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X-M Satellite Radio
The Bob Edwards Show
July 28, 2006
“Exploding Heritage”
Bob Edwards: The Appalachian Mountains were standing
before the Ice Age; they’re nearly 300 million years old.
They’ve survived everything nature’s thrown at them, but they
might not survive man. Using a mixture of ammonium nitrate
and fuel oil, mining companies are blowing up mountains to get
to the valuable coal deep inside. The mountains and the coal
they contain dominate the local economy and shape the culture
of Appalachia. But mountaintop removal is ravaging the land
and the people of the region.
Male Voice: It’s like we’re a forgotten land. It’s like
people are willing to sacrifice the Appalachian area so that
they can get what they feel is cheap energy.
Male Voice: If the price of cheap power is to destroy
the landscape and the ecology of eastern Kentucky, it’s not
worth it. It’s just not worth it.
Male Voice: There’s still a lot of mountains. There’ll
be 93 percent of the mountains of Appalachia will still be
there. What we’re doing is impacting a small percent for the
benefit of the future generations.
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Bob Edwards: Today on “The Bob Edwards Show,” “Exploding
Heritage: The Controversy Over Mountaintop Removal Coal
Mining.”
Male Voice: I was raised in this area and I hunted back
here when I was just a child, and I just love this mountain,
and I still love it.
Bob Edwards: Daymon Morgan is 80 years old. He lives in
Leslie County in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern
Kentucky.
Daymon Morgan: We have blackberries back here. You’ve
never seen as many blackberries as grow back here. I picked
14 gallons of blackberries here and seven gallons last year.
I like that. I like things of nature that way.
Bob Edwards: His home sits on a green oasis surrounded
by ugly gray industrial sites. They used to be mountains as
lush and green as his mountain, but coal companies exploded
the mountaintops and pushed the trees, the soil, and the rock
over the side into the hollows between the hills, sort of
connecting the plateaus that used to be mountains, and forming
long, wide mesas. If there were streams running through the
hollows, they are buried under the debris that the coal
industry calls the over burden.
Daymon Morgan: I was raised right over that hill there.
My dad owned it. And that mountain there, this mountain here
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was higher than that top yellow you see. Those two mountains
came way up there. Down between them is a beautiful creek,
and we lived down next to that creek. Well now, that creek is
filled up, and when they push that mountain, they’re going to
take the rest of that mountain down or push it over. Pretty
soon it’ll be even with that and you walk across there. It
used to be about 70 or 80 feet down there was a beautiful
creek running down there, went all down through yonder, but
not no more.
Bob Edwards: The coal companies want Daymon Morgan’s
land, too, but he won’t sell to them. Mountaintop removal
would destroy more than his home. It would rob him of his
culture and his heritage. The forest on his mountain, for
example. He learned from generations before him that nature
provides more than shade and a home for animals. The forest
is a pharmacy.
So what’s good for what?
Daymon Morgan: Well, sassafras is a blood thinner, red
sassafras. I use that as a blood thinner. And you take that
cherry birch, it’s a good blood tonic. It purifies your
blood. And then of course the polk berries. I know people
use it for arthritis. People will tell you they’re poison.
No, they’re not poisonous. If they had been, I had been
killed.
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Bob Edwards: Mountaintop removal is not a new process,
but it’s used much more often since federal regulations have
been altered and acts of Congress circumvent it. And while it
destroys the mountains, eliminates forests, berries, streams,
and kills habitat for wildlife, it’s done with the approval
and cooperation of those state and federal agencies whose duty
it is to protect the environment. Public officials have given
the energy industry what it wants. Mining coal this way is
cheaper, safer, and more efficient than traditional deep
mining in shafts burrowed into the mountains.
Eric Reese: Well, if you think of Appalachia like a
layer cake, you have these really scenes of sandstone, and you
have thin scenes of coal in between them.
Bob Edwards: Eric Reese wrote a book about mountaintop
removal coal mining called Lost Mountain.
Eric Reese: And they’ll just blast down 200 feet till
they heat a seam of coal, scrape that out, load it onto
trucks, send it to 22 other states, and blast down to the next
seam until you just are left with a completely demolished
landscape.
Bob Edwards: The destruction of the mountains is a
direct result of our need for cheap electricity. While coal
is dirty and pollutes the air, it is the cheapest, most
transportable, and by far the most plentiful source of energy.
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Bill Caylor (phonetic sp.) is the president of the Kentucky
Coal Association.
Bill Caylor: Coal is important to our economy. It’s
important to our national security. We have the cheapest
electrical rate in the country at 4.3 or 4.6 cents per
kilowatt hour. That allows a lot of poor people to keep that
air conditioner on during the summer. Until we have another
form of energy to create our electricity, without question we
have to have coal mining.
Bob Edwards: The coal industry says the coal now buried
in the United States could supply our energy needs for the
next 250 years, and the industry can’t seem to get it out of
the ground fast enough. A hundred tons of coal are extracted
from the earth every two seconds. Then it’s hauled away by
truck and train to the power plants that supply us with the
electricity we need to keep our lights on, our TV sets
blaring, our computers running, and our cell phones charging.
But Bill Caylor says most of the mountains will be spared.
