When I was nine years old and was living in the Washington suburbs, my father, a Navy doctor, decided to retire. He chose to move us to central West Virginia and join a medical practice — a strange choice since we had no ties at all to the area. But Dad was always altruistic and thought he might be able to do some good. It was 1962 and community service, John F. Kennedy style, was the prevailing mood.
So, we left affluent Bethesda, Md. for rural, coal-battered Harrison County. I had been taking French in the fourth grade back in Bethesda, but when I got to school in the Mountain State, I found that my arithmetic book had been in use since it was printed in 1903. Culture shock is probably too mild a world.
But I learned a lot. At night we’d hear the throb of diesel locomotives as they pulled a coal haul up a branch line. I would walk for miles, hiking up the hills that had been laid open with big shovels on strip mines. Few laws were in place then, and people would find the beautiful vista next to them blown up and ripped apart for coal.
Coal operators were supposed to shove the dirt back, but few did. The coal was heavily sulfuric, so leachate from rainwater created orange-yellow ponds of toxic water. We used to gather the skulls of animals next to them, and when we were old enough, blast them apart with the .22 caliber single shot, bolt action rifles that every boy in the Mountain State, including me, had to have.
My point is that for the several years we lived in West Virginia in the 1960s, I grew to love the place. Some of my school mates’ dads were miners. Some worked on the strip mines. And there was an uneasy history kept quiet by the authorities. The famed rebel organizer Mother Jones was actually put on trial once in town, but I didn’t learn about it until years later. We still were living there when a deep mine explosion killed 78 miners at Farmington on Nov. 20, 1968, including the fathers of some grade school friends.
So, I was glad that Style Weekly, the only print media outlet left in Richmond that actually does any real journalism, sent me out to southern West Virginia to do a piece about Massey Energy, the Richmond-based firm whose name is usually associated with cancer treatment centers and charity.
Yet Massey Energy (the Massey family sold their interests years ago) is anything but their Richmond image. Run by a strong-willed CEO, the firm is regularly sued for any variety of matters, including safety issues, deaths, mountaintop removal and union bashing. Last year, the EPA ordered it to pay $20 million for Clean Water Act violations, the largest penalty of its kind. In 2000, a Massey sludge pond spill in Kentucky was judged to be several times the size of the Exxon Valdez tanker disaster in Alaska.
The firm’s CEO contributes heavily to West Virginia political campaigns, especially that for judges and drew controversy when he was photographed vacationing with the then-chief of the West Virginia Supreme Court on the French Riviera.
I also visited with environmentalists worried about the threats of floods from sludge ponds and coal silos spewing coal dust next to elementary schools (see photo). But the most stunning thing I saw was mountaintop removal, which is strip mining on steroids. A fairly new concept, it was a topic for a report I did for BusinessWeek back in the 1990s. It is a quantum leap from the old strip mines I used to play on.
See the story at:
Let me know what you think.
Peter Galuszka