by Ninie Hammon
“Mr. Warren has already called twice asking for you.” She smiled. “But I made excuses for you.”
Stella had been flirting with him for months. She looked up at him now through a forest of heavily mascaraed eyelashes under lids slathered with blue eye shadow. The pale pink lipstick and boyishly short hairstyle completed her Twiggy look. Or would have if she’d been thirty pounds lighter.
“Thanks, Stel. You’re the best.” Always a good idea to keep the help on your side. Information was power, and nobody knew more about the goings-on in the office of the company president than Stella Coltrane did.
He leaned close enough so Stella could get a good whiff of his English Leather cologne. He knew it was her favorite.
“What’s up?” he asked softly.
She leaned toward him. White Shoulders perfume. Not his favorite.
“He was already in his office when I got to work this morning. He’s been huddling with Benson from operations and Clayton from quality control ever since, talking about USBM inspections—because of what happened to that school.”
USBM was the United States Bureau of Mines, the agency that exercised regulatory control over the mining industry. In theory, anyway. In practice, the USBM was more an extension of the industry than a watchdog. What was good for mining was good for the USBM.
“That coal slurry slide, you mean?”
“Yeah, the one in Wales.” She pronounced it with an H, then glanced over her shoulder at the big oak door behind her. “You need to get in there.”
The ornate door had a doorknob in the center, a big one the size of a baseball, made of cut glass. A simple thing, really, but profound in Carter’s mind. It had come to symbolize stature. One day, he would have an office with a glass knob in the center of the door.
Carter patted her hand and watched color flood her cheeks.
“Thanks,” he said, and then he strode toward the door. It opened for him before he had a chance to reach for the knob, and a tall, balding man with a neatly trimmed mustache stepped aside and gestured him into the room.
The office itself wasn’t as grand as the door leading into it implied. But its lack of grandeur spoke volumes. Hardwood floors were polished to such a shine that you could see your reflection. Dark wood paneling. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed with books—fancy leather-bound volumes worn from use, such an eclectic mix Carter couldn’t get his mind around the kind of man who had read them all, as it was rumored the man occupying the office had. From the complete works of Shakespeare to How to Train a Coon Dog. One shelf had a stack of newspapers, from Charleston, sure, but the New York Times, too, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. Today’s issues. Already read and digested.
The most telling thing about the man who ruled Northfield Coal was the most incongruous. Hanging on the wall behind his desk was a huge portrait in an ornate gilded frame with a small shaded light protruding from the top that illuminated the picture below. The subject was Nelson Warren’s son, Robert Nelson Warren Jr. Bobby. He’d raised the boy alone after his wife died and doted on the child. About five years old in the portrait—probably nine or ten now—the boy bore the angelic smile and vacant expression common to retarded children.
The room was gauzy with smoke—cigar, pipe and cigarette. It hung in the air like morning haze on a creek.
A conference table, of some dark wood so black it might have been ebony, dominated the office. Twelve chairs gathered around the table. Warren sat at the end, with his back to the entrance door. Two seats on the far side of the table were occupied by suit-and-tie-clad men; one chair on the near side was pulled out. It was where Haskell Benson had been seated before he got up to open the door for Carter. Benson gestured to the seat beside him, and Carter crossed to it, picking up on the ongoing conversation that continued uninterrupted.
“…in this morning’s paper.”
That was the quality control man, Clayton. He sat next to Warren on the far side of the table, the concentrated frown on his face as permanent as a tattoo. He gestured with the lit cigarette in his left hand, lifted the newspaper in his right hand and began to read.
“Concerned that something similar to the disaster that may have killed as many as one hundred twenty-five school children in the village of Gaynor, Wales, on Monday might occur here, officials at the U.S. Bureau of Mines announced today that the bureau would prepare a list of similar waste banks in the Appalachian coal-mining region and begin to inspect the ones whose failure could result in loss of life or extensive property damage.”
Clayton tossed the Charleston Gazette down on the table in front of him as Carter slid into his seat beside Benson.