Bill Caylor: People arguing over a small, less than
seven percent of the areas that has been, is being, or ever
will be impacted by mountaintop removal. It’s a very small
percent.
Eric Reese: You know, that’s like going to the doctor
and having your doctor say six percent of your lung is
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cancerous, and you asking to operate, and he says, no, no, no,
let’s just leave it. Keep smoking; it’s good for the economy.
To say it’s only six percent is not to say that it isn’t going
to stop. It’s only going to stop with people putting intense
pressure on our so-called leaders and on these companies to do
something different.
Bob Edwards: And Eric Reese notes that while Appalachia
contains a fortune in coal, the people who live there don’t
get to share the wealth.
Eric Reese: And that’s the most bitter irony of all is
that Kentucky has so many natural resources. And if you look
at the Appalachian Regional Commission’s 40th anniversary
study of what has happened since Lyndon Johnson’s War on
Poverty, that the counties that have had the most surface
mining are the counties that are the poorest. And so their
natural riches are taken away, and they’re repaid with dirty
streams, dirty air, cracked foundations, cracked wells. And
the money goes to Peabody Coal. It goes to Tampa Energy. It
goes to Massey Energy.
Bob Edwards: Residents who should be profiting from coal
are calculating its costs instead. John Rourke lives in Perry
County.
John Rourke: We’re paying the price. The people here in
eastern Kentucky, we’re getting the bad effects from it, and
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they’re enjoying the electricity down in Florida and other
places. They say it’s a cheap source of energy. Well, it’s
not so cheap if you live here and you see your water is
destroyed and all these other things.
Bob Edwards: There’s a cost to those of us from outside
the region, too. The poisoning of the watershed is not good
for anyone. For 50 years Tom Gish has published the Mountain
Eagle newspaper in Whitesburg, Kentucky.
Tom Gish: The important thing that the Appalachian area
has is water, and water in great abundance. This particular
county is a head water of much of the nation’s water supply,
certainly the eastern United States. And you’ve got to ask,
if we’re going to level every mountaintop in the Appalachian
area, what are you doing to it then as a source of the
nation’s water supply? What is the nation going to do when
California and Texas and Arizona really do run out of water as
sooner or later they’re going to do?
Bob Edwards: Rider, farmer, and conservationist, Wendell
Berry is one of those who can’t help but feel that the
systematic demolition of the country’s oldest mountains is
just somehow wrong.
Wendell Berry: It’s that old, and you destroy it for the
sake of burning the coal and destroying it also forever. One
of the things that upsets me about mountaintop removal is that
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it seems to me to be part of a trend. It in itself proves
absolutely our willingness to destroy this world. And as I
look at it from here and from the other rural landscapes that
I’ve seen, I think that the difference between that and the
rest of rural America is that it’s simply going faster there
than we’re able to make it happen here.
But we’re ruining all of it. We just have to face that.
Our economy at the place where it meets the landscapes is
violent, it’s toxic, it’s community destroying, it’s family
destroying. And there is no perception of it in the places
that matter, or maybe only indifference. I feel like that
rural America is Third World. It’s all designated as a
sacrifice area, and the people who profit from it and the
people who are living from it simply complacently feel
entitled to it.
[MUSIC PLAYS.]
Bob Edwards: We’ll visit an active mountaintop removal
mine site when “Exploding Heritage” returns after the break.
[BREAK].
Bob Edwards: Mountains figure prominently in religion.
Moses, Noah, Jesus, and Mohammed all had important business on
high places. Yet Scripture is rough on mountains. The Bible
instructs man to subdue the earth and have dominion over
nature. The Koran says, “Thou seest the mountains and thou
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deemest them affixed. Verily they are as fleeting as the
clouds.” And the prophet Isaiah was more specific. He
predicted that the mountains would be leveled and the valleys
filled in. That is precisely what coal companies are doing to
eastern Kentucky.
This is the sound of men moving mountains. But moving
mountains may not impress the citizens of Pikeville, who
nearly 20 years ago relocated their river to spare eastern
Kentucky’s commercial and banking capital from nearly annual
flooding. So what’s a mere mountain? This mountain or former
mountain is within the city limits, but it’s a massive
industrial site. It’s hundreds of acres -- dirt, and rock,
and coal. The scenes of coal are visible in the face of the
exposed high wall directly in front of me across the deep
ravine. There is blasting today, and coal extraction, and
grading, and leveling. But the most continuous activity today
is the constant movement of trucks from somewhere behind me to
the edge of the earth on which I’m standing. The trucks are
hauling rock and dirt and dumping it over the side into the
hollow below.
I’m 1,250 feet high, I assume I’m standing on the
mountain that used to be. I learned later that I was standing
not on the mountain, but on the hollow fill between mountains.
I was standing on 1,250 of rock and dirt that had been taken
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off the tops of mountains to get to the coal. This is what
the coal industry calls the over burden, which also includes
the forest trees that used to be the mountain’s best feature.
I see no piles of trees. The mining company may have
harvested the trees, but more than likely they were burned or
they’re buried far below me. Most mining companies are so
anxious to get to the coal that they don’t bother to sell the
timber. There are no regulations pertaining to the trees, but
there are regulations about what should be done with the
topsoil. Bill Caylor is president of the Kentucky Coal
Association.
