Mountain Justice. Tricia Shapiro
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government, the most corrupt in the history of the country perhaps.”
Jack confronted that problem directly in connection with an enormous coal slurry spill in Inez, Kentucky, where on one night in October 2000 more than 300 million gallons of sludge burst from an enormous “pond” similar to the one that looms over Marsh Fork Elementary School. Most of the sludge went into two streams that overflowed and flooded nearby homes. The Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska released 10.8 million gallons; the Inez spill was 30 times as big. Nonetheless, it received almost no media attention until the spill reached the Ohio River, days later.
People living in Appalachia’s coalfields sometimes wonder how it is that environmentalists across America can be so passionate about Alaska but apparently indifferent to the ongoing environmental catastrophe wrought by strip mining in Appalachia. Perhaps it’s because Appalachia, though spectacularly biodiverse and wildly productive of flora, fauna, and fresh water, isn’t pristine wilderness. Perhaps also it’s because Appalachia is inhabited by “hillbillies,” denigrated for generations by American popular culture.
In their response to the Inez disaster, government authorities apparently relied on both the national media’s lack of interest and the reputed ignorance of Appalachian locals. When local people went to public meetings after the big sludge spill, they expected at least some action from the environmental agencies, Inez resident Nina McCoy recalls. Instead, “the EPA, when they had one of their first meetings with the people [whose water supply and land were poisoned], they told the people that there was nothing harmful in the sludge, that it was fine because everything in it was on the periodical table of the elements. And then they went on to say: ‘You can ask your biology or your chemistry teacher.’” As it happens that’s Nina, who teaches at the local high school. And her students did ask her what that meant. They’d just studied the periodic table, and of course what the EPA was saying made no sense.
“So then what happens,” she says, “is [that most local people] just kind of give up. They’re not drinking the water—they know better—but they just don’t know how to fight it. So many times I think that is what we really need to focus on, not necessarily shooting everybody who runs the coal companies [she’s joking here—a joke with a bitter edge], but actually getting back our [government] agencies, to make the people feel empowered.
“We have corporations that think there should be no rules, and the people just think: ‘Well, uh, OK, no rules’—I guess. They’re afraid that the company will leave if [it has] to follow the rules.” At the same time, miners and their wives are telling their neighbors “that EPA was shoving them around: Do this! Get out of here!,” even though at public meetings, “we saw an EPA lawyer and coal company lawyer patting each other on the back.”
At the time of the Inez spill, Jack Spadaro was still director of the National Mine Health and Safety Academy, which trains the nation’s mine inspectors and is run under the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA). “Because I had years of experience regulating coal-waste dams—that had been my specialty for a long time—I was asked to be part of a [federally appointed] team to go to Inez and investigate the coal slurry spill. I was put in charge of the engineering aspects, the geotechnical investigation to determine the cause. And we were doing well. We went down in October, November, and December of 2000 and began investigating, doing a drilling program at the site of the spill to find out what had happened, interviewing people.”
They found that “a reservoir of slurry about 100 feet deep and about 70 acres failed by breaking into [abandoned] underground mine workings beneath the reservoir and spilling out into Coldwater Creek and another watershed, Wolf Creek. If it had all gone down Coldwater Creek, people would have drowned.
“In January 2001 when the Bush administration came in—honestly, on Inauguration Day of 2001 our investigation was halted. We were told to wrap it up in a few days and begin writing our report. Well, we had thirty-five, forty more people we wanted to interview. And we had a whole lot of evidence that the company, which was a subsidiary of Massey Energy, had submitted documents to the government six years before, when there had been another [slurry pond] breakthrough—those documents were essentially lies about what was underneath that impoundment.” The breakthrough six years before had been “the same sort of failure. Into Wolf Creek. So they submitted a plan to rectify the situation in 1994. But the plan showed that there was fifty feet of cover between the [underground] mine workings and the bottom of the reservoir, and a hundred-foot coal barrier. In reality we found, through this drilling program, about fifteen or eighteen feet of coal barrier and less than fifteen feet of cover over top of the mine workings. We discovered in the investigation, in interviews, that people at the mine knew that there was only fifteen feet of cover. But they submitted a document showing a fifty and a hundred-foot barrier. So they lied in their submittals to the government.
“I felt that the company should then have been cited for that, and for knowing and willful negligence at least, if not outright fraud for what they’d submitted to the government. But the Bush administration didn’t want to do that. So they had people tampering with the writing of the report.” Jack’s team would send drafts in “and they would be rewritten. The head of [MSHA], appointed by Bush, a guy named Dave Lauriski, started poking his fingers into this investigation, and I felt that was inappropriate. So I withdrew, I resigned publicly from the investigation and stated my reasons.
“It came time to do a public release of the report, and Lauriski called me several days before the release and essentially ordered me to sign the report. And I refused to do it. Twice. The report was issued without my name on the report.
“I fought with the Bush administration for the next two years about this. It was mainly about the government aiding and abetting a company that had violated the law and put people at risk. Because when that thing failed, it killed 1.6 million fish, wiped out water supplies to seventeen towns, killed everything for a hundred miles, all the way to the Ohio River.” In June 2001, federal officials changed the locks on Jack’s office and placed him on administrative leave, accusing him of abusing his authority as director of the mine inspectors’ academy. After that trumped-up charge failed to stick, Jack was ordered transferred to Pittsburgh, far from his family and home in West Virginia. He opted to negotiate an early retirement and has continued to fight against abusive mining practices ever since. (His nemesis Dave Lauriski himself resigned as head of MSHA in November 2004, shortly after a government report questioned the propriety of contracts he’d awarded to corporate cronies.)
Jack believes that “there’s still a lot that could be done [against MTR] in litigation. I think we can revisit some of those same issues that were brought up in the late ’90s in federal court on a state level. And then also go back in federal court and hammer away at the same issues, since nothing was really ever resolved on things like approximate original contour, the illegality of mountaintop removal and the valley fills, the Clean Water Act—none of it’s been really resolved.” The absence of such clear judicial resolution enabled the Bush administration to continue to use regulatory directives and redefinitions allowing mining companies to violate the laws’ apparent intent on these issues. For example, in May 2002, the Bush administration redefined “fill” for the purposes of the Clean Water Act as anything that would have the effect of filling in a streambed, thus gutting the act’s requirements that fill placed in waterways must be chosen both to avoid “adverse effect” and to achieve some desirable purpose.
Supporting litigation is currently the main focus of Jack’s current efforts against strip mining. “I’m in for the long haul. I think we can win this. Because I think what is happening is not only illegal, it’s just plain wrong.”
As of 2005, Jack says, MTR in West Virginia has “removed close to 400,000 acres; 320-some thousand in Kentucky; 150,000 total strip mining in Ohio; about 90 to 100 thousand acres in southwestern Virginia. It’s up to close to a million acres that have been completely wiped out.” (Reliable data on the extent of strip mining is hard to come by. These figures are from research Jack did in the early 2000s, through government contacts. Since then, the acreage affected has grown considerably.)
“About fourteen people have died in flash floods in the last three years,” Jack adds to the reasons why MTR