “Everybody had health problems,” she says, “but you know how it is. You’re busy with your life. You’re going through your work, taking care of your family, doing whatever. Unless it’s real close family, people just weren’t talking about all these things and connectin’ the dots.”

  Neighbors around her were dying in alarming numbers from brain tumors and cancer. Kidney stones were so frequent that she, and many residents in the holler, had to have their gallbladders removed.

  “The water smells like a cross between rotten eggs and sewer,” Sebok says. “So I’ve been told that’s sulfur. It dries your hair. It dries your skin. It stains even clear glass yellah. And if it does that to hard surfaces, what does it do to the inside of the body?”

  “A lot of people didn’t want to believe their water was bad because they are coal mining families,” she says. “They just didn’t want to hear it, because, I mean, it’s a hard choice when you gotta make a living, or you gotta say your water is bad from the company you’re working for. They’re scared.”

  Her son, Ryan, twenty-three, has just returned from training for the Marine Corps Reserve. He passes through the room with a quick nod. By the time he was five, Ryan’s teeth were so decayed from the water she took him to a dentist to have them capped.

  “People said to me, ‘Well, I wouldn’t waste all that money on that, I’d just get ’em pulled,’ and I said, ‘What’s he supposed to do until he’s seven or eight?’” she says. “ ‘He won’t have any teeth, you know?’ ”

  “It seems like there is a military tradition here,” says Joe. “A lot of people go into the military. Is there a sense of patriotism here?”

  “Oh, sure,” she says.

  “For what?” Joe asks. “The United States?”

  “For our freedoms,” she says. “But yet, we have to fight for water here, and for medical care. You have to fight everybody here. And it’s either fight, get out, shut up, lie down, die. What are you gonna do?”

  “What do you think the coal companies want to do?” I ask.

  “Smash it, grab it, run with the profit, just as fast as they can,” she says.

  We find Ken Hechler, ninety-four years old, slightly bent with age and dependent on a walker, in his cluttered basement apartment across from the state capitol in Charleston. Hechler was one of the few honest politicians in the state. He refused money from the coal companies as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for eighteen years and as the Secretary of State for West Virginia for sixteen years. And when he got out of politics, he did not sell his services to corporations or lobbying firms. He remains a fixture at rallies to oppose mountaintop removal, as well as those to defend the rights of miners. He now attends in his wheelchair. He is a throwback to an older time, when the liberal wing of the Democratic Party stood with working men and women and defied big business.

  Hechler has a mischievous sense of humor, quick wit, and an amazing recall for dates, facts, and information, along with a deep disgust for the coal companies and corporations that are destroying his state and the nation.

  He was drafted into the Army in 1942, passing the medical exam by memorizing the eye chart to mask his poor eyesight. At the conclusion of the war, with the rank of major, he was assigned to interview many of the captured senior Nazi commanders, several of whom would be executed or commit suicide following the Nuremberg Trials, including Hermann Göring.

  He returned from Europe and worked as President Harry Truman’s speech writer and then ran for Congress in West Virginia, serving in the House from 1959 to 1977. Hechler was elected the Secretary of State for West Virginia from 1985 to 2001.

  “Coal industry has deep pockets, and they buy off members of the legislature, members of Congress, even judicial officials, by contributing big bucks to their campaigns,” he says. “Every governor that we’ve had, ever since a renegade man named [William C.] Marland, who first introduced a severance tax on coal, which caused the legislature to reject it. They virtually ran him out of office. And he turned to alcohol. He left the state, and somebody discovered he was driving a taxicab in Chicago. He was the only farsighted governor that was doing things for the people and for the state that made sense. Every other governor we’ve had, Democrat or Republican, failed. Two of them went to prison.”

  By the time Hechler arrived in West Virginia, the glory days of the United Mine Workers Union of America under John Lewis had ended. By the 1960s the union was headed by Tony Boyle, who Hechler calls “corrupt and murderous.” Boyle saw the union as a route to personal enrichment.

  “Boyle fought me every step of the way on my efforts to bring an end to the excessive amount of coal dust in the mines,” Hechler says:

  Then when a candidate ran against him named Jock Yablonski, he sent out a contract and had Yablonski, his wife, and his daughter murdered, around Christmas-New Year 1969. He served a life term and died in prison, as well as the three triggermen. The first inkling I got of Boyle’s ineptitude was, you know, we had a major disaster on the 20th of November 1968, which killed seventy-eight miners at Farmington. Whenever there was a mine disaster Lewis used to go down into the mines and emerge with a blackened face and denounce the industrial murder that had occurred. He was a great hero among the miners for that reason: he always stood up for them. Boyle came to Farmington the day after the disaster in a long black limousine, in a new suit with a rose in his buttonhole. And, in front of the widows of that disaster, he said, “This happens to be one of the best companies so far as cooperation with the union is concerned.” Immediately his reputation went downhill. His people contacted me after the disaster and said, “We want you to introduce two bills in Congress, one that has to do with black lung, and a second that has to do with safety. And after you introduce the black lung bill, we will quietly bury it and just support the safety bill.” And I said, “You’re absolutely wrong. Now’s the time to get both of these together in one measure,” which I eventually succeeded in doing.

  Heckler’s hearing aid begins to beep because the battery is low. He gets up and rummages through a cluttered desk drawer to find a replacement.

  “Why didn’t they want to support the black lung bill?” I ask.

  “They thought it couldn’t pass,” he says:

  And I didn’t think it could pass at first until I began to raise hell. You know, I started out in Congress as an activist but found that wasn’t enough, so I became an agitator and I found that wasn’t enough so I became a hell-raiser, and that was
effective. That was probably the proudest thing I ever did in my life, to get that bill through and pretty much the way I wrote it, even though I was not a member of the committee. I used effective tactics. For example, the widows of the Farmington disaster asked me to meet with them right after the disaster, and I thought it was primarily to console them on the loss of their husbands. But one of them stuck her finger in my chest and said, “You’re a Congressman, why don’t you do something about this?” And I said, “Will you help me?” I said, “I’ll pay your way to Washington to lobby the members of the House and Senate from non-coal-mining states, and tell them how important it is that these stringent health and safety measures be enacted, because the efforts to protect the safety and health of coal miners have always failed in the past.” The coal industry had so much lobbying power it prevented stringent measures. Congress had always been affected by the demands of the coal industry. The coal industry has never invested a cent into improving safety, but they have invested millions into increasing production. Doctors, many of whom were partially on the payroll of coal companies, were saying that not only is coal dust not harmful but in some cases it might even prevent pneumonia or tuberculosis. It took great courageous heroes like Dr. Donald Rasmussen and Dr. I. E. Buff and Dr. Hawey Wells, three rebels who challenged the medical industry and pointed out that coal dust is what caused the incurable disease which has killed and disabled so many miners.

  When President Richard Nixon contemplated vetoing the bill, Hechler called a press conference. He announced that if the bill was not signed into law there would be a nationwide coal strike.

  “Hell,” he says, laughing, “I didn’t know if there would actually be a coal strike, but it scared Nixon into signing it.”