Bill Caylor: The coal mining, they will scrape as much
as they can to salvage the topsoil. Then they’re required to
come in and bulldoze and put into piles what topsoil they can
get prior to mining. And then at the end of mining they’ll
take that topsoil and redistribute it. But most of the
topsoil is man created topsoil. It’s called a topsoil
substitute, and they’ll use whatever materials they can to
create that.
Bob Edwards: How often is the topsoil put back?
Bill Caylor: Well, it’s required to be segregated and
put back. There is just not that much topsoil to begin with.
So we have to recreate topsoil on these mountaintop jobs.
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Bob Edwards: Author Eric Reese spent two years wandering
around mountaintop removal sites for his book, Lost Mountain.
Eric Reese: They are supposed to save the topsoil, and
if you look at a permit map they will show you on8 the permit
where they’re going to keep the topsoil. And when I went up
to Lost Mountain, I asked the guy who’s in charge of the job
where the topsoil was, and he said, we got a variant not to
keep the topsoil. And they just hand those out like coupons.
Bob Edwards: Variants are waivers granted to coal
companies by federal and state agencies so that the companies
won’t have to comply with regulations. Companies can get
variants exempting from having to save topsoil. They can also
get variants allowing them to destroy streams of water. Jack
Spadero is a retired federal mine inspector who served under
eight presidents.
Jack Spadero: The valley fills are in violation of
federal law because they’re covering up intermittent and
perennial streams, and that’s in violation of the buffer zone
rule that’s still in effect, although the Bush Administration
is trying to change it. It forbids mining within 100 feet of
an intermittent or perennial stream.
So those operations simply aren’t complying with federal
standards, and the states are not enforcing the federal
standards. And the oversight by the Bush Administration
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through the Office of Surface Mining is almost nonexistent.
It’s simply there aren’t any enforcement actions at the
federal level in a substantive way at all right now.
Bob Edwards: It’s the Corps of Engineers which allows
this building of the streams.
Jack Spadero: That’s right. There’s a requirement under
the Clean Water Act that the Corps of Engineers be allowed to
review the designs of these fills. Some of these fills are
massive. There might be five or 600 million cubic yards of
material. They’re the largest earth structures east of the
Mississippi River. They might be five to six miles long, and
they might fill, well all together they’ve filled about 2,000
miles of streams in Kentucky, West Virginia, and Virginia. So
the Corps is actually in violation of federal law by issuing
these permits, and that’s been proven in court time and time
again.
Bob Edwards: Why are they doing this? What’s driving
them? What’s their motivation?
Jack Spadero: Their motivation is the political pressure
that’s put on them by powerful people in Washington, in the
Administration, and in Congress to continue issuing permits
that allow this mining to continue. But they have streamlined
that process, and they still continue to approve valley fills
saying there’s no significant impact. How could there not be
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a significant impact if you fill in five or six miles of
stream with one valley fill? It’s impossible, and the federal
courts have said that. When you obliterate the stream, you’ve
created an impact.
Bob Edwards: Bill Caylor of the Kentucky Coal
Association says what’s being buried aren’t streams at all.
Bill Caylor: Bob, I know when I was a kid I would go
down, I lived in Somerset, a small town, and I’d go to one of
my aunt’s, and we’d go out behind her house and play in a
little stream. Of course, that stream was running with water
in the summer. What we’re talking about are these channels
that don’t have any water in it. They’ll have water in it
when it rains. It’s a ditch. Each of the streams, the
environmental activists are telling everybody that we’re
burying with waste --
Bob Edwards: Well, not the activists, the EPA. The EPA
says 700 miles of stream.
Bill Caylor: Yeah, but they’re not --
Bob Edwards: And that’s two years ago.
Bill Caylor: Yeah, but these streams are the more
perennial streams. They’re not the ditches. Now I don’t know
how to make people understand that. The environmental
activists say that these are head water streams. Well,
they’re dry ditches that the head waters of streams in a
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sense, but they’re in no stretch of the imagination a natural
stream, at least a stream that I grew up believing what a
stream is.
Bob Edwards: But it’s the EPA’s figures, not the
activists.
Bill Caylor: Well, it’s the EPA’s definition. What you
don’t realize is that the definition of stream has changed
legally over the last 30 years. Thirty years ago these would
not be defined as a stream, a jurisdiction of water of EPA or
the Corps of Engineers. Through litigation, the definition of
a stream has changed from a free flowing body of water to this
ditch.
Bob Edwards: Back at the mining site in Pikeville, I
learned that a mountain stream, not a dry ditch, used to run
under the massive pile of debris on which I’m standing. It’s
called Long Branch, and a couple of miles of it are now buried
1,250 feet beneath all this rock and dirt. I asked Bill
Caylor to explain.
If you can’t mine within 100 feet of a stream, why was I
standing on fill over a stream?
Bill Caylor: Because they probably applied for an
exemption to the buffer zone rule. The buffer zone rule is
not spelled out in the federal law, and probably what you’re
referring to that was an exemption that was applied for by the
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coal company and received that allowed them to encroach into
this buffer zone.
Bob Edwards: The mining company says it will route the
stream around this site. Maybe it will. After all, this is
the town that rerouted a river. In the meantime, the people
of Pikeville are wondering what’s to become of this site once
the mining is done and the flattened earth is declared ready
for development.
