Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal (23 page)

The best thing, I think, was the raising of public awareness, people getting involved. So that was good.

The worst thing was that Massey Energy and the rest of the industry has got by with flagrant violations of the law over the past eight years and tragic consequences could've been avoided.

We had proposed as many as ten serious violations, some criminal violations. And when Lauriski got involved and directed the new team leader, a guy named Thompson,
¹⁴
they reduced the number of violations—they weren't even serious violations—down to two. And they were fined $55,000 for each of those violations initially, but a federal appeals judge—an administrative law judge—threw out one of the violations and then reduced the fine on the second violation from $55,000 to $5,600.

The EPA called this the worst environmental disaster in the eastern United States in the history of the country, and to be fined only $5,600 for it was just outrageous. And it proved to me that there was, from the very beginning, a conspiracy in the Bush administration to protect Massey Energy and the Mine Safety and Health Administration for its failure to do the right job.

I started my career in 1966 right out of high school. That was the Lyndon Johnson administration. Then came the Nixon administration.

The Nixon administration we know was corrupt, but Richard Nixon at least signed the Coal Mine Health and Safety Act, which was a strong law. He signed it in response to the Farmington disaster. And he created the EPA, signed the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act. Some of our best environmental legislation Richard Nixon signed into law.

And then, of course, we had Gerald Ford, who vetoed the
surface mining bill three times, and it was Jimmy Carter who actually signed it into law in 1977.
¹⁵
Jimmy Carter was committed to protecting the environment. He said when he signed the law that he knew it wasn't enough, but he thought that it was at least the beginning of regulating the environmental effects of coal mining and that it would lead, he thought, to something better. The Surface Mining Act was actually only enforced for about three years under Jimmy Carter.

And then along came Reagan-Bush.

Then, unfortunately, I have to say Bill Clinton didn't do any better. Clinton did not enforce the Surface Mining Act. In fact, mountaintop removal proliferated during the Clinton years.

But the very worst is this George Bush administration. It is undoubtedly the most corrupt administration in my career, and I've lived through all those administrations. It is utterly corrupt; corrupt through and through. The whole process of investigating a mining accident was corrupted from day one, literally from Inauguration Day on, and then we've seen this string of mining disasters that have occurred since 2001.

The first disaster occurred in September of 2001 in Alabama. Thirteen miners died, and we found from investigation that one of the reasons that disaster occurred was that the philosophy had already changed within the agency. The new head of the agency, Lauriski, had encouraged managers to look away from serious violations, probably just to get along with the mine operators. So they found that months before the accident—before the fire explosion that occurred in the Jim Walters mine had taken place—that the district manager down there had been kind of letting things go, letting the company get by with things.

And then of course we had, beginning in January of 2006, a serious string of disasters, beginning with the Sago disaster in Upshur County, West Virginia. Once again, MSHA had been aware of serious violations at that mine in the months preceding the explosion. It had ignored them and allowed the mine operator to continue operating. They had written violations, but they
hadn't actually closed the mine, which is what they should have done.

And then a few weeks after that there was the Aracoma mine
¹⁶
fire—where two men died, but nine more could've died—and found again that MSHA had not done its job as an enforcer and allowed conditions to develop that led to that mine fire.

Then there was the Darby disaster in Harlan County, Kentucky, where five people died and, once again, when investigators looked into that they found that MSHA had known of serious problems with mine seals and other violations at that mine, but they had allowed them to continue.

And then this last year, 2007, the Crandall Canyon mine in Utah, where six miners died in a roof fall. MSHA had approved a plan, which they knew was defective, for mining that coal seam, because one of the engineers in the agency that had looked at the plan had said, “This is an unsafe plan,” but he had been overruled by people who were supervisors. One of them was a man named Allen Davis, who had been an appointee of the Bush administration, so we were able to show directly the influence of the Bush administration and what it had done to weaken mining safety.

During the Clinton years, we were really successful in keeping down the numbers of fatalities and serious accidents in the mines. There were no mine disasters during that eight-year time period. MSHA had a good reputation for enforcing the laws and doing the right thing, and there had been steady improvement.

