7:15 p.m. Wednesday, May 5, 2010

 

After I signed on as editorial page editor of the Charleston Gazette, West Virginia’s premier newspaper, the first visitor to the editorial board was Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship.

I arrived in 2003, and I’d been mostly delighted with this quirky, gorgeous and still isolated piece of America. But I quickly bumped up against West Virginia’s dark side: the ravages of coal mining. The mountains were being raped. Mountaintop removal was destroying much of the last wild landscape in the eastern U.S.

“Mountaintop removal,” by the way, is a terrible misnomer, since it creates the impression that it’s simply a matter of slicing the tops off some remote peaks. In fact, the practice systematically destroys entire mountains, reducing them to rubble that then chokes the surrounding valleys, creating thousands of acres of decimated, dead landscape.

And the main character in this ongoing drama, I was informed — a man who could have come from Central Casting in the role of old-fashioned mustachioed Bad Guy — was Blankenship.

He arrived at our office with a PR guy in a green suit and regaled our little gathering with his Local Boy history: childhood in rural Mingo County, graduation from West Virginia University, working his way up from the bottom of the industry. He then told us he thought it would be only fitting for us to give him a regular column.

We didn’t do that. We told him we’d be happy to treat him as any other member of the community and consider any contribution to our op-ed page, but that we weren’t in the habit of handing out weekly space to anyone who asked for it. To him, I’m sure, it only seemed fair that he should have his own regular forum in the paper to “balance” the aggressive and dedicated reporting of our coal beat reporter, Ken Ward.

What I remember most about the encounter, however, was Blankenship’s quiet arrogance: He was clearly a man used to getting what he wanted and utterly convinced of his right to walk into the local newspaper and demand a forum.

Once he figured out that wasn’t going to happen, we paid a price: He slapped the paper with a $300 million defamation suit. He lost the suit eventually, but it cost our little paper dearly in legal fees. And in the intervening time, he would ruin the career of a state Supreme Court judge who ruled against his company in environmental suits, spending millions to promote the election of an unknown lawyer who then ruled in his favor.

For a while, it seemed Blankenship would have his way. The Bush administration had stacked the Mining Safety and Health Administration and the EPA with industry-friendly types who weren’t much interested in enforcing environmental or safety regulations. Ward’s reporting at the Gazette doggedly pointed this out, along with the tragic results.

From time to time, as in 2007 with the Sago disaster, national attention would briefly be focused on West Virginia. But only briefly. And in my subsequent forays into the world beyond those mountains, I found it nearly impossible to get anyone to listen to the story. Beyond the mountains, West Virginia seemed to exist only as an amusing stereotype: pretty scenery and poor people, some of them coal miners. Not really a part of 21st-century America.

That isolation helped Blankenship. For years it seemed no one outside the state cared that he had succeeded in buying his own justice. It also helped the man to believe in his own mythology. For a few years, he seemed invincible.

Then two things happened: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that Brent Benjamin, the judge elected with the benefit of Blankenship’s largesse, should have recused himself from ruling in a suit involving Massey. Then came the explosion at Montcoal, killing 29 miners, the worst U.S. coal-mining disaster in 40 years, and subsequent revelations about Massey’s safety record. And now the FBI has opened a criminal investigation into the Massey tragedy; several news outlets report that it includes allegations of bribery of state and federal inspectors.

Blankenship is not the only character in this story. Last week, two miners were killed in a roof collapse at a mine in Kentucky. The Kentucky mine belongs to another company, and the neglect of Appalachia is a theme in American history.

But the Massey CEO’s aggressive tactics, combined with the recent anti-regulatory atmosphere in Washington, helped perpetuate both environmental and human disasters.

West Virginia’s coal industry likes to tout itself as the lifeblood of the state’s economy. Too much government interference, the coal apologists love to assert, will cripple a state whose economy is already close to the weakest in the nation.

But as a former colleague reminded me this week, there are now more nurses in the state than coal miners. This year, with a nonfarm work force of about 730,000, mining and forestry combined only employed 27,900. Coal only accounts for about 7 percent of the gross state product.

In fact, coal is probably more important to the rest of the country than it is to West Virginians. Most of the relatively cheap electricity we depend on comes from coal. Thanks to automation (including the scary, stories-high machines that efficiently chew up the mountains), more coal is mined today with fewer workers. All those “clean” cars we intend to plug in will have to get their power from somewhere: chances are, from coal-fired plants.

So yes, while the swaggering Blankenship deserves considerable blame, there’s another enemy in this story: the one we see in the mirror. The least we can do, as participants in this drama, is to remember who’s risking their lives to keep our lights on, and encourage our lawmakers to keep up the pressure on Big Coal and its enablers to clean up their act. Make sure they can’t hide behind the mountains any more.

 

Susanna Rodell lives in Milton.