Transforming a one time mountain into a place for another
use is called reclamation. It’s required by law. Most have
not been developed beyond man made pasture land of non-native
grasses planted on soil substitutes. But a few have been
turned into sites for Wal-Marts, golf courses, airports, an
occasional upscale housing development.
David Sanders: My name is David Sanders, and I’m a
professional engineer and work with a consulting engineering
firm, Summit Engineering, that’s located in Pikeville,
Kentucky. This is called Chloe Ridge. It’s a reclaimed mine
site that was, been reclaimed about five or six years, and the
owners realized as part of the mining that they wanted to
develop an access road up to the mountaintop and develop a
subdivision. And so we’re going to, he’s looking at a
reclaimed mine site with a subdivision constructed on it.
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Bob Edwards: Just three miles from the active mining
site I visited in Pikeville is this reclaimed site. The road
to Chloe Ridge is lined with signs promising luxury living
with lots priced at $37,500. It’s moving day at one fancy
home that has a brick driveway, a high iron fence, a swimming
pool, and extensive landscaping.
Bob Edwards: Yeah. Back where we come from, these would
be million dollar homes.
Dave Sanders: Probably pretty close to that in this
area, too, these particular homes. And very few lots left
developable. Most of them have been sold, but there are a few
lots that are mined and sold.
Bob Edwards: So there have been no sinking problems?
Dave Sanders: Not at this particular site, and they’ve
not been any that we’ve been aware of.
Bob Edwards: There have been sinking problems on other
former mountaintop removal sites. The most notorious case is
the Big Sandy Prison in Inez, Kentucky. The prison was built
on a donated mountaintop removal site. It’s the most
expensive federal prison ever built, $60 million over the
original bid because of problems with the land. The prison
was nicknamed Sink-Sink after the foundation failed.
Eric Reese: Did you see the golf course?
Bob Edwards: Author Eric Reese.
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Eric Reese: They built this supposedly great golf course
down there, which I find sort of interesting because nobody
down there plays golf except our attorney general, who lives
near the course I guess.
Bob Edwards: Shopping malls. There’s a Wal-Mart.
There’s a prison.
Eric Reese: Right. Wal-Mart actually had a lot of
problems because the high wall behind it is unstable. The
Holiday Inn that was built on a former mountaintop removal
mine site, the back half of it has fallen off because of
subsidence. So there’s a lot of problems with just the
stability itself of these sites. But even given that, sure,
there’s strip malls, there’s Wal-Marts on some of these sites.
But 99 percent of them are simply sitting there barren.
Bill Caylor: Of course they’re barren.
Bob Edwards: Bill Caylor is president of the Kentucky
Coal Association.
Bill Caylor: You can’t build it and they will come. Is
it the coal industry’s responsibility philosophically to not
just create the level land, but to build a factory and then
ensure that somebody comes to the factor to work? We can’t do
that. When you create it, that doesn’t mean it’s going to be
used tomorrow, but that does mean it will be used, and I’ll
guarantee you it will be used. You’ve got to have a vision.
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You’ve got to be able to look in the future. People
desperately need level land in east Kentucky.
Jack Spadero: I would say Bill Caylor is lying, and the
industry is lying, and they have been for a long time.
Bob Edwards: Jack Spadero.
Jack Spadero: There’s plenty of land already available
from past mountaintop removal operations. If one wants to get
into development, there’s already plenty to use. We don’t
need more waste land, grass waste land.
Eric Reese: Most of this land is extremely remote.
There’s no water source there. There’s no topsoil. It’s
barren rock. And that’s not at all attractive to a developer.
I mean, this is an absolutely ludicrous position that these
moonscapes are in some way improving the land of eastern
Kentucky. It’s utter nonsense. If you’ve flown over and seen
how bad this looks, how lifeless, how toxic it is, there’s no
way you could make that claim unless you’re just utterly blind
or being paid large sums of money to say that.
Jack Taylor: I would argue, now I don’t have facts to
base this on, but I would argue that they’re creating the
level land that’s being used to create a diverse economy to
sustain more growth. For example, around Hazard you’ll see
more of this type of mining than you will see in some other
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areas. You’ll also notice that Hazard is a very booming
little city.
Eric Reese: Well, it’s a boom town in the sense that
most people make seven dollars at Wal-Mart or Taco Bell, if
that’s a boom town. If that’s a booming economy, that’s what
Hazard has. It’s got all of these fast food joints and
American franchise on these mine sites. What’s interesting
about Hazard is if you drive through downtown Hazard, it’s a
complete ghost town. The shops are empty. They’re burnt
down. It’s hideous. Everything’s kind of moved out to the
strip mines. And downtown is just this empty shell of a town.
Bob Edwards: The aptly named town of Hazard does have a
small airport built on a reclaimed mountaintop removal site.
Inside the front entrance, a cardboard sign resting against a
wall bears a not too subtle reminder of the airport’s
benefactor. It declares, “Progress through mining.”
Male Voice: Wendell H. Ford Airport. Automated weather
observation, 205, niner, zulu.
