Houses Burn, People Die

Issue: Spring 2009
by Peter Britton '56

Years ago when I heard “West Virginia” I would think coal, hillbillies and bluegrass music, mystery, mountains and moonshine, Daniel Boone, Homer Hickam and basketball’s Jerry West.

Not anymore. Now I think mountaintop removal, the horrifying destruction of 300-million-year-old hills to get black gold in the cheapest, fastest way. You must fly low over the area to grasp what is happening: total devastation of some 500 mountains.

Seven years ago I’d driven through West Virginia to check out Cabin Creek, the home of the hoops legend. My map indicated a road south to the town of Dorothy and hence to Nashville. I’d heard of mountaintop removal and would keep an eye out for it.

Then came Kayford Mountain. The road I followed back then, now gone, turned to dirt, began climbing and became treacherous. Through the foliage came sounds of construction, I thought, and glimpses of rocks and hillsides stripped bare. Mountaintop removal.

Scattered mentions kept that memory alive. In 2005 I called a Mountaineer lawyer. He put me on to the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, which sent me to a remarkable woman whose home place in Bob White was under siege. Maria’s family lives at the foot of a hollow across a stream and a railroad track. One-hundred-car coal trains pass a half dozen times a day. Up the hollow, ammonium nitrate/fuel oil blasts send dust and flyrock onto her property. A mountaintop in view slowly disappears. Occasional floods of blackwater wash out her stream, poison her water, deplete her land.

She told me of her Cherokee ancestor fleeing the Trail of Tears in the 1830s to hide in a West Virginia hollow. Of her grandfather who mined coal underground and built the house she lives in. Of her father, who died in an ATV accident back up the hollow because of a trail aborted by mountaintop coal operators. And she told me of the constant fear and dread that hovers over all these little coal towns south of Charleston. Fear of losing one’s limbs or lungs or life in the mines. Fear of disease from air or water. And dread of uncontrollable blackwater floods like the ones in Buffalo Creek and Aberfan that together killed 269 people, mostly children.

Maria caused me to recall my part in all of this. In 1992 I was researching a story on “clean coal.” I went to the United Nations to scope out the world situation. An interview with Earth Summit Secretary-General Maurice Strong, a Canadian energy man, left me with one quote ringing in my ears. “The Cold War is over; the coal wars are just beginning.” A longtime journalist, I had to write.

Strong’s statement becomes clear in West Virginia and its growing practice of mountaintop removal (also thriving in neighboring states). The horrible concept is well described on the websites www.ohvec.org, www.wvhighlands.org and www.crmw.org.

The result of this devastation is chaos and death. But this is big business, and it runs the state. The only hope for the future is the law. And there’s the rub.

Maria has become a coal community organizer and recently a spokeswoman for the lawsuit to stop the operation behind her hollow. Coal-originated floods washed out her bridge; those responsible called it an “act of God.” But the plaintiffs won a temporary restraining order against the Callisto Surface Mine. And Maria, who became the scapegoat for the 39 laid-off workers, was labeled by their bosses an “anti-coal activist.” She’s not. She’s for justice and the environment and truth.

Since the federal judge’s ruling, overt threats—“sometimes houses just catch on fire and people die in them”—and other hostile acts have caused her to hire guards for her house and kids. Now she’s building a fence around her property.

She wears a bulletproof vest while doing housework. She has a trained guard dog. The FBI is investigating the threats. And Maria continues to fight.

The Coal Wars have, indeed, begun.

 

Peter Britton ’56 has been a freelance writer since 1960. He is currently at work on a “coalback/bluegrass” musical called HollowGirl concerning mountaintop removal. The music can be sampled by doing a Web search of “Peter Britton” or “Co2al Train to Amos,” or by visiting CDbaby.com.