The ads, underwritten by a natural gas company called the Chesapeake Energy Corp, show faces smudged with make-up meant to resemble coal dust under a headline reading: “Face It, Coal is Filthy.”

The campaign was pulled in the wake of Rahall’s and Byrd’s furious objections that it was unfair and misleading. They say the people featured in the ads are models, not miners, and that the Oklahoma City-based natural gas company is parading as an environmental group concerned about the hazardous effects of coal when really they’re just a “bamboozling” profit-seeker trying to swing business in their favor.

Well, this argument is all fine and good, except for one small issue: these ads depict a very real truth of life in the shadow of coal mining, and whether the people in them are real or the intent behind them is honorable is beside the much bigger point. Migrating, suffocating, ubiquitous coal dust is a hard and fast fact, as anyone who lives near a coal mining or processing facility can attest. If coal-loving congressmen want to ignore that or call the public picture of that an unfair and inaccurate stereotype, then they’re either kidding themselves or being knowingly untruthful.

Face it, gentlemen: coal is filthy. Stop denying it, stop shifting blame, and start pressing the companies at fault to clean up their acts.

They’ve been called out for illegally issuing permits that destroy vital streams, ecosystems, and the environment around mining sites. Never mind that they’re supposed to be the ones in charge of protecting the environment and preserving the integrity of the streams and rivers that run through the all-but-devastated Appalachian Mountains. Now they actually have to do their jobs, not facilitate the kind of environmental destruction they purport to fight.

Hard to believe it took a federal judge and months of appeals and public outcry to make the Army and the government keep their word. Makes me wonder what else we should be holding their feet to the fire for. How does this affect Arch Coal’s Spruce No. 1 mine, which I wrote about at the end of January? Well, it sounds like it’ll take more time in court to come to a conclusion, so stay tuned. Friday was a great day, though; Judge Chambers decision set a remarkably important precedent.

Now for the bad news.

West Virginia’s State Surface Mine Board approved Massey Energy Co.’s permit to build that second coal silo near Marsh Fork Elementary School.

Remember this issue? A couple hundred small children going to school 225 feet from a coal silo that releases poisonous, chemical-laden coal dust into the air, dust that has been found throughout the school, and just down the mountainside from a 385-feet tall sludge dam containing nearly 3 billion gallons of toxic sludge and waste?

But let’s forget about the sludge dam for a second (even though it contains over 20 times the volume of another nearby sludge dam that broke and killed 125 people in 1972) and focus on the silo. The coal dust it gives off is poisonous, literally poisonous. Children are sick, teachers are sick, but there are no other schools to attend, so the kids’ parents are forced to choose between their children’s health and education and the teachers between their health and a job. Now, instead of cleaning up the site and/or building the children a new school like Governor Manchin (W.Va.) indicated he might, the state has given Massey the go ahead to build another silo.

Overturning the WV DEP’s 2005 order to block the silo, the Surface Mine Board gave Massey the go-ahead on Tuesday, March 13. And lest anyone downplay the danger this silo posed with Massey’s PR spin of reducing emissions, Massey’s own permit predicts an increase of emissions by three and a half tons per year. That’s a lot of coaldust.

No wonder West Virginians are embarrassed of their government. No wonder they’re disappointed to a point bordering on hopelessness. The rest of the country is still mostly in the dark about what’s happening to West Virginia, to its residents and their homes, and to the future of their children — and the people in charge, rather than work to increase awareness and stop the madness, encourage the coal companies to ravage and rape the place they call home! It’s absolutely mind-boggling. I’ve heard stories of Senator Robert C. Byrd crying because he was "so devastated" for everyone affiliated with MFE. I’ve watched the videos of Governor Manchin looking into the eyes of a small child, assuring her and her grandparents that he would help them.

In reality, when activists and concerned citizens came to appeal to his reason and his compassion last week, when they came to his office to sit in protest of this outrageous and dangerous new ruling, they were arrested. But I guess that’s just politics as usual, politics as terrible and politics as immoral, which is how it’s been in West Virginia for a long time now, as long as King Coal has reigned supreme over conscience, public service, and the law itself.

Here’s some information on developing MTR stories:

The Appalachian Coal Field Delegation will be attending the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Conference for the second time this year. The conference runs from April 30-May 11, but Bo Webb learned from experience last year that corporate execs and the bigwigs that matter usually only attend the last week, so this year he and the other delegates will, too. They want to go beyond linking to NGOs with similar interests and goals to form a common language with which to (hopefully) influence U.N. policy. To bring attention to their efforts, the Coal Field Delegation, along with friends and supporters, will host an event in New York. Should attract some pretty big names from what I hear.

