Almost heaven, West Virginia
Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River,
Life is old there, older than the trees
Younger than the mountains, growin' like a breeze.
Country roads, take me home, to the place, I belong
West Virginia , mountain momma
Take me home, country roads
One day soon after (buying up the property), a timber contractor clear-cuts a ridgetop where families in the hollow hunted and fished and hiked for generations. Then the blasting begins. Daily detonations of ANFO--a mix of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, the same explosive that Timothy McVeigh used in Oklahoma City--cause reverberations that crack foundations and walls, destroy wells, and rack everyone's nerves. Coal trucks start barreling up and down the narrow hollow road. Coal dust from their open loads coats the houses and cars. At times, toxic chemicals, spilled from the site above, turn the hollow's streams black.
All my memories, gather round her
Miner's lady, stranger to blue water
Dark and dusty, painted on the sky
Misty taste of moonshine
Teardrop in my eye.
Country roads, take me home, to the place, I belong
West Virginia , mountain momma
Take me home, country roads
Somnolent as it often seems, the West Virginia Division of Environmental Protection still managed to issue 4,268 citations to Massey operations between January 1, 2000, and December 2, 2005. A violation is anything that looks amiss when an inspector comes by. By comparison, Arch earned 732 violations over that same period, with 355 for Peabody. Far more serious is a pattern of three violations for the same problem. For that, the W.V.D.E.P. may summon the offender to a show-cause hearing--to explain why he shouldn't have his permit revoked. Over that six-year period, Massey had 117 show-causes. Arch had 20. Peabody had none. Jeff McCormick, of the W.V.D.E.P.'s Division of Mining and Reclamation, puts it bluntly: "Numbers don't lie."
For none of these activities or infractions does Massey reach out to the communities it's destroying with an explanatory or apologetic word. The way it communicates is by posting "Do Not Enter" signs on its mines' entry gates, and by fencing off all the mountain land it owns or leases. Families in the Coal River Valley have lived with mining for nearly a century. But until Massey came, no one had kept them from the hills they called home. If they sue for some aspect of the damage done to their homes and land, they end up in court for years at great personal expense. If they try to move away, they find no one to buy their homes--except, sometimes, Massey, which might pay "fair market value" for houses in its direct path. "Fair market" means what the houses are worth now that a mountaintop-removal-mine site is up the hollow.
Officially, if a rupture occurred, an alarm would be sounded "personally or by bullhorn," and the children of Marsh Fork Elementary would be driven to schools down the valley. Unofficially, the children would probably be buried. Massey supporters in the area--which is to say teachers, parents, and other locals whose relatives work for the company--say this is a case of Chicken Little, since the impoundment was built in 1985 and no major rupture has occurred. (Small leaks of toxic liquid are considered routine.) Davitt McAteer begs to differ. The assistant secretary in the Department of Labor's Mine Safety and Health Administration under President Clinton, he headed up Senator Byrd's impoundment study and is now directing Governor Manchin's study of the Sago mine collapse. He points out that at the 110 impoundments in West Virginia built since 1972 there have been 33 spills or ruptures--more than half of them Massey operations--releasing, conservatively, 170 million gallons of sludge. "The fact that 17 belong to one company tells you that this company is not dealing with the problems," McAteer says. "My bottom line is you shouldn't have a huge impoundment above a school, even if it's the best impoundment in the world."
I remember, growing up, listening to the John Denver playing on the AM station in my parents' car, thinking how beautiful this place sounded. I really hadn't thought about it much lately, until I read the article "The Rape of Appalachia" in this month's Vanity Fair.
None of this should have surprised me. Corporate greed. Disregard for the environment. Disregard for the non-rich. Just another day in George Bush's America.
I hear the voice in the morning hours she calls me
The radio reminds me of my home far away
And drivin' down the road
I get a feelin' that I should have been home yesterday Yesterday....
Take me home, country roads, to the place, I belong
West Virginia , mountain momma
Take me home, country roads
Take me home, country roads