Crimes Against Nature

by Kennedy, Jr. Robert F.

  It was a decision with catastrophic repercussions. One in four Americans live near a Superfund site, and without sufficient funding, the program is essentially a paper tiger.

  68 The Superfund trust historically received much of its money from a tax on 43 particularly hazardous chemicals and a 9.6-cent-per-barrel tax on crude oil.

  69 This was a small concession by the oil industry, whose lobbyists had won an exclusion of petroleum products from liability under Superfund’s cost-recovery provision. While Superfund can be used to respond to public health emergencies and clean up orphaned sites — where the polluter had gone bankrupt or wasn’t known — it is despised by industry not so much because of the small tax but because it constitutes the government’s principal lever against recalcitrant polluters. The EPA can use the fund to clean up the site and then bill the responsible polluter triple the cost of cleanup.

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  Without the Superfund tax, however, the EPA can’t do the initial cleanup and has therefore lost the leverage that it needs to force action. The tax expired in 1995 and congressional Republicans refused to reinstate it.

  71 In his 2003 budget announcement, Bush followed suit, becoming the first president to abandon the tax, and in October 2003 the fund went bankrupt. Big polluters will save hundreds of billions, and the cost of cleanup will be shifted to the public.

  The conspicuous disregard for American citizens that led to the Superfund fiasco is the prevailing pattern of the administration’s energy agenda. Of the task force report, O’Neill told me sadly, “The product didn’t turn out to be what it ought to have been.” When I asked him why Cheney, an intelligent man, could not accept that sound environmental policy is good for our economy, he said, “I don’t know what motivates Dick Cheney.” When I pressed him as to why the vice president would do things that are so obviously antagonistic to the public good, reminding him that he had known Cheney since they were young, O’Neill said, “Beats the hell out of me.”

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  Maybe not, though a look at the nation’s largest energy provider should yield a clue.

  King Coal

  In May 2002 I flew over the hills of West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, and saw a sight that would sicken most Americans. The mining industry is dismantling the ancient mountains and pristine streams of Appalachia through a form of strip-mining known as mountaintop removal. Mining companies blow off hundreds of feet from the tops of mountains to reach the thin seams of coal beneath. Colossal machines dump the mountaintops into adjacent valleys, destroying forests and communities and burying free-flowing mountain streams in the process. I saw the historic landscapes that gave America some of its most potent cultural legends — the forests where Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett roamed, the hills that bred the soldiers who followed Andrew Jackson, the frontier hollows that cradled our democracy, the wilderness wellspring of our values, our virtues, our national character — all being leveled.

  According to the EPA, the waste from mountaintop removal has permanently interred 1,200 miles of Appalachian streams, polluted the region’s groundwater and rivers, and rendered 400,000 acres of some of the world’s most biologically rich temperate forests into flat, barren wastelands, “limited in topographic relief, devoid of flowing water.”

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  At the current rate, another million acres will disappear within decades. That’s a total of 2,200 square miles — an area the size of Delaware.

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  The EPA’s findings only confirm what has long been obvious to the people of Appalachia. “I look at what they’re doing and I can see the moonscape that they’ve created. And it’s total devastation, total devastation. Nothing will ever grow back,” says Judy Bonds, a 52-year-old grandmother from Whitesville, West Virginia. Bonds runs Coal River Mountain Watch, a community group that opposes mountaintop removal. In 2001, her courageous battle against the coal barons won her a Goldman Environmental Award — the Nobel Prize of community activism. “I tell my grandson when he sees these logging trucks go by with all the beautiful hardwood trees on it, ‘Son, take a good look at that because neither you, nor seven generations of your children, will ever, ever see trees like that again in West Virginia.’ ”

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  We flew underneath a Dragline in our little Cessna 172, dwarfed by the half-billion-dollar backhoe with a scoop big enough to hold 26 Ford Escorts. Below us I could see a half dozen oversized dump trucks. These absurdly colossal machines — along with the 2,500 tons of explosives detonated each day in West Virginia alone — have nearly dispensed with the need for human labor.

