from being around here. I mean, I live down here. We just want to save our kids, and keep them safe.”
CRMW—primarily Bo and Ed—went door to door recently to try to get a handle on how many kids at the school have health problems. “There are a lot of sick kids,” Bo says. “Sore throats, coming home with headaches, coughs. Sometimes the next morning they’re OK, and they’ll come home from school and it’ll be the same thing. Sometimes they’d be like that all week, and then the weekends they’d feel better, and then Monday when they went back to school they would start feeling worse.” Of 125 homes surveyed, 60 had kids attending Marsh Fork Elementary. Of those sixty, fifty-three had children with health problems, mostly respiratory (asthma, chronic bronchitis) but also symptoms such as headache and nausea that get better when the child is away from school. In addition, several students, former students, and teachers have contracted unusual cancers in recent years. Some have died.
Larry Gibson’s here today too, down from Kayford half an hour or so away. He’s holding a sign that says: “Remember Buffalo Creek—125 dead.” “My family lost sixty-six people to the Buffalo Creek disaster in 1972 because of coal,” he tells me. Larry’s father’s family had been there for generations. “You got this over here,” he says, pointing to the coal processing plant, “and you got the impoundment above the school. How safe do you think these kids are? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what they’re doing here is wrong.”
The comparison with the Buffalo Creek disaster isn’t unduly alarmist. Here as there, the dam is flawed—different flaws, but potentially fatal just the same. And here as there, the coal company knows the dam is flawed. “I helped build [this] dam,” says Jackie Browning, another local man attending the protest today. “I was the main dozer operator on that dam, from ’94 to ’99 till I got disabled from chemicals.
“A lot of [the dam] has got big mud pots in it. You have to compact a dam. Back when they used trucks to haul the refuse [the ungraded mine wastes used to build the dam] up there, you had to put the refuse down in two-foot lifts and it had to meet a strict compaction test. And that determines the strength of that dam. Well, when they put the belt line up there [in 1997, to transport the mine waste previously hauled by the trucks], the belt carried lots of water with the refuse.” In rainy weather, “you’d start to push that slate across that dam” from where the belt brought it, maybe 150 feet in from one side, push it across the top of the dam, 960 feet wide, toward the other side. “You’ve already got water in that slate. You have to push from the belt head over 800 feet. You cannot, on these rainy days, push that far without hanging up—you can’t get all the way across.” But you have to keep hauling what the belt delivers, so the loads of slate-mud-water pile up maybe 200 feet from the far side of the dam. Mud oozes out of the pile into the resulting low spot between the growing pile and the far side, “and that thing just fills up with this soft mud, like jelly.” When the weather improves, the belt starts delivering waste without so much water, “and you just start filling that [low spot] in,” right over the mud. “There’s no compaction there. Underneath there’s a big deck of Jello.” And Jello, of course, is not a good structural material. “How come when they used trucks they had to meet a compaction test? It was strict. Now they use dozers to push, they do not compact proper at all, and nobody worries about it.” Inspectors don’t come when it’s raining, and when they do come, it looks fine and they’re told everything is fine. “On paper, they’ll say everything’s passing. But it’s not. I went down [about two months ago] and talked to them, and the engineer told me, ‘We know we’ve got problems.’”
Jackie is also keenly aware of how toxic the chemicals used at the plant really are. He’s badly disabled from his own exposure to them, and wonders what they’re doing to the children attending school here. “I was down at the plant [working] on the coal pile for a little while,” he says, just a short distance from the school, “and that’s where I got the exposure. The last six weeks that I worked they increased the chemicals, about three or four times what they’s supposed to, in order to get that real fine coal out. The more chemicals they use, the more coal they can recover. They increased so high that my system couldn’t stand it. It’s just like I drank acid, it just ate me up.” Since then, Jackie has been plagued by multiple chemical sensitivity and a range of neurological and respiratory symptoms.
By just before noon, close to sixty people have gathered in front of the school. Four police cars are here. Several of the protesters, including Bo’s daughter, Sarah Haltom, are carrying cameras to document whatever happens. Local TV and radio reporters are here, too.
Chris Irwin, Judy Bonds, Hillary, and a couple of others are holding a large banner reading “Massey Energy Corporation Raping Our Homeland” as the demonstration prepares to move up the road from the school toward the driveway and gate of the coal facility. The demonstrators line up along the road in front of the school, holding up signs so people in passing cars can read them. Some drivers, a few dozen over the next hour or so, honk their support as they go by.
At noon the procession starts up the road, with Bo in the lead, alongside Jackie Browning, who looks a bit nervous. At the entrance to Goals Coal two police cars have stopped traffic in both directions. Another police car is parked in the plant’s driveway, which is closed to deliveries right now. (They’ve also got a back entrance, so the demonstration may be inconvenient but isn’t actually shutting the facility down.) Demonstrators and the big banner stretch across the driveway in front of the gate, but at the request of police, they refrain from blocking it completely.
When everyone has reached the plant entrance, and the police have allowed traffic to resume on the road, Bo speaks to the crowd, followed by Jackie and then Judy. “It is time to join together to halt this destructive mining practice that destroys our homes, communities, and Appalachian mountains and culture,” Judy says. “From across Appalachia and the entire country, Americans are building a strong movement called Mountain Justice Summer. Who is Mountain Justice Summer?” The crowd shouts back: “We are!”
“We are the ones whose homes are being blasted,” Judy continues, “whose homes are being dusted, whose children are being poisoned every day. We are everyday citizens who have been abused and denied our rights for over 130 years. It’s a shame that we have to beg our government for our basic human rights, to live in our homes in peace and send our children to a clean school without fear of being poisoned or crushed to death by a dam. We welcome all of our brothers and sisters that will join us to fight for justice for mountain people this summer and beyond. Welcome, Mountain Justice Summer.”
Next, Bo reminds the crowd that two days from now representatives from the state DEP will hold a hearing at the school. “Massey has applied to build another silo identical to that monstrosity over there, right next to it,” he says. “Give our kids some more coal dust and chemicals, I guess. They haven’t killed them with that one, they want to speed it up.” Bo asks everyone here to come to the hearing. “We want them to do their jobs. We want that sludge dam shut down and dried out. Take their license away! They don’t have the right to have a license in this state!”
Debbie Jarrell addresses the crowd briefly, describing the siting of the silos as “pure arrogance” and reading a list of demands, including: 1) that the coal processing plant beside the school be shut down; 2) that the school be cleaned up or a new, safe school be built nearby, in “our community,” not a long drive away like the other schools that have replaced those closed in the valley; 3) that Massey withdraw its request to build a second silo; 4) that Massey stop blasting that affects local homes; and 5) that Massey shut down all of its surface (strip) mine sites.
It’s now shortly after 12:30. The protesters move to line both sides of the driveway but, cooperating with the police, still refrain from blocking it. Bo and Judy walk across the bridge and up the driveway to deliver the list of demands to Massey.
“You know, that was so strange,” Judy tells me later.