Bob Edwards: I’m going up in a small plane to get an
aerial view of mountaintop removal and see if it matches the
descriptions I’ve heard -- moonscape, atomic bomb site,
autopsy. In this case, with Mother Earth it’s cadaver.
This is one continuous site here?
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Male Voice: Yes, it is. Thousands and thousands of
acres.
Bob Edwards: From the air, Harry County shows two faces
-- unmined areas and forest green, mined areas in pallid gray.
Below me are dozens of mesas of varying sizes, some former
mountains and some piles of mountaintop that have been blasted
away and pushed into the hollows. Most prominent is a wall,
hundreds of yards long, and 100, maybe 200 feet high. It’s
the hacked away side of a mountain with all of its many
ancient layers of rock, seams of coal exposed to the open air.
A slide photo of the sheer wall that I’m saying would make an
excellent visual aide for a geometry class. But here it is in
nature stripped of its covering, revealing secrets it’s held
for nearly 300 million years.
I see a giant lake filled with what looks like tar. It’s
set perilously above a public road at the edge of the site.
It’s a slurried pond. Slurry ponds contain the liquid waste
from the coal cleaning process. The slurry can develop into a
deadly and dangerous mass of black industrial sludge. The
ooze is contained behind earthen dams. What happens when the
dam breaks when “Exploding Heritage” continues.
Male Voice: Okay, the wind’s picking up. I think it
might be time to head back.
[BREAK].
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Bob Edwards: Mountaintop removal has turned ordinary
citizens into activists. They’ve had help organizing from a
group called Kentuckians For The Commonwealth. A few times a
year Kentuckians For The Commonwealth also takes Kentucky
writers on a tour of areas most devastated by mountaintop
removal. The idea is that the writers will be moved to write
about what they see and here, exposing the problem to a wider
audience.
Male Voice: And we want to keep our comments, each of
you keep them to five or seven minutes because I think we have
--
Bob Edwards: It’s the end of a long day of touring
mining sites, and the writers are now gathered in Hineman,
Kentucky to hear testimony from Appalachian residents directly
affected by mountaintop removal. The writers sit like a panel
of judges at the front of the room. Each speaker faces them,
coming one by one to share their stories.
Male Voice: Hello. My name is Archie Fields. I was
born in Lechard County. And I guess where I’ll start at is
the time I started going in the mountains, it’s always been a
wilderness, a beautiful place. And then you go up there now
and it looks like an atomic bomb just hit the top of the
mountain and leveled all the trees down to the earth.
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Female Voice: Respect. Respect for the land that God
made and allows us to live on. And I’m sure when He looks
down from Heaven, I don’t think He’s very proud of the way
that man is destroying the earth.
Male Voice: So I think at some point we have to decide
I’m not willing to make a good living if it means that
somebody else’s house is going to be flooded. There is a
price that is paid, and it’s a very big price that’s paid for
these good paying, short term jobs.
Female Voice: And I’m here to tell you there’s no such
thing as clean coal. I don’t care how many billboards they
put it on. We live in dirt, dust.
Male Voice: Ten years down the road, this company will
be gone. There won’t be no mountain. There won’t be no
checks. To see your heritage, and your grandchildren’s
heritage, and everybody from now until eternity’s heritage go
away overnight because of greed, I don’t know what to tell you
except that anybody that loves these mountains the way I love
them would just about bear arms against these coal companies.
[APPLAUSE].
Bill Caylor: What we’re fighting more than anything else
is the emotional aspect of it. And facts will not trump
emotion.
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Bob Edwards: Bill Caylor is president of the Kentucky
Coal Association.
Bill Caylor: Coal mining, if you tend to live near it,
it can be a nuisance, no different if you live next to a
factory. But it’s more of a temporary, maybe three, five,
seven years, which is a lifetime to a lot of people. But we
are a nuisance industry.
Bob Edwards: Mining operations can be a nuisance, but
coal field residents also know they can be fatal. At 8
o’clock on the morning of February 26th, 1972, three earthen
dams gave way high above Buffalo Creek in Logan County, West
Virginia. The dams held gobs of coal waste. When the dams
collapsed, they sent 132 million gallons of black waste water
gushing down Buffalo Creek Hollow. In just minutes, 125
people were dead and 17 towns were destroyed, leaving 4,000
people homeless. The Pittston Coal Company said it was not
the company’s fault; it was an act of God. Jack Spadero went
there as a young mine safety inspector.
Jack Spadero: Well, we’ll have to go through the
records, going back all the way until the 1950s, and people in
the community were concerned that something was going to
happen because they knew the dams weren’t being built safely,
and there was a lot of water being stored behind them. And
there were studies done by various government agencies, at
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least four or five government agencies did studies of the dam,
that very dam and said, yeah, there’s something really bad
wrong here, but no one did anything. There were agencies that
could have done something and they didn’t.
Bob Edwards: Nearly 30 years later, Spadero investigated
a much bigger, though non-fatal spill, and episode that would
end his government career. It happened nearly six years ago
in Martin County, Kentucky. The Environmental Protection
Agency called it the worst man made environmental disaster
east of the Mississippi, but most people who lived outside the
region have never heard about it.
