Coal Ain't The Culprit

By Peter Britton

"Coal Ain't the Culprit" is a hybrid ebook aimed at telling the real & true story of coal and what its abuse does to people and the planet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 22, 2012
• ISBN: 9781626757707

Book preview

Cover photo courtesy Vivian Stockman, OHVEC / Flyover courtesy SouthWings.org

©2013 Peter Britton

ISBN: 9781626757707

Dedicated to all those harmed by the abuse of coal—past, present and future.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

The Trail of Fears: The Truth Will Stand

Hollowgirl: Living With Dread

A coalblack & bluegrass musical (extended libretto)

Act I

Act II

Denouement

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Author’s Bio

PREFACE

As you may know, the White House ignores coal as a subject—at least on the surface. News organizations run occasional stories but they are short lived and superficial. Magazines and books? Ditto. Movies have yet to tread there (in Appalachia) and may never do so—it’s bloody dangerous. The same applies to television. And today the very veracity of the media is questionable, most being controlled by huge corporations.

As one Virginia State Senator quipped concerning an energy comment, Hell, it’s only West Virginia.

But West Virginia is much more. It is the world. And, indeed, it is the town of Bob White, West Virginia. For an American family lives here, in a hollow, besieged by a monstrous mountaintop-removing coal organization.

This tale is not new but is has new wrinkles and twists as well as devious methods long practiced by coal-industry bigwigs. This story is the legacy of an economy that demands more energy, more coal and more electricity supplied by those willing to do anything to get it.

And this modern-day coal industry is buttressed by a single word designed to placate and mollify and inspire and mislead. That word is sustainability and has been on Washington’s tongue for many years.

What does it imply? Only that the economy can continue growing and the environment can remain undestroyed with careful stewardship by industry et al.

One should quickly look at Boone County, West Virginia and the skies and the seas to understand how absurd that notion is. For coal destroys all around it. Those extracting it blow the mountaintops, fill the hollows with the rubble, create black sludge, murder creatures great and small, and provide the fuel to create acid rain, CO2 clouds and mercury fallout for sky and sea.

Protect the environment? Bullshit. Read on and see the true story of that family in the hollow in Bob White. It is hard to believe—but do believe it.

Peter Britton

Road into deep coal land, north of Bob White, West Virginia

INTRODUCTION

Coal and the men who extract, transport and burn it have held a fascination for me for the past thirty years. It is, collectively, one of man’s great endeavors, providing much of the energy to power the planet. But it is riddled with deadly drawbacks.

That coal is dirty, filthy and dangerous must be admitted at the outset. Any mention of clean coal must be said tongue-in-cheek. For coal, indeed, is this deadly trio, well documented but continually denied by the people who run and use the industry.

I first met coal on its home ground in Shamokin, PA, where I had gone for a magazine story on fluidized bed combustion (FBC), a German process newly adapted for burning anthracite culm (the waste from mines that contained dirt, rocks, wood and coal). This Department of Energy-financed effort was sparkling and tidy. Was this true?

Yes and no. You could cook an egg on the inside of the boiler. The outside was fit for a coal industry magazine ad. Even the coal-culm pile was glistening. But...

I had heard about coal breakers and seen Lewis Hines’ photographs of breaker boys. There was a small one in town and I finagled a tour. A coal breaker is one of man’s most fiendish contraptions. Made of wood, constantly shaking, filled with coal dust and noise, extremes of hot and cold and as dangerous as you could want. This was the tip of the coal industry iceberg.

As anthracite coal petered out, the supply began to come from Western Pennsylvania and the Appalachian Mountains. This mining was all underground until strip mining began: easier and cheaper. And then some greedy coal baron thought: Why not the mountains themselves? Blow off the tops and then strip out the layers of coal hidden inside.

In the hillbilly towns and hidden hollows of West Virginia and Kentucky the descendants of early coal robber barons could work in near secrecy. They could make the local labor force near slaves, which they frequently did. The country needed the means to make electricity, and coal was the main way to do so.

Then I read, with growing dismay, of the introduction of ammonium nitrate/fuel oil (ANFO) and the appalling downstream effects this method produced: sludge contamination of drinking water, air pollution, destroyed mountains, decimated towns, destroyed hollows, ended lives. Less than 400 miles from Washington a national heritage—the Appalachians—was being ruined.

At the same time, the truth of global warming/climate change was becoming verifiable. Scientists around the world logged in to the wave of opposition to political leaders shrugging it off. Suddenly, the two—coal and warming—seemed firmly linked. This was something I would look into at its source—the coal mines.

I contacted the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (OVEC), a group adamantly opposing mountain top removal (MTR). It is worth a look at ohvec.org

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Through OVEC I was referred to Maria Gunnoe. I met her in January 2006, at the foot of a hollow in Bob White, Boone County, West Virginia, where she was living with her two kids and Rottweiler, Draco. And with the growing conviction that she and countless other poor neighbors were being ripped off, poisoned, and severely damaged as a way of business for the coal barons. Nothing new, merely increased in intensity by several notches of new technology and urgency.

Maria’s homeplace is below an MTR operation, subject to periodic floods of black sludge from coal washing. After the worst flood, her bridges were rendered unusable. She was told by Jupiter Coal company engineers that they had been damaged by an act of God and she would have to pay over $60,000 to fix them both. She bristled and flamed and joined OVEC.

Other more insidious but equally outrageous acts of injustice and outright criminality infuriated Maria: the dirty politics of her state; the bribing of judges; the memory of Buffalo Creek and the presence of new sludge impoundments; the Marsh Fork Elementary School saga, just below a giant impoundment; the continued encouragement of the incestuous hillbilly culture; the consistent desecration and/or bulldozing of mountainside cemeteries in coal’s path; the drinking water plight of Rawl, within view of the Massey boss’s mountaintop mansion.

And there was more for Maria’s outrage. Much more. The seeming disinterest of the American people; frequent clandestine involvements by President George W. Bush; the quiet easing out of legendary front porch bluegrass music; the disappearance of small towns and zip codes; the uncertain future of large tracts of coal-rich lands; the sustained aura of fear and dread hovering over those country towns; the specter of eminent domain; and the possible plans for the 800-square-mile chunk of Upper Big Branch (UBB) land, a choice piece for energy-expansion use: more coal, hydro power (like TVA), energy testing and research, abandoned-mine storage of UGGs (Ungodly Government Garbage) as well as a protected site for military training and caching.

Maria became a persistent coal community organizer for small towns throughout Boone County (and Appalachia). She became a modern-day Mother Jones along with the late Judy Bonds and Larry Gibson; and the likes of Jack Spadaro and Bo Webb and Ed Wiley and Joe Lovett, other leaders of a grass roots’ resistance born in response to flagrant acts of tyranny and disrespect against the men working in the world’s worst job.

And then came the UBB mine explosion that killed twenty-nine underground miners and is under criminal investigation and common-sense suspicion to this day. Maria recognized telltale similarities between the company that flooded her hollow and the operator of UBB: arrogance and hubris and the time-honored act of God excuse.

And Maria became a symbol of what people need to live. Her clarity of vision and fearlessness in the face of corporate and political tricks was recognized by the prestigious awards from the Goldman Award and the Wallenberg Medal and Lecture.

Today, Maria remains on fire against injustice, rip-offs, lies and pollution and the arrogance of coal robber barons, ever on the make-and-take.

So here were the elements of a major magazine story. Oddly, no one would look at what I had written in magazine form. At the time, several books were in the works. But who, I thought, would read them? I could not drop the issue. Perhaps, with the music of the mountains, Maria and I could fashion