Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal (22 page)

“Shame on the United Mine Workers for even supporting mountaintop removal,” he says. “Mountaintop removal has replaced thousands of jobs in the coalfields. It's the main reason their membership has declined so dramatically over the past thirty years.”

Despite its prevalence, Spadaro is confident that the movement to stop the practice will ultimately prevail. “I've always thought we could be successful in Appalachia if we joined together with folks throughout the coalfields who are being affected by mountaintop removal and other travesties of mining.”

He says as much on a panel at the Appalachian Studies Association Conference held at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, in late March 2008. Afterward, he finds himself surrounded by audience members who compliment his presentation, ask him questions about mountaintop removal, and express their gratitude for his dissent. Spadaro spends a few moments with each one, speaking with his typical humility and nonchalant attitude.

Later that day, his good friend, filmmaker and musician Jack Wright, presented the Jack Spadaro Documentary Award at the Appalachian Studies Association conference in Huntington, West Virginia.
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Wright says that naming the award after Spadaro was an obvious choice. “Most of the awards given out these days are named in honor of those who have passed on. We have a hero, and he's a live hero.”

The accolades are so strong, however, it does sound like a eulogy of sorts. “Jack has devoted his entire career to trying to make mining safer, looking out for the workers, and has not been afraid to face intimidation from above,” Wright says. “He sacrificed his career for an ethical belief and should be recognized for his great sacrifices, humbleness, and his ability to stick to the task through hell or high water.”

Spadaro makes light of such heady tributes. “I'm just glad I'm still alive. Somebody who had known me for years but hadn't seen me for a long time came running up to me the day before they
gave the first award in Dayton and said, ‘Oh Jack, I'm so glad to see you. I'm so glad you're alive!'”

“And I said, ‘Well, what do you mean?'”

“And she said, ‘Well, I thought when they named an award after you that you were dead.'”

Spadaro laughs when he tells that story, his relaxed posture indicating that he is indeed fully alive. His is a patriotism of the present; his work is ongoing. It hasn't taken death for him to be canonized alongside other prominent Appalachian dissenters such as the Widow Combs, Aunt Molly Jackson, and Don West. He would surely shrug off being included in such hallowed company, preferring instead to focus on the fight at hand. His reward, his assurance, is predictably quite simple: “There's never been any doubt in my mind that I did the right thing.”

Jack Spadaro talking…

My grandfather was James Spadaro, and he was a coal miner for forty-five years in West Virginia. He worked for the New River Company, one of the big companies in southern West Virginia in a little town called Mount Hope. He worked for them all his life. He came here as a boy; he was eleven years old when he came to this country, and he started working in the mines very young. I don't know exactly how old he was, but he was a teenager. He came from Sicily.

My grandfather was an avid member of the United Mine Workers, and my father also belonged to the United Mine Workers. My father worked for a mining company as well, but he didn't work underground; he worked in a machinery repair shop. But during the fifties, there were strikes that I remember as a child, and so I did see people fighting back then, fighting against the mining companies.

Well, not only my father and my grandfather, but my mother, who worked for the communications workers—she was a union member for the telephone company, the Communications Workers
of America—and they went on strike several times. I remember one strike in particular when I was in college—it was real painful and long—but she probably, as much as anyone, instilled a sense that you could be successful in fighting back if you joined with other people of like mind, and the union certainly was an example of that.

I've often wondered how I became what I have. My sister saved a bunch of old things that she thought would be important for me and gave them to me a few years ago. One of them was an essay that I wrote when I was fourteen years old about the importance of clean water.

We lived in the woods, really. So at least as young as fourteen, and even younger, I had been playing in the woods. Preschool age we were in the woods, and I think I began then to get the appreciation for the forests that we have. And these are some of the oldest forests in the world, and the most diverse forests, and I began intuitively knowing that as a child living in southern West Virginia, playing in the woods and wanting to learn the names of trees, flowers.

Later, my wife and I met an old gentleman named Rufus Reed who lived in Eastern Kentucky in the town of Lovely. Mr. Reed was a surveyor, a land surveyor, and he knew all the plants in the woods; he'd studied them all his life. He was in his late eighties or early nineties by that time; I was probably in my late twenties or early thirties when I met him. He would take a bunch of us into the woods to show us the wildflowers that grew in the woods, particularly in April and the spring. One day, just walking with him for a few hours—and he could hardly walk, we had to help him through the woods—we identified something like 250 species of plants. I knew how diverse the plants were, but I didn't know it was that diverse a forest. But it is, indeed.

There are about 250 bird species that breed in these forests. There are about 150 tree species. And there are countless other plant species. I was an engineering student and we didn't study that, but I learned as I grew older.

I knew very definitely [that I was an environmentalist] by the time I was twenty-three years old when I went to Buffalo Creek in Logan County, West Virginia, and started studying the root causes of that dam failure that killed 125 people. I had to interview survivors, people who had lost their families.

We had a commission of nine people who'd been appointed by the governor; we set up down there. We had the very first hearing at the Mann High School gymnasium; Mann was right at the mouth of Buffalo Creek. I had a tape recorder, so I had to really carefully listen to everybody who talked. And these were all survivors of this terrible tragedy. I'll never forget those voices.

One woman had lost six members of her family.

A few years before that had been the Farmington disaster, and I had actually been in that mine a few months before it exploded, so I knew some of those men, and I knew the mine well. But the Buffalo Creek experience was what really transformed me, I think, more than anything.