When I first started in the industry in the sixties, five or six hundred people a year were dying in the mines. Far, far fewer now are dying. It's still way too many—we shouldn't be having any disasters—but substantial improvement was made with the passage of the Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969, there's no doubt about it. And that was government at work.

Under the right kind of leadership, government can function and people can do their jobs and protect people. You go back to things like the New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt. That administration gives you faith in what government can do and what people
in government can do. It's one of the best examples. I mean, the country was in really dire straits and the government really saved the country, the leadership of the country saved the country from some of the excesses of the years before.

We've got great people within the Mine Safety and Health Administration who really want to do their jobs. They've just been hindered in doing their jobs by the management that was brought in by this corrupt Bush administration.

I was depressed for a while about the whole thing, but I've been able to actually speak out more since I don't have to worry about working for the government. I can say pretty much what I think whenever, and I'm helping environmental groups and communities who are doing things like petitions for designating areas unsuitable for mining.

I've been working with a bunch of different lawyers who are suing mining companies on behalf of workers who've been injured or killed on the job, and working with groups in environmental litigation.

I'm working with some lawyers who are representing the people from Rawl in Mingo County,
¹⁷
where 653 people had their water polluted for over a thirty-year period by Massey Energy. They went to the records and found they'd pumped over a billion gallons of coal slurry in the underground mine workings, contaminated the whole groundwater system. People have arsenic poisoning and neurological damage, kidney damage, lung disease, all kinds of things from being exposed to this really bad water.

From Martin County, after all the hoopla about the cover-up and everything, I got to work with some attorneys who were suing Massey Energy, and we found a miner who had been the fire boss for the mine that the water drained into at Martin County.
¹⁸
He had had to walk through that mine every day for years checking the belt line, to see if it was working right, because it ran coal through that abandoned underground mine—they had a segment of it that was still active—to the prep plant. As he was walking through, he found a lot of water leaking from the impoundment,
and he was told by Massey Energy not to report it. He finally told it because he wasn't working for the company anymore, so he wasn't afraid for his job. That's how they covered it up. They knew something was wrong for all those years, from 1994 till 2000. For six years they knew that there was [a] serious problem with that impoundment.

The national media ignored the Martin County coal slurry spill. It was 300 million gallons. That was thirty times greater than the Exxon-Valdez spill. When I got fired, or they tried to fire me, a
New York Times
reporter called me—this is three years after the spill—and he asked me, “How come my paper didn't cover this three years ago?”

I said, “Buddy, you tell me. I'll bet if it was in Connecticut you would have covered it.” Or Pennsylvania. Or New York. Or if it had been in New England, it would've been covered. It was because it was in Appalachia that it was not covered by the national media.

It's the
Deliverance
syndrome. People from outside the region still view Appalachia as that dark place over there on the other side of the mountains that you shouldn't even go into. And the people in the Appalachian region are some kind or another backward and deserving of this kind of neglect, and it doesn't matter because they're used to putting up with this. I think that's beginning to change a little bit; I think once people actually see things like mountaintop removal now, from outside the region, they really are appalled by it. They're appalled. So that is slowly changing, but that's been an attitude for years.

We didn't get any real national publicity about mountaintop removal until Penny Loeb did her story for
U.S. News & World Report
in 1997. And how she found out about it was she called me one Sunday night from her home outside Washington and said, “I've heard something about mountaintop removal; I'd like to know a little more about it.” So two hours later she got a pretty good earful from me, and she decided to come down and write the story. That was the first national coverage that we'd ever had.

We've destroyed a million and a half acres in the past thirty years with mountaintop removal. It's going on at an accelerated rate now. It's not just destroying the land; it's destroying a whole people. It's destroying a culture. It's destroying towns. It's destroying the most diverse forest outside the tropics in the world. This is the Mother Forest for North America. This is the forest that was still in existence after the last Ice Age, and it was the seeds from this forest that repopulated all the rest of North America. Those mountains won't ever come back, and trees won't ever grow on those places, but it's because it's destroying the people along with the trees and the forests that it's morally objectionable.

