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 lost the right to mine coal in this state, in my opinion. Anyone that abuses these kids like they have been doing should be shut down. If [another company] wants at some future date to mine coal underground up there, responsibly, we would not be opposed to that. But we want the kids moved out of that school, we want the school torn down because it is laden with chemicals and toxins, and we want another school built up the road, upstream.”
Most of the people here today are longtime locals, like Bo, but some “outsiders” are here to support them, including Hillary and the interns now living just up the road in Naoma, as well as a carload from Tennessee—Chris and Paloma, Gena (one of Chris’s fellow law students, very active in the fight against MTR in Tennessee), and john johnson, whose role today is to provide security for cars.
CRMW’s Patty Sebok arrived here early today, she tells me, and soon afterward a car carrying two state troopers pulled up. (State police told CRMW the day before that they’d be there, to make sure the demonstrators were safe from traffic on the road, which typically travels quite fast.) “I showed them the pictures [aerial views of the sludge pond looming over the school] and I started telling them the story about what sits behind the school and what’s going on.
“They said that they had heard rumors that there was a camp going on, an action camp,” referring apparently to the weeklong MJS training camp that’s to begin near Pipestem, West Virginia, this evening. “And they said that they were concerned because they heard it was the ‘earth movement people.’ And I said, ‘Well, I don’t know who the earth movement people are, and he said, ‘Well, they blow up power lines and things like that.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m not going to blow up the power line—I wouldn’t have any power!’ And he started laughing, and kind of got relaxed a little bit. And he said, ‘You all are our people,’ and I said ‘That’s right.’”
Debbie Jarrell, Ed Wiley’s wife, tells me: “I’ve lived here all my life. Generations of my family have lived here. I have a ten-year-old granddaughter inside the [school] building right now. The reason we’re here is not only the slurry pond, not only the prep plant, or the silo, or them wanting to put another silo right beside that. How much poison do our kids need? It’s time for the community to put their foot down. And that’s why I’m here.”
Melissa Beckner moved here only about four years ago, she tells me. Her daughter goes to this school. “She had the little childhood sicknesses, but she never was really sick until she started kindergarten [here] last year, and she has been sick ever since. She has to take [medication] for allergies and asthma, she keeps a headache, she keeps a sore throat, a stomachache. And I didn’t know, I thought it was just her,” until Ed and Debbie told her about other kids