“You start talking about a hundred and twenty-five dead kids and folks get up in arms quick. All it takes is one person to go on some kind of crusade and—”
“A thing like this makes mine inspectors nervous,” Benson put in. “None of them wants to be the one everybody’s pointing a finger at if…there’s a problem.”
“We have six large slurry piles,” Clayton said. “There are three trailer houses below the one—”
“It’s not the gob piles that are the problem,” Benson interrupted, his voice firm. “What happened in Wales—that was a freak accident. From what I understand, they piled the slurry on top of a spring and then it rained a lot. Somehow the stuff liquefied and slid downhill. None of our slurry piles is on top of a spring. Besides, I believe we’ve got much bigger fish to fry than those piles.”
“And what fish would those be?” Clayton sounded miffed. He was a self-important little man and didn’t like it when somebody stole his thunder.
“The impoundments,” Benson said.
Carter sat up a straighter in his chair.
Strip-mine canker sores first infected the West Virginia landscape before World War I, and the blight spread like smallpox in the decades that followed as the coal companies determined it was more efficient and required far less manpower to rip the tops off mountains to get at the coal than to pay miners to dig it out. The environmental ramifications were enormous, of course, not the least of which were impoundment lakes. Strip mining created huge amounts of waste material, including the acidic sludge produced when the coal was washed. It was common practice for coal companies to bulldoze the coal waste, called slurry or “gob,” across a hollow to form a dam and then impound the black sludge water behind it.
Since technically the structures were just gob piles and the coal companies hadn’t designed engineering plans for the construction of a “dam,” federal regulations about the structure and safety of dams did not apply to them.
Apparently, Benson feared that might change.
“I think we have to consider the possibility—the likelihood—that the feds will go after the impoundments and not just the slurry piles,” Benson said.
Nelson Warren sat deep in the leather-cushioned comfort of his swivel desk chair. The droopy eyes below his shock of pure-white hair belied his riveted attention. A trim man, tall and boney, he was as physically fit as any athlete. People said he actually ran up and down the road in front of his house—five miles every day—ten on Saturdays! He held an unlit cigar in his right hand, brought it to his mouth and bit down on it now and then as he listened, but made no attempt to light it. Carter had never actually seen the man smoke, but he also had never seen him without an unlit cigar.
“I concede the point about the impoundments,” Clayton began, “but how—”
“I want to know about the locals,” Warren cut Clayton off. His voice was deceptively soft and almost sounded kind if you didn’t know better. “Any of them got a tit in the wringer about this business?”
Warren didn’t turn his way, but Carter knew the question was directed at him. All such questions were directed at him, given that he was the only one of Warren’s flunkies who knew jack about the people who actually worked in Northfield Coal’s mines and lived in the mountains and hollows that surrounded them.
For generations, coal companies had built ho
using for their miners, called coal camps, along streams in steep-walled valleys, creating strings of small communities clustered up and down just about every creek in West Virginia. The Pocahontas Coal Field alone supported one hundred and twenty camps, with five hundred to eight hundred families in each one, up and down the hollows wherever the steep mountainsides gave way and the land around the creek spread out enough so you could build a house.
Even though most of the miners were now unemployed, untold thousands of people still lived in those coal-camp houses—many of which now lay beneath a strip mine and downstream from an impounded lake. Among those people was Carter’s family. The home where he grew up was perched on a mountainside in Sadler Hollow, less than a mile down the valley from Northfield Coal’s Impoundment Dam No. 1.
“Not that I’m aware of, sir,” Carter said. He almost added that he’d bet his paycheck they didn’t even know there’d been a disaster in Wales.
“What are they saying about it?”
Again, Carter caught himself before he said more than he could prove. Bluff Nelson Warren and you were asking for trouble. Craftier men than Carter had tried and had lived to regret it.
“I haven’t been home since it happened. I haven’t talked to them, but Sadler Hollow’d certainly have something to say about it if anybody does.”