  4 And that, indeed, is the point.

  There was no environmental issue about which my father cared more passionately than strip-mining. He visited Appalachia in 1968 and told me how the coal companies were using this technique to put miners out of work. In the process, they were also destroying our historic landscapes and permanently impoverishing the region. Strip-mining made its debut in the 1940s in the western states, to get at the coal seams that were just a few feet below the surface and inaccessible through traditional tunnel mining. To extract the wealth all you needed was a bulldozer. In Appalachia, the mining companies adopted the process to get at deep coal seams. It was a labor-saving practice that allowed the mining companies to decimate unions that had championed worker health and safety for generations. Nothing was left behind, my father said — not even the hope that Appalachia’s people could someday resurrect their economies or communities. Since my father’s trip, the machines and cuts have grown bigger and bigger while the workforce has shrunk. Back then, there were 120,000 coal miners in West Virginia. Today, thanks in part to mountaintop removal, there are fewer than 15,000.

  5 To get the same amount of coal as they did in 1960, these companies now use 12 percent of the workers.

  Poisoned streams, horrific noise, and choking dust make life near these mines unbearable. “We’ve watched our communities become ghost towns,” says Judy Bonds, whose family has lived in Marfork Hollow for nine generations. Bonds was radicalized in 1997 when she saw her 11-year-old grandson standing in a creek of dead fish poisoned by mining drainage. “We only have one grocery store where we used to have four. And you can walk through the little town and see that most of the buildings are boarded up because the businesses failed and the young people have left the area.”

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  It’s the same story wherever King Coal sets up shop. From Appalachia to the western states of Wyoming and Utah, the strip miners have permanently destroyed some of the most beautiful country on the planet, leaving behind a legacy of misery and poverty. King Coal sends more greenhouse gases into the air and more mercury and acid rain onto our earth and produces more lung-searing ozone and particulates than any other industry. As the nation’s largest energy provider — more than half of our electricity is coal-fired — big coal is the number one polluter.

  It’s also a key Bush donor. Coal-mining companies and the coal-burning utilities donated $20 million to President Bush and other Republicans in 2000 and have since sweetened the pot with another $21 million.

  7 Their generosity has not gone unnoticed. No industry had more highly placed sympathizers in the Bush camp than King Coal. Lobbyists and executives of coal companies had unparalleled access to Cheney’s task force while it was creating its new energy bill. During the two years that the bill was stalled in Congress, coal sympathizers in the White House employed a variety of tactics to push through many of the bill’s provisions. At the West Virginia Coal Association’s annual conference in May 2002, President William D. Raney reminded the 150 industry moguls in attendance, “You did everything you could to elect a Republican president.” Now, he said, “you are already seeing in his actions the payback.”

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  The experience of Peabody Energy, the world’s largest coal company, is typical. Executives from Peabody and its Black Beauty subsidiary served on the Bush transition’s energy advisory team, and Peabody officials met repeatedly with task force member
s.

  9 When the task force released its final report, it recommended accelerating coal production and spending $2 billion in federal subsidies for research to make coal-fired electricity cleaner.

  10 Five days later, Peabody issued a public stock offering, raising $60 million more than analysts had predicted. Company vice president Fred Palmer credited the Bush administration. “I am sure it affected the valuation of the stock,” he told the Los Angeles Times.

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  Peabody also wanted to build the largest coal-fired power plant in 30 years upwind of Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky, a designated UNESCO World Heritage site and International Biosphere Reserve. With arm twisting from Deputy Interior Secretary Steve Griles and $450,000 in GOP contributions in a three-month period, Peabody got what it wanted.

  12 Political appointees with no technical expertise overturned a study warning of air pollution from the plant, and park scientists who expressed fears that several endangered species would be harmed due to mercury and acid rain deposits were ignored. The plant is expected to come on-line in 2007.