I think it's been easier for the industry to do what it's been doing because many of those mountaintop removal sites, especially in Kentucky, are non-union operations. But in West Virginia, I'm sorry to say, the union came out in favor of mountaintop removal a few years ago. I was really disappointed with Cecil Roberts
¹⁹
and the leadership of the union because they knew better. They knew that mountaintop removal had actually cost union jobs. So I think it's disgraceful that they have joined with the coal operators to defend mountaintop removal. Shame on them.

I still work with the union and try to help them when I can, but it's really disappointing, and it's weakened the people of the coalfields, the way the union has kind of accepted some of the things that have happened and allowed large operations—like the Massey operation—to keep operating. That really disturbs me.

I really think that the movement in the coalfields is strong enough in and of itself that change can happen. I've been involved since the sixties, really, in resisting strip mining, and helped start Save Our Mountains in the seventies in West Virginia, and this is the strongest I've seen people be. I'm seeing these diverse groups. The broad-form deed was great because it was diverse as well, but I'm seeing people now from the whole region joining together to fight mountaintop removal. I'm very optimistic that we'll ultimately prevail because we have to; it's too precious to let go.

We need some leadership. I've heard that Ben Chandler's
²⁰
willing to introduce a bill to outlaw mountaintop removal. We get a few more people like that on the national scene, it doesn't matter what Robert Byrd or Nick Rahall
²¹
say, a lot of other people can join in. It'll take support from outside the region.

It's a real fight; we're up against really powerful forces. You don't get much darker than the coal industry. People who run the coal industry pretty much don't care about the damage they're doing to people or to the land. That's been my experience. They don't see, they can't see.

They're just like Nazis; they don't see what they're doing is wrong. And this Bush administration is a fascist regime. It's the wedding of corporate power and government power. So we're fighting fascism, a modern form of it. We really are.

It's a tough fight, but we can win it.

Huntington, West Virginia, March 29, 2008

A Leader, Not a Follower

They say: “Hey, we're gonna put it back,”
We're gonna put it back, just like we found it.”
Then they make a wreck and call it reclamation
Take away the beauty and they leave an open sore.

Now you boys know you can't put it back
You can't put it back just like you found it
There's a whole lot of sky where there used to be mountains
And there ain't no mountain where there was before.

     —Kate Larken, “Can't Put It Back”

When presidential hopeful John Edwards visited Whitesburg, Kentucky, in June 2007, retracing the steps of Bobby Kennedy's “poverty tour,” the first question he answered was one posed by Nathan Hall, a twenty-three-year-old Berea College student from Floyd County, Kentucky.

Hall, looking uncomfortable in a button-up shirt and freshly pressed khaki pants, explained that he wanted to come back to the region after completing his degree in sustainable agriculture and industrial management with a focus on biodiesel. Then he launched into his carefully prepared question: “If you're elected president, how will your initiatives to fight rural poverty and jump-start a green energy economy help young people like me to be able to move back to areas like this and have safe, good, and environmentally friendly jobs?”

Hall never cracked a smile. His face was friendly, but he was there to take care of business, and this was clear during the brief hesitation before Edwards gathered himself enough to answer this serious-looking young man, who didn't look completely convinced that any politician had the answers to the problems plaguing Appalachian youth. Edwards, good-natured, with his ultrawatt smile, did a little joking around with the audience before replying to Hall's question. While the rest of the audience laughed and leaned forward to hear more from Edwards, the young man remained stoic, waiting for his answer.

Nathan Hall, London, Kentucky. Photo by Silas House.

“Well, biofuel is definitely the answer,” Edwards began. He then went on to talk about the way he would reduce carbon dioxide emissions 80 percent by 2050, about how badly the region needed grants to provide proper training and how every person in the country—Appalachians included—is of equal worth. He encouraged Hall to pursue his studies, saying that biofuels could be a godsend for the region.

Hall isn't looking for a godsend as much as he's looking for a solution to the major problem that has been plaguing Appalachia for decades: a mining economy that doesn't give much back to the place from which it takes so very much.

Sitting in a friend's house just before heading off to work mowing yards and doing handyman work—“I need money while I'm in college,” he explains—Hall is a study in contrasts. On the one hand, he is so young-looking that his vast knowledge of environmental and economic issues is jarring. There is the suggestion of youth in his mussed blonde hair and the extra cream he takes with his coffee. On the other hand, Hall's face is all straight edges and sharp angles: his is the face of a mountain man, somewhat hard and unsentimental. His gray, weary eyes reveal that he is much more aware of the world's sorrows and major issues than twenty-four-year-olds are reported to be. His is the face of countless Appalachian men staring out at us from old photographs. Even his posture suggests someone much older. His is a confidence born of experience, not arrogance. Nathan Hall knows who he is.

