Mountain Justice. Tricia Shapiro
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 at the school being sick. And not just the kids are sick. “I keep headaches,” Melissa says, “just from being around here. I didn’t keep headaches until I moved down here. And I keep sore throat, upset stomach. It’s 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