The Liberal Patriot

Criminal Indifference, Big Coal Versus Children

J.G. Schwam - March 26, 2007

The parents of Sundial West Virginia are fighting for their children. They are fighting for a safe school for their children. In New York, Los Angeles or many other major cities parents fight this battle too. They battle drugs, crumbling buildings, violence a struggle to retain good teachers.

In Sundial these common issues are not the problem. They fight a corporate machine, backed a government that cares not for the safety of their children or anyone else in Sundial. Their children go to school next door to Massey Energy’s Goals Coal Company’s processing plant. Less than 300 feet from the school sits a massive coal silo, filed constantly day and night by a mile long conveyer belt that hauls thousands of tons of coal a day, as the strip mine above blasts away mountains above the school. The mine and the plant rein rock, coal dust and the untold chemical residue upon the Marsh Fork Elementary School just next door.

Federal law prohibits such operations yet for nearly five years yet Ed Wiley a vibrant grandfather with children in the school has been met with defiance and indifference in his fight for the most basic of all parental wants, a school for his children that is safe from harm.

But West Virginia is not New York or Los Angeles. The governmental coffers are dependent on a coal severance tax, not property or income taxes. Its citizens are pawns in a cynical game, ignored by a government long ago bought and paid for by big coal companies like Massey.

The more coal and the faster they get it, the more people get rich.

But not the people of Sundial, their jobs were gone long ago when Massey and others shifted from underground mining to a form of strip mining call Mountaintop Removal (MTR) that blasts away the mountains, so that twenty men with massive machines can do the work of one hundred. The coal will be long gone before they grow old and ill from the coal dust and chemicals they were knowingly exposed to as children. Children that just wanted to go to school, free from the risk of black lung disease or worse, entombment under a wall of toxic sludge from the massive waste impoundment just one hundred feet above their heads.

Decades ago coal mining jobs fueled a poor but vibrant Raleigh County, astride the Marsh Fork of the Coal River, the county built parks, a public pool and a community center, quality amenities that would equal those citizens that the brawny nearby industrial centers of Illinois, Ohio and Virginia would be expect.

But in the decades that followed cheap oil and gas prevailed and the coal jobs dried up and with them the meager coffers of the small coalfield school district of Marsh Fork dwindled. The pool closed for lack of funds to keep it up, the parks became overgrown and the community center closed.

Then in the late 1980’s after a decade of oil prices shocks and spiraling energy demands, big coal returned. But the jobs and money did not. MTR was the new game in town. Big coal began to ravage and pollute the land and ship the profits out of state. The severance taxes, collected by the state never made it back to Sundial. Today the stricken county can not afford to build a new school, in a safe place. The state government has turned a deaf ear to the pleadings its citizens.

Massey Energy and their subsidiary, Goals Coal somehow managed to spit in the face of Federal law and build and now they seek to expand their plant. After five years of defiant indifference, emotions have to boil over in Sundial and nearby communities equally devastated by MTR and angered by governmental indifference. Community organizations like Wiley’s Pennies for Promise and Coal River Mountain Watch, ignored by the West Virginia government that sanctions and permits the mining, have had enough.

On March 16, 2007 a group of citizens of Sundial and nearby communities ventured not for the first time to the state capitol in Chareleston. As about 30 coalfield residents assembled in the capitol rotunda Governor Joe Manchin sent his Deputy Chief of staff to take notes from the residents. According to a resident community organizer for CRMW and coalfield resident Heather Hosta, he did not.

For reasons not apparent the Capitol and State police, chose to violently dissipate the gathering, throwing several to the ground including Keeper of the Mountain, 62 year old Larry Gibson. Hosta was carried away in a manner so clearly intended to inflict pain it that it would make any conscientious enforcement professional ashamed. Comments made to Hosta prior to the arrest by officers present may indicate prior intent to treat her in the brutal manner they later chose.

When asked for a comment on the conduct of the arresting officers Dep. Sec'y for Media Affairs and Operations for the WV Dept of Military Affairs and Public Safety, Joe Thornton replied: “I can't say what State Police or Capitol Police procedures are but I did not see anything (on TV news footage) that alerted me him to think that anything improper may have occurred. When asked if there will be an investigation into the propriety of the arrests, he responded: “anytime arrests occur in public the department looks internally to see if all procedures were followed but I saw nothing in this occurrence that warrants anything further than a normal review”.

Hosta said, “The pain I endured during the arrest is a small sacrifice compared to that of the community. My experience pales in comparison to the fears community has for their lives and their community. If they loose their school they loose the last community building they have. They fear they may loose their community entirely if it is closed without being replaced and their children bused miles away”.

Tonya Allen, press secretary for West Virginia congressmen when asked, about the March 16^th arrests and the plight of Marsh Fork Elementary replied: "Congressman Rahall met personally with Ed Wiley last year when he came to Washington to draw attention to his understandable concerns about the Marsh Fork School. But this is an enforcement matter that is up to the State of West Virginia. I would note, however, that federal law is clear that there shall be no surface coal mining activities within 300 feet of any school.”

Sources say that the state of West Virginia Bureau of surface mining overruled a ruling by its own Department of Environmental Protection that a permit to build second silo at the Goals plant would be denied and advised Massey Coal to go ahead with the project. Comments from Congressman Rahall’s office on this decision, which is in counter to his statement regarding the federal law, are pending.

For five years the state of West Virginia has offered no alternative to the small community school district located in a county devastated by the changed paradigm of coal mining. Outrage runs high as the ravages of greed and MTR wear day after, year after year on families that live beneath its scourge, trying to preserve their home, their lives and those of their children.

To the government of West Virginia and its big coal patrons the criminal indifference they exhibit to the pain they inflict on its states parents, its children and those that attempt point it while suffering beneath it are little more than an annoyance.

To the government of West Virginia coal comes before anything, even the lives and safety of the children of their state.

However in the wake of the arrests, years of small victories and massive set backs on March 23^rd a Federal Court judge reinforced prior court rulings that the US Army Corps violated the law by issuing permits to permanently fill stream headwaters with mountains of mine tailings called valley fills violates the Clean Water Act and can not continue.

Perhaps this ruling will stand where others have not. Perhaps Governor Manchin, will realize its time to serve his state, not just big coal and build the people of Sundial a school away from harm and give back the communities some of their dignity and the coal severance tax money he and has predecessors have withheld for so long.

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