This conference comes none too soon, as Massey Energy Co. has just applied for three new mining permits in and around Coal River Mountain, plus an additional 162 acres in the Peachtree and Edwight areas in which it is already mining. News of the second permit appeared in the February 1 edition of the Beckley, W.Va. Register-Herald and struck fear in the hearts of the most fearless anti-MTR activists: Bo Webb and Judy Bonds. The permit would give Massey 2039.89 acres to mine in the Horsecreek, Dry Creek, Sycamore Creek, and Dorothy areas of Coal River Mountain and ties into a 680-acre permit Massey already applied for in the Bee Tree, Horsecreek, and Dorothy areas. In other words, the mountains directly surrounding Bonds’s and Webb’s homes. (Bonds, who’s essentially been forced from her home one time already, can feel the blasting again where she is now.)

What tragic irony it would be if those who have given up everything to fight MTR were forced out of their homes and off their land because of it, too. It seems incomprehensible to someone like me, living in an apartment in New York with no real space — never mind land — to call my own, but can you imagine how dreadful it must be to open the daily newspaper and learn that the fate of your home rests in the hands of a corporation that doesn’t care and a government that doesn’t notice?

I mentioned the Spruce Mine permit in my last post, and the number of people who would be affected by it keeps climbing higher and higher: Sible Rose Wheatley Weekley of Blair, W.Va., died on January 15 without ever learning the outcome of the battle she began almost nine years ago. In 1998, Sibby and her husband James filed the original lawsuit that helped launch the fight against MTR. The original Spruce Mine permit was at the heart of that case, and its legacy in the form of this most recent and no less devastating permit remains a central issue for James Weekley today, especially since the permit threatens both his home in Pigeon Roost Hollow and his efforts to save Blair Mountain, the historical site of the largest armed uprising in American labor history in which miners fought against dangerous conditions, abusive management and the disorganized labor practices that led to both.

To give a brief update on the current Spruce Mine permit’s status, Joe Lovett, hero lawyer from the Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment, along with Jim Hecker, another maverick environmental advocate from Trial Lawyers for Public Justice, asked Judge Robert Chambers to issue a temporary restraining order to block Arch from further activity. On February 1, after hearing from lawyers on both sides, Chambers agreed that, for now, there would be no more disturbances at the Spruce permit area. And so the lawyers will get to work on their arguments in the coming days and weeks, each party trying to persuade or dissuade Chambers as to whether or not he should include the Spruce case in the ongoing case that the Weekleys began.

As Chambers has yet to come to a decision in the larger lawsuit, it seems like we’ll be waiting for answers for quite a while. But in the business of mining, where so often the coal companies emerge victorious from cases like this one or from the endless round of appeals that follows, no news is good news for residents of Appalachia.

This is a devastating blow for the folks in Logan County — and all over West Virginia, really. What’s even more devastating are the loopholes and provisions that allow streams to be buried and ecosystems to be destroyed by a “Clean Water Act” permit. Yesterday, three fast-acting environmental groups represented by Joe Lovett, a straight-shooting environmental lawyer who’s been following this case from the start, filed papers to secure a temporary restraining order to block the operation from moving forward. So far, the judge hasn’t responded.

Sadly, the local papers seem to be the only ones covering this historic and potentially catastrophic act of environmental terrorism.

Not 300 feet away from where children learn and play nine months a year sits a leaking, 385-feet tall coal refuse dam with a nearly 3-billion gallon capacity. Never mind the coal dust that has been found in the school. Never mind the drinking-water contamination that has been reported. If this dam breaks, it will destroy everyone and everything within 30 miles. So why are 200-plus children still making the trip to school every day despite the constant threat of illness and even death?

Because they have nowhere else to go.

Photo by Vivian Stockman. That’s the school in the lower left.

Enter Ed Wiley. Two years ago, Ed and his wife Debbie Jarrell began to notice their granddaughter coming home sick from school with greater frequency. And when Ed would arrive to pick her up, he noticed it wasn’t just Kayla. Dozens of children were signed out sick.

Ed decided to take action. The twofold threat of the sludge dam and migrating coal dust was too much for him to ignore.

Working with local activists like Coal River Mountain Watch, Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, and Appalachian Voices — along with other concerned parents and citizens — Ed petitioned his local school board for help. Problem was, when the WV Department of Environmental Protection came in to test for coal dust, it didn’t find any. Not surprisingly — you see, Massey Energy (they own the offending sludge dam and Goals Coal Processing Plant that creates the dust) pours a lot of money into elections, and into West Virginia itself, to make sure its public image is as clean and friendly as possible.