Mick McCoy: We’re talking about a flood of 306 to 350
million gallons of toxic waste, emptying into people’s yards,
emptying into our creeks, emptying into our rivers, and
eventually our reservoir. This was 30 times greater than the
Exxon Valdez and didn’t even get on the damn scroll of sea in
the end. Now, what the hell’s wrong with that picture? I’m
Mick McCoy. I’m a teacher. I was born and raised in Inez.
And, hell, I reckon I’ll die here.
Bob Edwards: Ironically, Mick McCoy was enjoying the
local harvest festival when he first heard something was wrong
with the creek.
Mick McCoy: I had grown up knowing about black water.
My dad was a game warden for 23 years in this county. And
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black water is when there’s a slurry pond that somehow
overflows or leaks into a stream or a river. But the way
people were talking, this was like nothing that had ever
happened before.
At the creek, it was like running black
with like a slow, slurry lava. And it definitely would
smother any kind of lie in its path.
Bob Edwards: Coal slurry is the byproduct of cleaning
coal. It can develop into thick, black mud, a mix of
chemicals and coal particles and water that collects in huge
impoundments called slurry ponds. In Martin County, a slurry
pond sat atop an abandoned underground mine. The floor of the
pond was the ceiling of the underground mine. When the mine
ceiling collapsed, the coal waste came crashing down into the
mine and out the mine openings, flooding a wide area of the
county.
Mick McCoy: Well, they call these places slurry ponds.
Well, this pond was 72 acres. I don’t know about you, but,
you know, a pond is something that you let the Boy Scouts in
to catch the blue gills because there’s too many fish.
Seventy-two acres is a damn lake.
Bob Edwards: So it oozed out of the face of the mine.
Mick McCoy: It burst out of the underground passageways
and then was oozing down the mountain into the people’s yards,
into the streams. You see, the Wolf Creek empties into Tug
26
River, and the Tug River is where we get out water. So that
black shit was what we were drinking, Bob.
Bob Edwards: That was tragic. Bill Caylor, head of the
Kentucky Coal Association.
Bill Caylor: You have to realize the coal industry
doesn’t want this, but it wasn’t the failure of the damn or
the impoundment. What happened is something that we had not
paid a whole lot of attention to. It was the ground way back
behind the dam that caved in.
Bob Edwards: But the company knew it could happen
because it had happened as mine inspector Jack Spadero
discovered.
Jack Spadero: I found that six years before the October
2000 failure, that there had been a previous failure and of
the same kind where the bottom of the reservoir broke through
into old mine workings and caused a considerable amount of
damage. But the operator was allowed by the Mine Safety and
Health Administration to go back to work that day and resume
pumping slurry into that very reservoir.
Bob Edwards: A mining engineer working for the federal
government made nine recommendations that would have been
prevented another breakthrough. None of his recommendations
was implemented. As one of the lead government investigators
of the spill, Jack Spadero wanted to cite Martin County Coal
27
with eight violations, including willful negligence. But then
the Bush Administration took office. Charges were reduced,
and Spadero refused to sign the government report on the
disaster. Under intense pressure to sign the report, Spadero
chose to retire from the government. The coal company was
fined $110,000, reduced on appeal to just $5,500.
Jack Spadero: For the what EPA called the worst
environmental disaster in the history of the southeastern
United States, $5,500 fine. That’s incredible, isn’t it?
That’s just incredible.
Bob Edwards: Nina McCoy teaches high school in Inez,
Kentucky.
Nina McCoy: What we learned hard and fast with our own
environmental disaster when we had this 300 plus million
gallons of sludge shoved in our fast is that we have to take
the democracy seriously. A lot of people in this country have
come to believe that democracy is an automated machine and
that it will run itself. We thought that we were being taken
care of. We thought we had an Environmental Protection
Agency. Come to find out the coal company had an
environmental protection agency.
We thought we had a Center for Disease Control. Come to
find out, the coal company had a center for disease control.
We knew that we didn’t have a congressman or a senator, but we
28
assumed that somewhere when there was something so massive as
what we had that someone would take our part. But we found
out that we didn’t have any of that. And so I think a lot of
the people with mountaintop removal, they think somebody’s
watching, and nobody is.
Bob Edwards: The coal companies are enjoying
Washington’s friendly attitude to the energy industry, and
they’ve long had a cozy relationship with state and local
officials. But there are exceptions. Carroll Smith is the
judge executive for Lechard (phonetic sp.) County, the
county’s chief elected official.
Carroll Smith: The coal companies learned real early how
to keep themselves in power. They had the money. They
controlled the local officials. You know, we’ve never really
had a county government for generations. We’ve always had a
county judge, but if you really wanted something you didn’t go
to the county judge; you went to the coal company, you know,
because that’s where the real power was. The coal companies
decided who was going to be the county judge; therefore, the
county judge owed his soul to the coal company, and the real
clout and the real power of the government rested with the
coal companies.
Also if you complained about the coal companies’
practices, then you, or some of your family members, or some
29
of your friends, were fired from their jobs. And so people
learned real quick that if coal company flooded your house,
then you said, oh, that’s okay. My husband works for you or
my brother works for you, so it’s okay. We’ll clean it up.
Don’t worry about it.
Bob Edwards: An ex-miner himself, Carroll Smith was able
to break through the tradition of corruption, but he only won
the election by a few hundred votes. He and his constituents
have had problems with floods in areas that traditionally
never flooded. With the mountains changing shape, rainwater
develops new run off patterns, flooding homes that never had a
problem before.
