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Kennedy writes about the book, “Coal River is a dismaying story of Armageddon in Appalachia. Together, the powerful forces of ignorance and greed are dooming America’s landscapes, our culture, and our democracy.”
Journalist Sebastian Junger commented, “I found myself hoping that people named in this book would read it and experience that sick fear of knowing their game is about to come to an end. Indeed, that is one of the very satisfying things about this book: as horrifying as the story is, there is the real and very beautiful possibility that justice will prevail in the end.”
The Coal Valley News obtained an interview with author, Michael Shnayerson, who told the CVN that he learned about strip mining after being assigned to write a story in Vanity Fair magazine.
“Before traveling to West Virginia I researched the state by reading books such as The Appalachians: America’s First and Last Frontier, and Night Comes to the Cumberlands by Harry M. Caudill. If you haven’t read that book, you should. Like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, it delivers a powerful social message,” he said.
“It is important for people to be aware of what is happening in their own backyards, not only to their environment but their entire way of life,” he said.
“I still travel to West Virginia occasionally. Recently, I was at a book signing in Charleston at Taylor Books,” he said.
Shnaryerson made many friends in the Boone County area, he says, who still reside and are working to change the laws and practices of mountain top mining. According to Shnayerson, he is happy that the book is causing people to take a second look at the environmental and cultural effects of mountain top mining.
With permission from him and giving credit to the publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, here are a few excerpts from his book:
“The coal in the Coal River valley was of the hardest and most valuable grade: bituminous coal that burned more intensely than softer grades. Because the coal had formed in a freshwater climate, it contained less sulfur than saltwater coal and burned with so little sulfurous smoke that the miners called it smokeless coal. In 1742, an explorer named John Peter Salley crossed the Allegheny Mountains and noted an outcropping of smokeless coal in a riverbank – reason enough to name the pristine tributary the Coal River.”
“So many kinds of trees grew here that settlers could chose one for each need: chestnuts for fence rails, yellow locusts for posts, hickory for axes and broom handles. Most forests are dominated by two or three species of trees. This one had eighty. It was one of the oldest and richest temperate-zone hardwood forests in the world – the only forest in America not obliterated by glaciers in the Pleistocene Age. Ecologists came to refer to it as America’s mother forest. Its seeds, they theorized, had traveled on the wind to grow as the virgin trees of every other forest in the land.”
“As word went out in the valley that the new guy at the DEP was standing up to Massey, Crum began to get more calls from residents reporting blackwater spills and other violations. One came from a pair of feisty ladies who lived in Sylvester, a once postcard-pretty town just north of Whitesville on Route 3. Mary Miller and Pauline Canterberry had watched their town turn black from coal dust after Massey’s Elk Run operation built a prep plant right above it. At Crum’s suggestion, the “Dustbusters,” as they came to be known, started wiping the sides of several coal-dusted houses every day with paper towels, putting the towels in plastic bags, and dating them while a video camera filmed them doing it. When the Dustbusters and nearly 150 neighbors decided to sue Massey for ruining their town, Joe Lovett took the case. Eventually, he handed it over to a bold young Charleston lawyer named Brian Glasser, who represented them on contingency; he would get no money unless they won in court. With the unassailable proof of those dust-blacken paper towels in Baggies, they did win: 4473,000, to be divided among 151 plaintiffs, plus about that much more in legal costs to Glasser’s firm. Uncharacteristically, Massey chose to pay up, not appeal. Brian Glasser thought he knew why. In the trial, the judge had accepted Massey’s claim that Elk Run was an independent subsidiary. That had limited damages. In judging an appeal, the state supreme court might strike down that claim, opening Massey to far greater punitive damages.
For a while, the Dustbusters allowed themselves to feel they’d won. Massey had put a white nylon dome over its prep plant, before the trial, to contain the coal dust; in accordance with the ruling, it drastically reduced coal-truck traffic through town and paid for a street-sweeping truck to clean coal dust from Route 3 each week. Yet three years later, the Dustbusters were again wiping down their houses with paper towels. And Matt Crum was gone.”
Recently, Don Blankenship, the Chairman and CEO of Massey Energy attended a tree-planting and reforestation project at Black Castle Mine, located off Rte 3. The Coal Valley News was able to ask Blankenship to comment on Shnayerson’s novel, as well as some of the subjects discussed in the book:
Coal Valley News: “Strip mining is a very controversial practice in this area and recently you were fined by the EPA for numerous violations of the Clean Water Act, where pollutants from coal slurry were dumped in our waterways. What steps do you have in place, or are you going to be taking, to make sure that won’t happen in the future?”
Blankenship: “Well, first of all, our performance from the environmental and the safety side are better than most, and of course that gets overshadowed. And secondly, we’ve done more than anybody that I know of in the industry where our impounds are three times as strong as other peoples’ are that we keep coal slurry or dark water in. We’re constantly adding environmental improvements with computer monitoring so we can tell whether the water is actually doing what it should do and we have written manuals on training on a constant basis to try to improve our peoples’ efforts. So, we’re doing everything that we know to do and certainly we are doing better than anyone else in this line of business. ”
Coal Valley News: “Are you familiar with the book, Coal River, by Michael Shnayerson? Have you read it?”
Blankenship: “Yes; I’ve read the parts that I was interested in.”
Coal Valley News: “I’m doing a book review and had an interview with the author and was wondering if you had any comment on any remarks or chapters in the book?”
Blankenship: “Well, he mixes enough truth with enough fantasy to make the book readable, I think. As far as how he writes, he’s a pretty good writer. As far as the personal things that he says about me, and so forth, he says it with no knowledge, and that’s the unfortunate thing is people willing to say things that they either know aren’t true or they have no idea. But, generally speaking, I don’t have any problem with the book. People will write what they want to write and that’s the way this country works. So, it’s just unfortunate that a lot of people read it and they believe it and they don’t have any opportunity to see the other side like perhaps these kids are seeing today.”
Coal Valley News: “Do you have any comments about what is happening in Charleston? Currently there have been some accusations that you’re overstepping the bounds when it comes to the legislative process there with some of the judges.”
Blankenship: “Well, I think it is humorous that someone would say that the things that I do within the bounds of the law and totally transparent, never hiding anything, that a politician would claim that I’m doing something wrong. I think we all know how politicians have worked in West Virginia for years and I’ve been upfront about my views and my concerns for jobs, concerns for kids, and concerns for West Virginia. They’ve gone as far to say that I’m not even a West Virginian. So it’s one of those things that when you come back to the nature of a lot of politicians in West Virginia, they’re going to sling mud and I pay very little attention to them.”
Coal Valley News: “I’ve heard a lot about how you like to come in and turn union mines into non-union mines. Why is that? Why do you prefer to work with a non-union capacity in your mines?”
Blankenship: “First of all, there’s a presumption there that’s not true. We don’t come in and convert union mines to non-union. Basically, the people always make that decision. It’s by vote; it’s by private vote. They’ve organized us for the 22 years that I’ve been on the job. They’ve not been able to get Massey’s people to vote for the union because, quite frankly, the company offers the people more than the union does. So they have better benefits, better job security, better work rules, and so forth, without the union and that’s the reason they stay non-union. It has nothing to do with me, because if I was as bad as the unions and the politicians make me out to be, the 6,000 people at Massey wouldn’t vote to stay non-union.”
The book, Coal River is available at the Madison Public Library as well as most bookstores.
Contact Joanie Newman at jnewman@coalvalleynews.com or call 369-1165.
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