While Hall is in awe of old-time mountain music and old-time ways of life, he is equally fascinated by classic rock music
and progressive forms of economy. He chooses his words carefully, his hands restless before him as he prepares to speak. He is, in many ways, the epitome of the modern Appalachian intellectual twenty-something: respectful of the past to the point of near obsession, yet profoundly aware of the future, of progress, of the need for new ideas.

Like many of his contemporaries, Hall doesn't want to leave the mountains, as he told John Edwards. But he also wants more reasons to not leave. And like many others his age, he has briefly left the region only to find that he wanted desperately to return. He has lived briefly in the flatlands of Western Kentucky and Louisville, as well as the even flatter lands of Wisconsin, but he has never been able to rid himself of the mountains that live in his blood. This is something that Hall would have never thought possible during his childhood and teenage years.

“When I was a teenager,” he says, “I consciously masked my accent if I was somewhere else. Growing up, I got the impression from the outside world that it was a bad thing to be a hillbilly. A lot of people I grew up with, I only saw the negatives about them, didn't recognize the positives. I was just this stupid, angsty teenager who thought I was so much smarter and cooler than everyone else around me. I get mad at my former self when I look back on that. I grew up thinking that it wasn't good to be from Eastern Kentucky. I thought that I should leave here to better myself, that it was a place you had to get out of.”

He wanted nothing more than to get out of Floyd County and go to the bright lights of the big city.

“When I was younger I was a little bit resentful of growing up here because I felt like there'd be more to do if I grew up in Lexington or Louisville, so I moved away when I was eighteen,” Hall explains. “But nowhere else felt right until I got back to the place I was from. I went through a lot in that period to…come to the place where I really did appreciate the positives of where I was from.” It took being away from the region for Hall to completely appreciate and understand it. “For a long time I didn't make the
connection between surface mining, where I grew up, and how badly that's affecting the environment. I thought about the environment everywhere else, but not in my own home, where I was from,” he says. Once he realized how wasteful Americans were, he started trying to make a difference, mostly because he knew what it was doing to his homeland in the mountains. “I started using less electricity and gas and water, started thinking more about renewable energy and renewable fuels. Once I really thought about what I grew up around, I realized what a unique ecosystem and topography we have, and I thought about the way that's being changed permanently.”

He finally couldn't fight his homesickness—or his conscience—any longer. “I'd been doing stuff in Louisville, helping out at the community center and all that, but I didn't really care that much about it, to be honest, because it wasn't home to me,” he says. “So, I thought, if I'm going to really do something, then I need to do it where I'm from. I'd definitely say I felt a responsibility to come back.”

Once he came back, he decided the perfect thing for him to do was to go into the coal mines. He is proud to have been a coal miner, and he is also firmly against mountaintop removal.

Hall says his parents raised him to be aware of, and to appreciate, nature. They often took him hiking and encouraged his interest in the insect world by helping him with a bug collection that won a statewide prize. Still, as a teenager he became apathetic. “I just wanted to party and play music,” he says. But, then, in high school, Hall read
Ishmael
, a philosophical novel by Daniel Quinn that had a lasting effect on the way he saw the world. “It's not really an environmental book, but it made me think a lot more about what we were doing to the planet, the mind-set everyone was caught up in. It caused me to start thinking more. My thought process kept developing as I went on, and I hope it still is.”

Hall remains in touch with the natural world. “I do spend a lot of time outdoors, more time than I do indoors. I try to get
out in the woods quite a bit, and I work outside,” he says. “That connection to the land—well, I think that's part of me whether I want it to be or not.”

Hall first encountered mountaintop removal mining as a small child. “You can't hardly leave the house I grew up in without seeing a big job. I grew up with them everywhere around me…Lots of people can't tell the difference between all the different kinds of mining, but when you see mountaintop removal, you know it because you'll see a big flat area for miles. In MTR, the whole ridgetop is taken,” he says. “When I was growing up, I'd go hunting pretty often, and it was just like another part of the landscape, but I didn't realize that wasn't natural back then. But when I was a teenager I started noticing it quite a bit, and I knew it was wrong.”