I was an engineer, and I had been teaching at West Virginia University, doing research work about acid mine drainage. And I was appointed by the dean of the school of mines to go down and do the engineering research to figure out why that dam had failed. Of course I didn't know a lot then, but I went into the records of the construction of the dam and found out how long it had been developing. It had been developing over years. There were a series of dams that were built—three dams had been built in a series up this hollow—and people downstream knew that they were unsafe, and they wrote letters to the governor and other people saying, “These dams are unsafe, something needs to be done about them.”

There were several government agencies—the U.S. Geological Survey, the Department of Natural Resources, the Corps of Engineers—that sent people to look at these dams, and they didn't do anything. So I think that's when I realized that in any of the work I would be doing, no matter what happened, I would always make sure that, at least from my end of it, the right thing got done.

First I worked for the Department of Natural Resources, and then I went to work for eighteen years for the Office of Surface Mining, a division of the Department of the Interior, writing and enforcing regulations related to coal mining and the environment.

Naturally, I went and got involved in the strip mining issue back in the early seventies. I helped found a group called Save Our Mountains in West Virginia around 1973 or thereabouts. One of our leaders was a man named Chester Workman, who was an underground coal miner, but he hated strip mining. He worked for Westmoreland Coal Company; he really risked his career getting involved in the anti–strip mining movement. But he had the guts to go ahead and be active. That taught me a lot, watching Chester and his family. That whole family was inspirational. That whole community was called Richmond District of Raleigh County. It's near Beckley in southern West Virginia.

We were actually successful in running the strip miners out of the area. We did some legal action, some demonstrations, some fund-raising, and the community united and drove the strip miners out.

I worked for years for the Office of Surface Mining, and I got frustrated because they weren't really enforcing the law, and I had done switched my job, really, to working abandoned mine lands—trying to patch together remedies to try to fix the lands that had already been damaged—and a chance came for me to go back to the Mine Safety Health Administration.

I had actually started with them way back in the sixties. There was a new appointee to run the Mine Safety and Health Administration during the Clinton years, Davitt McAteer, who's a pretty good guy. And so in 1996, I went back to MSHA and was there just a little while, and they decided that they needed somebody to run the mine academy, train all the mine inspectors, to get them oriented in the right way and build an inspection force that would do the job. So that's what I did. I was the director of the Mine Safety and Health Administration's training facility, called the National Mine Safety and Health Academy, near Beckley.

The people who came to us to be trained were people from the coalfields. So what I did was meet with every group that came in for training—there would be groups of fourteen or fifteen or sixteen people at a time—and I would just get to know them pretty well and meet regularly with them, find out what their needs were, find out how we could improve our training program.

What we were trying to do at the academy was to get and instill in inspectors the idea of their responsibility, and there were some really fine instructors. One guy in particular was Richard McDorman, who had been out in the field as an inspector for many years and really understood the law well. We tried to take some of our very best field people and make them teachers for the new inspectors. We were really successful at doing that. So that's what I wanted to do—I wanted to get the inspectors geared to doing the very best job they could to enforce the Mine Act
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and protect workers in the mines. And we did well.

In October 2000, I got a call from McAteer, and he asked me to join with a team of people he was appointing to go down to Martin County, Kentucky, and find out what happened down there where the impoundment had leaked 300 million gallons of coal slurry into the Tug Fork River and killed everything downstream on Coldwater Creek and Wolf Creek (from the Tug River and Big Sandy River) for a hundred miles, really. It was coal waste impoundment that was regulated by the Mine Safety and Health Administration, so we had jurisdiction.

He wanted to find out really what had happened. He honestly wanted to find out where we had gone wrong as an agency so we could keep it from happening again. He wanted to know if there were other places like this that could break through, you know, and it was just a miracle people didn't die. If the drainage had not split into two watersheds—if it all had just gone down Coldwater Creek—there would have been people drowned in coal slurry.

We started the investigation in November of 2000; there were about seven or eight of us. We interviewed people through November and December of 2000, and in January of 2001 we continued.
We had a drilling program that I was in charge of, to go down, drill, and find out exactly why things had broken through. We were interviewing people, we were moving along pretty well, and then Inauguration Day came along on January 20, 2001, I think it was. And that's when Tony Oppegard, who was the head of the investigation, was fired by the Bush administration.

On day one.

We were told to go ahead and wrap up the investigation. We wanted to find out what Martin County Coal and Massey knew, and whether they knew that it was an unsafe situation to begin with. And we were finding out that yes, indeed, they did know and that MSHA itself knew that there was only about fifteen feet of cover between the bottom of the reservoir and the underground mine workings because it had broken through six years before in May of 1994.
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We were told not to even look into that aspect of it.

So I went along into the spring of 2001, when we were supposed to be finishing up our investigation and write a report, and then this guy Lauriski
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showed up. He was the Bush appointee to head Mine Safety and Health. (McAteer had been replaced in January of 2001.) So Lauriski poked his finger in the actual writing of the report, and I finally told Lauriski that I refused to sign the report. And I went public and talked to the press, and told them what the Bush administration was trying to do—trying to cover up the real cause of the accident, trying to protect Massey Energy, trying to protect the Mine Safety and Health Administration.

So time went along, and in October of 2001, the report was due out. And Lauriski himself called me twice and tried to get me to sign the report, because they wanted my name on the report to give it credibility, and I refused to do so and again went public with what my concerns were.

The fight went on from January of 2001 until I was literally kicked out of my office in June of 2003, and then the fight went on for another year and a half after that, so it was about a four-year fight. So that takes its toll on you emotionally.

I thought it was really important that we make it public. I
didn't struggle with it a bit because of what had happened at Buffalo Creek. I knew that I was probably jeopardizing my job, but I felt like it was important enough. We found out that there were 225 more coal refuse impoundments in the country sitting on top of abandoned underground mine workings, so any of those 225 dams could fail in the same way.