The Tragedy of Coal

Exactly one year ago, I was in Naoma cruising up and down the Coal River Valley working on a story for Richmond’s Style Weekly on Richmond-based Massey Energy Co.’s mountaintop removal practices in which entire mountains in the Central Appalachians are lopped off like a bottle cap to get a rich coal seams. The millions of tons of waste are stuffed in streams and massive sludge ponds filled with billions of gallons of toxic waste sit here and there contained by often fragile earthen dams.

Now, Massey is the locus of great grief. The miners were working in an especially gassy part of Upper Big Branch Mine went the explosion set off. Some were torn apart by the blast; others suffocated. Hope is fading for another four who may or may not have made it to underground safe rooms equipped to keep them alive for about 96 hours.

The Massey disaster points out, once again, some very ugly things about the firm and coal mining in general. Coal supplies more than half of our electricity in this country, but it is dirty and dangerous. It is a major contributor to global warming and although safety records are much better than they used to be, mining is still an exceptionally hazardous way to make a living.

Massey used to be synonymous with a fairly philanthropic family in Richmond that gave to cancer centers and education. True, they were staunchly anti-union but they didn’t have Massey’s Bad Boy image of today. The family sold its interests off first to St. Joe’s Minerals and then to Los Angeles engineering giant Fluor which spun off Massey in the late 1990s.

The new face of Massey is that of a dark-haired, jowled man named Don Blankenship who is a latter day tycoon. He has stirred controversy by giving millions to elections of legislators and judges, especially in West Virginia where some of Massey’s most profitable operations are. A stickler for the bottom line, he is known to check faxed production reports from his mines every two hours. He’s now drawing fame because in a court case, evidence was produced that he wrote a memo that in his mines, production comes first.

Blankenship is an in-your-face type. He’s called Al Gore a “greeniac” and once came close to punching out an ABC reporter who confronted him at a Massey facility in Kentucky. Massey was responsible for one of the biggest environmental fines ever when a sludge lake dam burst. Even at the Upper Big Branch Mine, regulators cited it for 50 “unwarrantable” violations last year even though Massey’s Website brags that it’s 2009 safety record was better than the industry average.

A few personal notes:

• I spent part of my childhood in north central West Virginia where coal was a big part of life. Back in the early to mid 1960s, strip laws were a joke in the Mountain State and it was common to wake up one morning to find the property next to you blown apart and hauled away. I used to play on the remains which had poisonous yellow lakes from rain leaching from coal. We used to collect the bones of the dead animals.
• On occasion, some of the fathers of my grade school classmates died in deep mines.
• When I was away at high school in the DC area on Nov. 20, 1968, a Consol mine blew up in Mannington, in Marion County, a county north of where my family lived. It killed 78 miners. It was not far from where the Monongah mine blew up on Dec. 6, 1907, killing 361.
• I used to have to take West Virginia history and learn how to spell the state flower, the rhododendron. But our state-sanctioned history books never talked much about the dangers of coal on the War of Blair Mountain in the 1920s that involved the U.S. Army using fighter planes to bomb and strafe striking miners.
• In 2002, I was five miles in a mountain at Red Ash, Va. on a story for Virginia Business magazine. It was a Massey mine and they actually let me in. It was “low coal” and we had to maneuver in seams no more than 40 inches tall. I remember feeling intensely claustrophobic but in time, a strange sense of calm came over me.
• Last year, at Coal River, a man in a pickup truck took offense that I was photographing a school next to some giant Massey coal silos. He followed me around the twisting mountain roads for a while.