Carroll Smith: If this was happening in Lexington or
Louisville, then people would revolt. But it happens here,
and the people said, well, just one of them things, you know.
That’s part of it. It’s like an abused spouse or something,
you know. You take your whipping every week and go on.
Bob Edwards: I don’t think many people know about this,
you know? They know about plans to drill for oil in the
national wildlife refuge and get very upset about that. And
Appalachia doesn’t seem to have friends.
Carroll Smith: Well, a lot of times we are our own worst
enemies, you know? We allow ourselves to be taken advantage
of. We’ve always had absentee ownership, absentee government.
30
We’ve always allowed somebody else to provide for us, to
provide our job, to provide whatever. And a lot of people are
waiting on some, you know, from Toyota or Ford Motor Company
to build a plant or somebody to come in and save us. But the
truth about it is we have to save ourselves. Nobody’s going
to save us. We have to do it ourselves, and we have to
decide, you know, this is enough, you know. We’re going to do
this, and it’s going to be our people protecting our place and
our culture, and nobody else is going to help us.
Bob Edwards: What would you like to see for your
constituents in this whole matter, coal and exploitation of
the region?
Carroll Smith: If a company can come in and extract
their minerals, not destroy our people, our culture, our
environment, do it responsibly, put something back into the
community for what they take out. And I think that can be
done. You can’t do it if you demand that your electricity
just be $50 a month. I mean, you know, the real cost has to
go to the consumer at some point. We should be paying our
fair share like the rest of the world pays. But I think that
if a company can come in and say, okay, we’re not going to
destroy your water, we’re not going to destroy your homes and
your roads. We’re going to mine coal, but we’re going to do
it responsibly. And then we can coexist. And then when
31
they’re done, we’re not left with a sterile dust bowl or, you
know, something that we just can’t inhabit.
Bob Edwards: Another lethal hazard plaguing the people
of coal country has to do with coal trucks -- their number,
their size, their weight, and the recklessness of their
drivers. For a long time, coal trucks were allowed to haul
overweight and severely overloaded, another price one pays for
having coal in the neighborhood.
Patsy Carter: I’m Miss Patsy Carter. Our daughter,
Darliss Carter, she was killed with an overweight coal truck.
That was in 2000.
Bob Edwards: You and Darliss were very close.
Patsy Carter: Very close. We did a lot together. What
we did, we raised chickens, and gathered the eggs for
breakfast, and then made the homemade biscuits from scratch.
And she wasn’t ashamed of her biscuits. But we did a lot
together. We’d eat greens and I taught her, you know, what we
could eat and what we couldn’t. We lived on a farm, and it
was a good life. It was really a good life.
Bob Edwards: The driver tried to blame her.
Patsy Carter: The driver tried to blame her. Usually
these coal trucks, usually they travel like two or three
together. That way if an incident does come up, they can back
the story up. And the guy that was in front of this driver
32
that killed my daughter, his name was Joseph Meadows. And two
coal truck drivers. They tried to blame it on her, both of
them. They tried to say she fell asleep, which I knew better
than that because she always, she was active. She has just
called me.
Bob Edwards: Why are they allowed to get away with that?
Patsy Carter: Coal. Coal. King Coal. I mean, you look
around in the United States and freight miners, you know.
They haul pickles, and paper towels, and all of what we need,
our necessities. But if they’re overweight, then they’re in
big trouble. Big trouble. But in Kentucky and West Virginia,
it’s just like we’re on the tail end of the earth, you know.
We’re trying to get awareness out on what’s going on in
Kentucky and West Virginia in the mining industry because it
is, it’s all wrong, you know. I feel like a second class
citizen.
Bob Edwards: Patsy Carter, whose daughter was killed by
a coal truck 11 days before her graduation from college. The
conclusion of “Exploding Heritage” after this break.
[BREAK].
Bob Sloan: I care about mountains deeply.
Bob Edwards: Writer Bob Sloane.
Bob Sloan: I’ve believed for a long time that if you
live somewhere where you can only see about a quarter mile --
33
that’s as far as you’re going to see -- that it impacts your
character. It forms your character. You become invested in
what you see, perhaps more strongly than in other places,
because you can’t look that far away. Things are very
immediate. I care about mountains deeply.
Bob Edwards: Respect and even reverence for the land are
a part of American Indian culture and tradition. The Dali
Lama has written of the Tibetan Buddhist sense of
responsibility to nature. In Japan there is a festival twice
a year, in the spring and the fall, that is held specifically
to praise mountains. In the United States we don’t praise
mountains; we blow them up.
Tom Barnes: I’m Tom Barnes. I’m extension professor in
the Department of Forestry at the University of Kentucky. We
are on the top of Pine Mountain in Lechard County, just south
of Whitesburg, Kentucky.
Bob Edwards: What grows here?
Tom Barnes: The forest that we’re in is called the mixed
mesophitic (phonetic sp.) forest. There’s a very famous
forest ecologist by the name of E. Lucy Braun, and she wrote a
book called The Deciduous Forest of North America. She
described these forests, and these are one of the most
floristically diverse forests in all of North America,
unrivaled in terms of plant species diversity. Just standing
34
right here you’re looking at, on the top you’re looking at
chestnut oak, sugar maple, black oak, scarlet oak. You’ll see
sassafras in the understory. There’s some elm coming up.