Hall knew how he felt about surface and mountaintop removal mining, but he wanted to make sure that he knew what he was talking about, so he decided to go into the mines. He admits that a big part of the reason he became a miner was because he needed the money, but he also did it for moral reasons. “The way I looked at it, if I was going to say that we needed to stop strip mining and mountaintop removal mining,” he says, “then I had to be able to say that we should do more deep mining, so I decided to be a deep miner.”

Hall is clearly a man of integrity, another one of the quiet heroes working toward solutions in Appalachia. He is representative of so many young adults who are trying to make a difference in the world while simultaneously making their own way in it. Defying the popular stereotype, he also represents all those mountain people who are trying to make their region a better place. He may be doing it without fanfare, but he's doing it nonetheless.

In a revealing interview that took place over the course of a drought-plagued August morning, Hall offers insight into what it's like to be a contemporary deep miner. He gives his views for a more economically viable and environmentally friendly Appalachia. He talks with refreshing candor about the trials of starting a
true grassroots movement. And he gives a brief but poetic look at his family's history in the region. From his very first words he conveys that age-old connection to the land that Appalachians have, which might just be the major reason that so many are beginning to rise up to speak out against mountaintop removal. Hall, however, has decided to not just talk about stopping mountaintop removal. He's taking direct action, using his college studies to find solutions. Instead of waiting for others to join in, he's ready to lead the way.

Nathan Hall talking…

I'm from a small town called Allen.
¹
That's where my dad's side of the family has lived since the early 1900s. Before that, they were in Letcher County,
²
after coming in from Virginia sometime in the 1700s. My paternal mamaw's side of the family was from Floyd County. My mother's family is from Johnson County, near Lawrence Creek. Her maiden name is Lyon.

As far as the history of mining, my mother's family was mostly self-sufficient on small agriculture. They farmed, kept hogs and chickens. My papaw, he worked in the oil fields in Johnson County,
³
drilling. But he also had a big garden. On my mom's side, one of my uncles—she had four brothers—he worked for a while in the Pike County deep mines for about eight years. He was a foreman for a while, but then there was a rockfall. Rocks hit him in the head and gave him a concussion that put him in the hospital for a while. On my dad's side, my pappy (who was my mamaw's dad, my great-grandpa) ran a pony mine on Arkansas Creek. The mules had carts that were loaded and they'd walk it out, the mules were trained to turn so that it dumped over the hill and then they came back in for more. Pappy also worked for the railroad. And my papaw, he worked for the gas company. I don't really come from one of those families where everybody is a miner.

Like I said, my mother's people had land over in Johnson County, and I used to spend a lot of time over there. In the eighties,
a piece of family land that nobody lived on got strip-mined, and a little bit of it had some gas wells drilled that exposed some people to radioactive material, and there was a big lawsuit over that. I personally haven't set foot on that land, because every time I ask about it they'll say, “Aw, it's grown up in briars,” or something like that. I've been trying to get my family to take me over there for a while. That's something I'm real interested in because I'm pretty interested in the family history.

It's strange to know about this land my ancestors lived on for generations, but now it's not fit to visit. In a way it seems like there's a part of my past I'll never get to know.

I went one semester to college right after high school; didn't know what I wanted to do. I just took some basic classes; I did pretty well. Then I spent a year where I just worked, then I thought maybe I knew what I wanted to do, so I went back for one semester, did more basic classes. Then three years of no college, just worked. That's when I worked underground, and at that point I figured out the direction I wanted to go. And so then I decided to apply to Berea because they have a free tuition program and it's close to home, and I got in.

I had been living in Louisville for about three years, from the age of nineteen until I was twenty-two, and I just hated it. I never felt right there. Don't know why I stayed there that long. I finally realized I had to move back to Eastern Kentucky because anywhere else, I just didn't feel right. But, you know, to live you have to be able to make a living, and I wanted to be able to make a
decent
living, didn't want to work at Wal-Mart.