Without a DEP coal dust finding, the school board said its hands were tied. So Ed went to Governor Joe Manchin, who responded with a test of the school’s ventilation system. Not helpful.

Finally, an independent study was conducted by D. Scott Simonton, PE, PhD, and whaddya know, it found that yes, “fugitive coal dust emissions” were present and ready for inhaling by students, teachers, and staff at Marsh Fork Elementary. Surely this would result in some action, Ed thought.

Nope. Nothing. So Ed decided to take matters into his own hands. If neither the school board nor the governor (who, incidentally, considers himself a champion of the state’s schools) would give them the money, they’d start raising funds themselves and petition the federal government for the rest.

If you’ve ever met the people who get things done in West Virginia — local activists like Bo Webb, Judy Bonds, and Maria Gunnoe, people who love where they come from and wouldn’t dream of going anywhere else — you’d know they’re nothing if not hardworking. Ed Wiley is no different. A true multitasker, he decided to combine his fundraising efforts with a trip to D.C., and on August 2, 2006, Ed started the 455-mile journey … on foot.

He walked for 50 days, through two states, all the way to Senator Robert C. Byrd’s office, where he stayed for hours. When he left, the venerable senator from West Virginia had tears in his eyes and promised to explore every avenue to get the students at Marsh Fork Elementary a new school once Congress goes back in session in January. It’s just difficult, Byrd said, because it’s not a federal issue.

Well, now it is. Toward the end of Ed’s walk, asbestos was found in Marsh Fork Elementary, and asbestos equals federal money. If West Virginia’s leaders are smart, they’ll latch onto that asbestos with every ounce of political might they have. Building a new school due to asbestos is a lot easier to explain than building a new school due to coal dust contamination and 3 billion tons of sludge.

While they wait for a decision, though, it’s business as usual for the folks at Marsh Fork Elementary.

Fortunately, Massey was denied the permit to build yet another silo earlier this fall. Let’s hope, for the sake of the kids, it stays that way.

James Bowe, a lifelong resident of Whitesville, W.Va., knows the mountains around his home better than he knows himself. He’s seen friends and family buried there, and has devoted countless hours to protecting his loved ones’ resting places and the Indian burial grounds that stand alongside them. So when Bowe pulled up on his four-wheeler in early April and spotted a coal company drilling in the middle of what he says was a known, if unnamed, cemetery on White Oak Mountain, he was livid — and determined to stop them.

Mountaintop-removal mining marches its
way across West Virginia.

Photo: V. Stockman / ohvec.org

Knowing how quickly surface-mining operations can scrape away any trace of a mountain’s natural landscape, Bowe immediately filed a formal complaint with the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection. For the next three days, he waited anxiously for intervention. On the fourth day, a DEP officer arrived, but it was too late: There was nothing left of the headstones that had been there, and only a small section of border fence remained. The investigator’s report said he believed “a cemetery did exist at this site,” but concluded that the cemetery “was unknown to the core drilling company … and the West Virginia DEP when this permit was issued.”

Bowe was, and remains, incredulous. “I don’t see how the company wouldn’t have known — there was a tombstone sitting there,” he said later. “You can’t miss that. When you see crosses on top of something and sandstone markers, what do you usually associate that with?”

The DEP report indicates that the agency turned the matter over to Lora Lamarre, senior archaeologist at the West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office, for a final decision. Contacted in late April, Lamarre said there was no record of this complaint.

Stories like Bowe’s have become a staple of local lore in Appalachia. There are hundreds of accounts of sunken graves, uprooted Indian and slave burial grounds, family cemeteries blown to smithereens and compacted into valley fills. Some of the tales have gained an almost mythical status, but residents and activists say they are disturbingly real.

Throughout the coal-rich land of southern West Virginia and eastern Ohio, they say, mining companies are damaging and even destroying burial sites. Industry leaders Massey Energy Company, Arch Mineral, and their subsidiaries are accused of drilling under, mining over, or raining sulfurous and acidic emissions down on tombstones and graves across the region.

“Many a known burial ground has been annihilated by drilling and blasting,” says Maria Gunnoe, a member of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition. Such actions, say Gunnoe and other worried activists, are destroying the few pieces of these scarred mountains that locals can still call their own.

