Mountain Justice - Tricia Shapiro

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at the site of Marsh Fork Elementary since the 1940s. When Judy Bonds was a student there, in the mid-1960s, it was a middle school. She remembers that the school was rebuilt after being partly destroyed by fire in the 1950s, then rebuilt and expanded after another fire in the late 1960s or early 1970s. It became an elementary school in the 1990s.

      The school is the lone survivor in the Coal River valley of a series of school closings and consolidations that began in the late 1960s, in tandem with depopulation of the valley after the mostly boom years in coal mining—from the 1940s to the early 1960s—ended. Depopulation accelerated in the 1980s as MTR began, as many families were forced from their homes by mining operations or lost their jobs to mechanization and out-of-state hiring. What population remains here now is concentrated along Rt. 3, as most of the hollows along the streams that feed, or formerly fed, the Coal River have been taken over by MTR operations.

      When Judy was in middle school, the high school football team played on what is now Marsh Fork Elementary School’s athletic field. On nights when games were played, you couldn’t find a place to park within a mile of the school along Rt. 3. “Friday night football was really big,” Judy remembers. “Not everybody went to the same church, but everybody went to the same school. The school was a real close tie, for our sense of community.

      “When I went to school here, there was no mining around this school whatsoever. [At] football games, you could look up on the hill and see people with bonfires up there watching the football game from the top of the mountain. It was kind of comforting to look up there and see those people standing up there.” Now that mountainside is off-limits to all but Massey employees working the enormous mountaintop removal site just over the ridge.

      That MTR site feeds coal to the Goals Coal prep plant, a Massey subsidiary, where coal is washed with water and chemicals by the river right next to the school. Coal moving along the prep plant’s conveyor belts and into and out of its coal silo sheds dust and chemicals into the air just 150 feet from the school grounds. The byproduct of the coal’s washing, called slurry or sludge—black goo laden with toxins—gets pumped up into the 2.8 billion gallon slurry pond back behind the 385-foot earthen dam that looms over the plant and the school.

      Construction on the dam began in 1985. “Of course I did not know that in ’85,” Judy says. “A lot of people did not know that dam existed—thought it was a few buildings up there, and they’s loading coal up there. I didn’t find out about that dam until 1997 or 1998, when I found out about the one [down the river] at Marfork [and] someone said: ‘Well, don’t you know there’s a dam over the elementary school?’

      “The coal companies really do not want anyone to see what they’re doing, don’t want anyone to know what’s going on in Appalachia. It’s as though we’re the coal companies’ private serfdom. And that’s how they treat us: ‘How dare you! Don’t look at that.’”

      If you did dare to look, if you hiked up through what was left of the mountains here in 2005 and picked your way through the mine sites, here’s what you would have seen: A long tramp through woods gets you to a long drainage ditch that feeds into the sludge pond. (Yes, the pond collects rainwater runoff from the mine site as well as sludge from the prep plant. No, this is not a safe design.) Follow the ditch downhill, clamber over the Massey access road that circles the pond (watch out for trucks on patrol), and continue along the ditch to where it empties into the sludge pond. Seen from maybe a quarter mile back from the dam, the top of the dam’s wall looks pretty high above where you’re standing—exactly how high is hard to guess, though, since scale is hard to reckon on enormous MTR sites devoid of natural features. The pond—a lake, really—is irregularly shaped and too big for you to see all of it at once when you’re standing at the edge. Where you’re standing, trees line the edge of the pond. The top layer of liquid on the sludge pond is oily, black, opaque, ugly.

      If there’s blasting today anywhere nearby, you’ll surely feel it here. Blasting at the MTR site behind Bo’s house a while back shook Ed Wiley’s house several miles up the river. Since that blasting took place about midway between Ed’s house and this sludge pond, Ed worries that what rattled his house might also have damaged the dam. In addition, a great deal of other blasting has taken place much closer to the pond.

      In some places, dead trees stick out of the pond near its edge, having been submerged as the pond filled. As the trees rot, they’ll break off and could clog the overflow system intended to ease liquid out of the pond during times when runoff from rain is heavy. If that system gets clogged, the uncontrolled rush of water could overwhelm the dam. This and other potential dam-failure scenarios worry parents enough that some won’t send their kids to school on days when heavy rain is forecast.

      On your way to and from the sludge pond, you’ll pass by active mine sites with miners at work. But not very many miners. This whole mining complex, including the sludge pond, the prep plant by the school, and all the 1,849 acres of surface mine sites feeding it, employs perhaps 60 to 80 workers. Maybe twenty to twenty-five more miners work in a nearby underground mine that also feeds the prep plant. Surprisingly, you don’t see much coal being taken out of the strip sites. Most of the thick, easy-to-reach coal seams were mined out of Appalachia long ago. The seams you’ll see exposed here now are thinner and seem hardly worth the effort of removing hundreds of feet of mountain to reach them. Still, they work these sites 24-7, using floodlights at night. (If you’re leaving the sludge pond toward sunset, pause where you can look back down on it to see the reflected sunlight off the sludge, a spectacularly unnatural and oddly beautiful effect.) You ought to be well camouflaged and careful as you pass by the active sites, as security tends to be more vigilant there, where there’s so much expensive equipment vulnerable, than at the sludge pond.

      Back in the woods you’ll see a great deal of dust, in the air and on the ground, with no evidence of either current or recent spraying of water to keep dust down as required by mining permits. The trees that you’re walking among will probably be gone soon, likely burned rather than harvested for lumber or even firewood. Wasted forest, wasted mountains and hollows and streams. Only the memory remains of places that used to be here—Clay’s Branch, Shumate Hollow—places where hundreds of local people, many now displaced from their former homes, grew up exploring and hunting.

      At 11:30 AM on Tuesday, May 24, 2005, about two dozen people have gathered in front of Marsh Fork Elementary School, clustered under a big oak tree that looks like it’s dying—perhaps poisoned by the particulates and chemicals emitted by the prep plant next door. It’s raining when I arrive, but it soon stops.

      Reporters have been invited here today, and Bo Webb tries out his talking-to-media spiel on me: “I’m here because for the past year and a half—gosh, longer than that—we’ve been trying to bring attention to the abuses of these kids at the school by this mine company. We’ve gone to the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources, the county health department, the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, the governor’s office, the county school board, the state school board, and the federal EPA, various politicians—and they keep passing the buck.

      “We filed [under the] Freedom of Information Act for the MSHA reports on the sludge dam. I’ve got some of them with me. The dam has various leaks. The toe of the dam is leaking, which is one of the most dangerous places. The downstream foundation of the dam is leaking. There’s widespread leaks all over the dam, and we think it’s time to stand up and get attention. Someone is not doing their job. They’re either being paid off by the coal company, they’re intimidated by the coal company, or they don’t want to stop progress—or maybe they just do not want to admit that the school’s here. But it’s not just the schoolkids that are in danger [according to] these MSHA reports. It’s everyone downstream. That dam’s holding back 2.8 billion gallons, and there’s a lot of lives that they’re playing Russian roulette with here. So that’s why I’m here today.

      “I want a government that has the authority—and I believe the federal EPA has the authority—to shut down this mine site, shut down that dam, dry it out, cap it, and throw them [Massey] out of here. They should not be allowed to mine in this state. They have more violations, Massey Energy does, than all other coal companies combined in West Virginia. I think that they have

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