  The coal barons were apprised of every move by the energy task force, while the rest of the nation was kept in the dark. I recently obtained the transcript of a briefing by Quin Shea, a top lobbyist for the Edison Electric Institute, to a closed-door conference of coal- and utility-industry big shots in April 2001, a month before Vice President Cheney disclosed the administration’s energy plan.

  13 (The head of EEI, it bears remembering, is Bush’s pal and Pioneer donor Tom Kuhn.) Shea had received regular briefings on energy task force business from several White House insiders: task force executive director Andrew Lundquist, chief economic adviser Larry Lindsey, and then–OMB head Mitch Daniels. The transcript of Shea’s comments reveal that the Bush administration’s energy task force proposals followed a line-by-line game plan devised by his coal and utility contributors.

  At the conference, Shea explained that Edison was “working with the vice president” on behalf of the coal industry. Shea refers to the Republican Party as “our party” and the administration as “we.” He says: “We desperately want to burn more coal…. Coal is our friend.” He cautioned, however, that several Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act requirements — in his words, “coal killers” — would soon impose costly cleanup measures on fossil fuel companies unless something was done to scuttle or delay them. Luckily, Shea explained, the administration was coming to the industry’s rescue. But he warns his cronies against complacency, telling them that in the future they should not assume that they’ll have a president like “Bush or Attila the Hun” who would presumably be as willing to plunder.

  Shea boasted that in addition to getting “possible tax relief,” they had killed the Kyoto accord: “Kyoto is dead. Kyoto is absolutely dead…. For those of you…who want to continue to beat that dead horse, let me tell you right now, there will be no equine resurrection here.” He noted the Bush administration’s desire to abolish New Source Review standards and predicted a reversal of President Bush’s campaign promise to regulate CO2. “We’re taking steps right now to reverse every piece of paper that EPA has put together where they could call CO2 a pollutant under the Clean Air Act,” Shea told the assembled executives. “That’s going to be worked on in the next few months.”

  In a telling exchange suggesting that some utility executives do indeed have reptilian hearts, Shea told the group how he explained the Bush rollbacks on ozone and particulates to his own worried grandmother. The EPA’s estimates, he noted, predict those pollutants will put 15,000 to 100,000 Americans each year at risk for premature death, mostly children and the elderly.

  “Folks,” he said, “those are just numbers. They’re scary numbers. They scare people. They’ve scared my grandmother. She is ninety-seven and said, ‘What is going on?’ I said, ‘Gram, this is wrong. Plus, it’s premature mortality. If you die a day early, you’re a statistic.’ She said, ‘Oh, okay.’ She didn’t really understand, but she sort of got it that I was taking care of it and it wasn’t a problem.”

  Judy Bonds and her friend Freda Williams both live in the shadow of a slurry dam at a mine owned by the Marfork Coal Company, a subsidiary of Massey Energy. Coal dust washed from the pulverized rubble, along with the toxic wastes from mountaintop removal, are stored as a thick, oily sludge in billion-gallon reservoirs behind sometimes shoddily constructed earthen dams.

  The Marfork Dam is 925 feet from toe to crest and is capable of holding 9 billion gallons of slurry perched over a deep mine.

  14 A breakthrough could bury communities and schools for miles down the hollow.

  15 Neither residents nor fire and police departments in nearby Beckley, Madison, or Charleston have ever seen an evacuation plan. “The coal company will tell you, yes, they have a plan, it’s on file at their office, and it’s not their responsibility to put the word out to the public — to notify the public,” says Williams, who has been fighting the dam since 1996 as a member of Coal River Mountain Watch. “If a breakthrough occurs, it will be like an explosion, and there’s just not going to be time for an emergency evacuation anyhow. It would take at least an hour for help to get into the area from Charleston.”