Just Mine All Around It

Much of the reported damage takes place along West Virginia State Route 3, which starts south of Charleston and runs along the Coal River. As it winds through coal country, the road and the skeletal settlements along it tell the story of the last quarter-century of mining in central Appalachia, says Peter Slavin, a Virginia-based writer who has covered the industry for more than a decade. Once brimming with life and the promise of prosperity, most of these communities now sit empty and broken. Failed businesses and rundown buildings stand like memorials to a more hopeful past.

Everything changed after Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1970, and the later amendments to it, requiring strict emissions guidelines for high-sulfur coal processing. Companies began to invest in low-sulfur bituminous coal, which can be easily extracted by blasting and scraping away the tops of mountains. With the rise of mountaintop-removal mining, entire towns have been relocated — in many cases forcibly evacuated — to allow better access to the coal seams running through these hills.

Stories of mining’s impact on communities here are nothing new. Coal companies have had a heavy presence in central Appalachia for more than 100 years. But the earth-moving dozers and evacuations associated with mountaintop removal have raised the stakes. Between 1939 and 2005, this form of mining claimed an estimated one million acres of West Virginia’s mountains. More than half of that occurred after 1992.

Because the coal-rich land that companies buy or lease often borders or encompasses communities that date back hundreds of years, companies inadvertently find themselves in possession of the generations-old family cemeteries that pepper the landscape. Though the law requires them to provide access to cemetery visitors and researchers, the plots are often inaccessible, either due to remote locations or heavy mining activity around them. By the time families with limited access or those who have moved away return to visit their ancestors, they often find that the roads have been closed — or worse, that the cemetery and graves no longer exist.

Larry Gibson inspects damage caused by
mining adjacent to his family cemetery.

Photo: Penny Loeb

Larry Gibson has been fighting surface mining and the companies who practice it for decades. His family’s land on West Virginia’s Kayford Mountain contains some of the richest coal seams in the area; after refusing countless opportunities to sell the property, he says, he has been threatened and even shot at. But Gibson will not budge. He stays to defend his home and defend landmarks like nearby Stover Cemetery. Though Stover is protected by the state’s historic preservation office, Gibson and his friend Elisa Young have become increasingly concerned about the mining activity creeping dangerously close to the cemetery’s border.

Stover sits on land now owned by Catenary Coal, and prospective visitors must obtain written permission from the company in advance. When Young and Gibson arrived for a visit last fall, they were refused entrance because guards could not find the email authorizing admission. After a few hours, they gained access, and Young was shocked at what she saw: about two-thirds of the gravestones were scraped to one side of the cemetery, and the wire perimeter fence was knocked over. Many of the graves, Young says, “were sinking into the ground because there were mining cracks, holes that were opening up because of the long wall mining that had been done underneath.”

Horrified, she contacted the state DEP, only to find that Catenary was technically following state regulations, which prohibit operations within 100 feet of a cemetery. States enforce mining regulations based on the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977. A mining applicant who suspects or knows of an existing cemetery must commission an archaeological survey to determine the historical significance and boundaries of the plot before a permit can be obtained. But Young and other activists find the guidelines outdated and inadequate.

“Even when they follow the regulations, damage still [occurs], because they’re blasting around under these cemeteries, and it literally shakes the ground up,” says Judy Bonds, who heads Coal River Mountain Watch. “Even if we can get to a cemetery before the mining company, even if we point out one that needs saving, [the state will] tell us, ‘Yeah, OK, here’s this corner [for your cemetery].’ And to the coal companies, they’ll say, ‘Now just mine all around it.’”

The Best Unintentions

Raised in a family of miners, Bonds is no stranger to King Coal’s presence in Appalachia. But her activist awakening came just six years ago, after she discovered her grandson lying awake at night, planning his escape route in case the dam holding back the slurry pond above their hollow broke. When she finally moved away from Marfork, W.Va., in 2001, she and her family were the last of more than 50 families to leave. The century-old community is now little more than a ghost town.

Bonds still visits Marfork and neighboring Packsville, where many of her family members are buried, but each time she goes back, she finds it more difficult to access the cemeteries. Once inside, she says, she encounters “slippage and headstones falling over where they’ve blasted out the side of the mountains.” Bonds, who also says she’s seen graves sink due to mining, claims Massey once hired contract workers to fill in graves, thinking no one would notice the damage. (Representatives for Massey and Catenary did not respond to repeated requests for comment on these or other allegations.)