Historically there were chestnuts here. In these forests you
can see probably in an acre 20 or 30 different species of
trees.
These forests are very complex. There’s a lot of plant
species diversity. There’s great animal species diversity.
And, of course, when you replace that with either a grassland
monoculture or a tree farm, you don’t recreate the kinds of
conditions that you had originally. You can’t do that.
Bob Edwards: A forest can’t develop on a reclaimed coal
mine?
Tom Barnes: Not in my lifetime. Not in your lifetime.
Not in my children’s lifetime. Maybe not even in their
children’s lifetime. These forests are old. These are
unglaciated forests. It took tens of thousands of years for
these things to develop.
Bob Edwards: It’s a trade off, right? Dense forests.
Tom Barnes: Well, it depends on what you value in life.
I mean, how many Wal-Marts do we need? How many more shopping
centers do we need? I mean, once this forest is gone, it will
take another Heaven and another earth for it to be replaced.
Once it’s gone, it’s gone forever.
35
You know, it’s really interesting. One of the things
that I’ve been thinking about and doing a lot of reading
lately has been on kind of the morality of kind of this, what
we call the environmental crisis, and it’s related to all of
this. And God gave us the world to be stewards of, to care
about. And is that what the Creator wanted, to blow the tops
off of mountains so we can have cheap electricity? I mean,
where is the morality in that?
Bob Edwards: Henry David Thoreau, perhaps the American
writer most often quoted on nature, climbed an Appalachian
mountain or two in Maine. Then he wrote, “The tops of the
mountains are among the unfinished parts of the globe, whether
it is a slight insult to the gods to climb and pry into their
secrets and try their affect on our humanity. Only daring and
insolent men perchance go there.” Very close by Thoreau in
Concord, Massachusetts is another great writer, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, who wrote, “Mountains are earth’s undecaying
monuments.” Hawthorne was wrong and Thoreau was right. The
tops of the mountains were unfinished until now when they’re
being finished off.
Our present day Thoreau is writer Wendell Berry.
Wendell Berry: Well, I was raised by, among others, a
father who thought a grass pasture was the finest human
artifact; that it was a wonderful thing, that it was
36
productive, it was protective of the land. It was beautiful.
And to him to have violated the capacity of that land to
produce that pasture would have been a desecration. And so
when I first saw strip mining 40 some years ago now, I
couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that grown up
responsible people would do a thing like that. And I’m having
trouble believing it still, although it’s persisted for long
and grown much worse.
Patty Ambergy: We all should come as one voice. I think
it’s time for a revolution. I think it’s time to raise hell.
Bob Edwards: Patty Amberthy lives in Lechard County,
Kentucky.
Patty Ambergy: These mountains are our children’s
heritage. Some of them laugh and says it’s not. Our heritage
is our mountains. To me, mountaintop removal is like a thief
in the night. When the thief comes to your house and robs
you, most of the time you can replace those things. And when
a mountaintop removal comes into your community, you can never
replace that as long as this earth stands.
Wendell Berry: What does it mean to love a place that’s
completely destroyed? That, it seems to me, is a unique
suffering.
Bob Edwards: Isn’t there a natural heritage when you’re
born and you get -- some oceans, the mountains, some rivers?
37
Wendell Berry: You get it and your children get it, and
it belongs never to you and never to them. But it belongs
always in human terms to whoever’s yet to come. And to fail
to protect it for whoever’s yet to come is a grievous fault.
I don’t think the word “sin” is too strong a word for it.
It’s a terrible sin to destroy a gift that you could not make
or replace yourself, that is not given to you except in trust
for those who are still to come.
Bob Edwards: The effort to protect Appalachian heritage
is a solitary endeavor. Support for mountaintop removal coal
mining is bipartisan. It has the blessing of both political
parties, multiple state and federal agencies, both houses of
Congress, and the federal courts. None of the major
environmental groups -- the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth,
Greenpeace, the Natural Resources Defense Council -- none of
them includes the end of mountaintop removal coal mining among
its major goals. Those people in central Appalachia who
oppose the radical alteration of their portion of the
Appalachian mountains stand alone. Meanwhile the hauling of
coal from eastern Kentucky continues around the clock, off to
the power plants that keep our homes and businesses operating.
The consumer measures the cost of energy in dollars and
cents on a monthly bill. The power plant and utility
companies measure the cost in dollars per ton of coal. But
38
back at the source of that coal is the cost that is, as
Wendell Berry says, incalculable -- the cost of a 300-million-
year-old mountain.
The Bob Edward Show is produced by Tish Dalton (phonetic
sp.), Chad Campbell, Andy Daniel, Phil Harrell, Steve Lichtein
(phonetic sp.), Ed McNulty, Jeffrey Ruddick, Jim Rosenberg,
Shelley Tillman, and Sam Wright. Our e-mail address is
bob@XMradio.com.
Monday, political analysis by David Broder
of the Washington Post.
Thanks for listening. Have a great weekend. This is
XMPR, channel 133.
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