  Everyone in the community lives in constant fear of a breakthrough. Judy Bonds says her grandson “used to lie awake at night when it would rain and plot escape routes in case the sludge dam would bust and drown us, much like Buffalo Creek.”

  Their fears are not so far-fetched. In 1972, the Buffalo Creek Dam southwest of Charleston collapsed, burying 120 souls and several communities. Just four years ago, on October 11, 2000, a slurry pit in Inez, Kentucky, owned by Martin County Coal, another subsidiary of Massey Energy, burst into subsurface mine shafts, flooding downstream communities. The 300-million-gallon spill was the largest in American history and, according to the EPA, the greatest environmental catastrophe in the history of the eastern United States. Thick black lava-like toxic sludge containing 60 poisonous chemicals choked and sterilized 100 miles of rivers and creeks and poisoned the drinking water in 17 communities. Unlike some other slurry disasters, no one died this time, but hundreds of residents were sickened by contact with contaminated water.

  Jack Spadaro was a member of a team of geodesic engineers selected by the Mine Safety and Health Administration, a division of the U.S. Department of Labor, to investigate the spill. Spadaro, the superintendent of the Mine Health and Safety Academy where MSHA trains its engineers, is the nation’s leading expert on slurry spills, having spent 30 years studying slurry dam failures and how to prevent them.

  From the outset, the coal industry kept a wary eye on the Massey investigation, since it would raise the obvious question of whether slurry impoundments should ever be permitted over abandoned mines. Of the 650 existing impoundments, at least half are in this tenuous situation. Conditions under the surface haven’t been investigated for any of them. “I’m worried that the potential for more breakthroughs is great,” Spadaro told me. “That question certainly would have been addressed in our report.

  “We had a team of engineers who were very effective. We were geotechnical engineers determined to find the truth,” Spadaro continued. “We simply wanted to get to the heart of the matter — find out what happened, and why — and to prevent it from happening again.”

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  During Spadaro’s investigation, however, there was a regime change at the White House. And it became clear that George W. Bush and his coal cronies were just as concerned about the Inez disaster — for very different reasons. Spadaro soon found that all the hard work by his team “was thwarted at the top of the agency by Bush appointees who obstructed professionals trying to do their jobs.”

  Those Bush appointees all had coal-industry pedigrees. The new Bush team at the Department of Labor included Secretary Elaine Chao, a former fellow of the Heritage Foundation,

  17 who is the wife of Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate’s largest recipient of coal-industry largesse. As
the investigation moved forward, Massey Energy contributed $100,000 to a Republican Senate campaign committee controlled by McConnell. Chao appointed Dave Laurisky, a former executive with Energy West Mining, a Utah coal company, to be director of MSHA. Laurisky’s deputy assistant secretary was John Caylor, an alumnus of Amax Mining; his other deputy assistant, John Cornell, had worked for both Amax and Peabody Coal. Together, this group wasted no time in putting the brakes on the investigation.

  Tony Oppegard, Spadaro’s boss, whom the team regarded as a strong leader with unquestioned integrity, was fired on the day of Bush’s inauguration. “He was getting down to the root of what was going on,” Spadaro says. “He was simply fired. The people at Massey knew before he did.” Spadaro recalls how Oppegard’s replacement, Tim Thompson, laid things out at the first meeting he attended: “We are going to terminate this investigation and make sure that no fingers are pointing at persons within this agency.”

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  The original team had intended to charge Massey with knowing and willful violations of the law. The company had ignored safety recommendations arising from two previous slurry spills; these recommendations came from both the MSHA and its own engineering firm. Massey’s engineer had testified following a 1994 accident that if the recommendations were ignored, a new spill was “virtually inevitable.” But Thompson reduced eight citations for criminal negligence to two, choosing the weakest — and one of those was later thrown out by the administrative judge. “Massey paid a pathetic $5,600 fine for doing billions of dollars in damage,” said Spadaro.