Those concerned about this issue say it’s not just earth-moving that’s the problem. Sarah Hamilton, a member of Coal River Mountain Watch, had to go through a safety class and sign a waiver absolving Massey of responsibility for her well-being before guards allowed her to enter the Marfork cemetery. Once inside, she saw “subsidence and ashy gray residue on the ground.” Activists believe the substance she saw at Marfork is the same coal dust that biologists have found in large quantities in the water and air around Massey’s Elk Run Coal Company processing facility near Sylvester, W.Va.

The coal dust piles up quickly on buildings, in homes, and on land around the plants. And the sulfur it contains, in addition to posing a potential public-health hazard, accelerates weathering on limestone and marble — two of the principle materials used to make tombstones.

Just across the West Virginia border in Ohio, Elisa Young and her friend Karen Werry, an amateur historian, have spent hours documenting the condition of cemeteries near their homes. Werry recently discovered that previously readable headstones had become illegible after just 10 years of exposure to the air. And Young has noticed unusual wear and tear on the headstones in her family cemetery, which houses more than 200 graves. Werry and Young attribute the erosion to increased local emissions from coal-processing facilities that have shifted to low-sulfur methods.

“Since they knocked the [high-sulfur] stacks down, [emissions stay] concentrated here,” Young says. “My theory is that it’s those emissions that are eating away the stones. You can smell the sulfur in the air.”

Between the pollution, the permitting process, and the informal nature of local cemeteries, it is hard to know how many have been affected by mountaintop removal. The historic preservation office estimates there are thousands of cemeteries in the state, but Lamarre says the office would need to “compile documents from many different agencies, as well as from each county’s circuit court” before it could even begin to guess how many have been affected by mining over the years.

“Certainly, there has been unintentional damage to cemeteries, but often this occurs when a cemetery is unmarked or poorly marked,” Lamarre said. “We have also heard about damage to cemeteries resulting from mine subsidence, but again, this is unintentional.”

Bonds takes exception to Lamarre’s readiness to make excuses for the coal companies, and feels the agency does not do enough to preserve burial sites. As it stands, the responsibility for protecting cemeteries rests largely with the people of Appalachia, not with the state-appointed guardians of their culture and heritage.

Speak Now, or You’ll Never Rest in Peace

To be eligible for protection under federal law, a cemetery must be included in the National Register of Historic Places. Prospective registrants must complete a lengthy, multistep application and submit a detailed land survey to establish historical or archaeological significance, and Bonds believes hundreds of cemeteries were already lost by the time residents realized what the registration process entailed. The process of fighting offending coal companies is even more complicated: citizens must not only prove that a cemetery existed, they must provide evidence that the company was aware of that cemetery when it applied for its permit.

They’re not gonna take it anymore.

Photo: Jesse Mwaura / ohvec.org

The goal for local activist groups, then, is to raise awareness among residents in areas of heavy mining activity and teach them to watch for notices of land sales or permit applications in the local papers. Additionally, they push people in the community to register any known cemeteries or burial grounds as quickly as possible to qualify for protection. “King Coal has a long arm in this area, so it’s up to the citizens to find out about a permit and then try to figure out how to protect the area,” Bonds says.

It’s also important, she adds, to let coal companies know that residents won’t tolerate the destruction of their communities any longer. “When I became active in this, nobody even knew about these permits; no one knew what these things in the paper were. Well now we know, and they know that we know. And now we’re saying, ‘Stop it.’”

Though she believes her group’s efforts have been successful, she says it’s “only because we are and have been fighting this so hard here and they know we’re fighting it. I shudder to think what they’re doing in other communities, in Virginia, in Kentucky, over in Mingo County. I’m really afraid to hear their stories.”

Young — an executive committee member of the Ohio Chapter of the Sierra Club and co-chair of its energy committee — also does her part to raise awareness. She leads tours called the “True Cost of Coal” for journalists, activists, politicians, and others, hoping to “enlighten people about how this method of generating electricity impacts the communities near the power plants, near the waste, and near the mining — the whole cycle of coal.” Only then, she says, will there be a desire to change, since those who have not been personally affected by mining are “not being forced to absorb the externalized costs of their homes being flooded or their cemeteries being blasted. That kind of thing doesn’t go on a utility bill.”

This spring, Gibson and Gunnoe took the word even farther afield as members of the first Coalfield Delegation to the U.N.’s annual Commission on Sustainable Development. Gunnoe focused her talks almost entirely on the destruction of cemeteries.

“It is a global problem and it’s up to the people to … do something about it,” she says. “We have sacrificed everything for the land that we love, and now our entire way of life is threatened. I will not let them lock the mountain people out of the mountain.”