“Then go home,” Warren said. “Talk to the mountaineers up in the hollows.” Unlike most of his executive staff, Warren was a native. Not of the mountains, of course, but of Charleston. Still, he knew West Virginians were mountaineers, not hillbillies. “I want to know what they’re saying to each other.” He turned back to Clayton. “And what they might say to a federal inspector if one happened to ask.”
Warren must really be spooked!
Mountaineers wouldn’t say crap to a mine inspector if he was covered in it. Warren knew that. They wouldn’t spit on one if he was on fire. Wasn’t a soul Carter knew in Sadler Hollow who’d give the time of day to any outsider, let alone a “fed-ral.”
“I’ll go home tomorrow afternoon and—”
“Today,” Warren said. “Take a three-day weekend. I want a full report on my desk first thing Monday morning.”
“Yes, sir,” Carter said. He was careful to keep the joy out of his voice and the happiness off his face. “I’ll leave right after lunch.”
“You’ll leave right now.”
* * *
The president of Northfield Coal Company was still seated at the big conference table in his Charleston office hours later when Carter Addington pulled up in front of the house where he’d grown up in Sadler Hollow. In fact, it was at that very moment that Nelson Warren made up his mind to blow a great big hole in the dam on the mountainside above Carter’s head.
It had come to Warren the way his best plans did—all of a piece, complete. He was not one to second-guess himself, but even if he had been, this decision fit so perfectly into the complex puzzle of his plan to become one of the most powerful men in West Virginia that even a man given to vacillation would have seen the genius in it. It was daring. Even dangerous. But big rewards required big risks.
The idea had formed in his head as he studied the maps, geologic surveys and reports on the long black table in front of him. Everyone who had attended the morning’s meeting in his office had left hours before, but Warren was again seated in his big leather chair, looking over his chief engineer’s assessment report of all the dams. It was a document Warren had commissioned after the discussion at the meeting, and he was relieved by what it revealed. The document reported that all the dams built by Northfield Coal were sound.
Well, all but one.
The short, bespectacled engineer stood behind the chair next to Warren, first on one foot then the other, his hands drumming unconsciously on the chair back.
Warren shot him an irritated glance. Peter Grigsby looked confused, then down at his hands and quickly shoved them into his pockets. Finally, Warren scooted the papers away from him, as a man might shove away his plate when he has finally stuffed himself.
“And all this means…?” he asked Grigsby. Warren knew full well what it meant, but he wanted Grigsby to say it, to explain it. That’s what he paid the high-priced engineer for, and he wanted his money’s worth. He demanded his money’s worth from all his employees—men who were “picks of the litter” in their fields. Well, except for Addington, and Warren was stuck with him. The boy’s uncle had called in a favor to land him the job, and no one understood the reciprocity inherent in business associations better than Nelson Warren. He would see that Jim Addington repaid that favor with a generous contribution to his political war chest when he rolled out his plans next month.
In all honesty, the young man did bring more than Fritos and bean dip to the party. Addington understood the locals, and God knows there wasn’t anybody else in Warren’s organization who could lay claim to that particular area of expertise. And you had to keep track of the locals, know what they were thinking as soon as they thought it. Before they thought it. Warren needed the half-wit mountaineers to mine his coal, of course, but they were like those birds that lived in the mouths of crocodiles, picking out the scraps, keeping them clean. A crocodile tolerated the bird’s existence because it performed a useful function. Any time it got out of line, however, pecked a little too deep, the crocodile could chop down and swallow the bird in one bite.
“All your figures and numbers…give me the bottom line.”
“Well, Mr. Warren, of all the company’s impoundment dams, No. 2 above Sadler Hollow is the only one in critical condition. I’ve run all the equations, studied the—”
“Cut to the chase, Grigsby.”
“It won’t hold, sir. Impoundment Dam No. 2 is a disaster waiting to happen. There’s too much water, too much pressure. The structure wasn’t designed for it. When No. 2 starts to leak—and it will start to leak, no doubt about it—the water’s got nowhere to go but downhill into No. 1 at the top of Sadler Hollow. That dam’s solid, but it’s nowhere near tall enough. You pour a whole pot of coffee into one cup, it’ll fill up and then overflow. Water leaking out of No. 2 is going to spill out over the top of the lower dam and flood the stream below…I believe it’s called, Naked Turtle Creek.”
Dam No. 1 had been built first. Coarse coal-mining refuse, rocks, soil, anything and everything lopped off the top of Chicken Gizzard Mountain had been bulldozed into the valley where it narrowed at the top of the hollow above Sadlerton, creating a dam forty feet tall that stretched two hundred fifty feet between Chicken Gizzard Mountain on the north and Naked Turtle Mountain on the south. As the strip mine moved east, it expanded, and the valley was wider in the spot selected for Impoundment Dam No. 2. Stretching from ridge to ridge, the slurry pile dam built there was eighty-five feet tall, six hundred fifty feet across and was constructed of more than a million tons of coal waste. The dam held back 142 million gallons of black wastewater and sludge, five times the size of the lake behind dam No. 1.
“When you figure the pounds per square inch of all the water behind it, the failure of No. 2 is mathematically inevitable,” Grigsby said.
“How long?”
“Sir?”
“How long before it goes?”
“If the drains I recommended for both dams had been completed…” he began self-righteously, caught the look on Warren’s face and let it go. “How long is hard to say, sir. It depends on—”
“Estimate.”
“I don’t know. So many variables—”
“A guess, Grigsby. A ballpark guess.”
“Well…it’s been a wet month for August, sir. If the weather clears, it could hold six, maybe eight more months. But if the rain hangs on upstream, we’re talking weeks. In a few weeks, it’s going to pop a leak somewhere. Then another and another. And once a leak starts, there’s so much water pressure you, can’t plug—”
“Is there any way to fix it?”
Grigsby looked relieved, less pained. “Well, yes sir, there is. First, we�
�d have to drain most of the water out of the lake, which will take—”
“How much?”
“How much wha—?”
“How much will it cost to fix it?” Warren ground out the words between clinched teeth.
“Well, I…” He caught Warren’s deadly look. “Hundreds of thousands…half a million dollars. At least that. Maybe…probably more. You’d have to—”
“And if we don’t fix it, how much will that cost?”
Grigsby was genuinely confused. “I don’t think I understand the question, sir.”
“If we choose not to fix it, the dam starts leaking and the water overflows the lower dam, how much will that cost?” He spit out the words carefully, like he was addressing a three-year-old. “The flooding downstream, destruction of property—buildings, bridges, roads…whatever.”
Grigsby looked horrified. “I’m afraid I don’t have any idea, sir.” He paused, then pushed forward timidly. “But…it’s not only property. All those people who live below the dams, where will they—?”
“That’s enough,” Warren voice was back to its normal timber, like he was discussing the Giants chances in the world series or the square root of pi. “Leave these papers here with me.”
“Yes, sir,” Grigsby sighed the words out, anxious to get out of the room. Warren waved his hand in a dismissing gesture, and the man practically bolted for the door. Without even turning around, Warren timed it perfectly. As Grigsby reached for the doorknob, Warren called out.
“One other thing, Grigsby.” He still didn’t turn but merely pictured in his mind the man motionless at the door.
“Sir?”
“If you tell anybody—and I mean anybody about our conversation today…” He allowed the rest to hang there in the air between them. Let Grigsby come up with his own horrible end to the threat.
“Oh, no sir. Absolutely not, sir. Nobody. I won’t breathe a word to anybody.”
“See that you don’t.” Menace caustic enough to melt a hole in boot leather dripped from his voice.
Warren sat quiet for a time, eyes closed, after Grigsby pulled the door softly shut behind him. A casual observer might well have assumed he’d dozed off. But Nelson Warren’s mind was whirring, spinning, calculating. Yes, it would work. Blow a hole in the big dam, No. 2, let the water behind it pour over the top of dam No. 1. Perfect.
