By Dave Cooper

I hope that one day we can have responsible coal mining in the mountains of Appalachia. Recent news coverage leads me to believe that we’ve still got a long way to go.

In a March, 2006 National Geographic magazine story about mountaintop removal coal mining, there is an especially poignant photograph of Kenneth Stroud of Rawl, W.Va., standing by the bathroom mirror with his young son.  Out of the bathroom sink faucet comes a sickening, orange-brown stream.

It’s hard for me to believe that in 2006, an American family still can’t get a safe drink of water in their home.  Stroud and others who have fought for over ten years to get safe drinking water are suing coal company Massey Energy, of Richmond, Va., claiming that Massey’s underground storage of coal slurry contaminated their drinking water wells with arsenic, mercury and selenium, and rendered their properties worthless.
In July, West Virginia Circuit Court Judge Michael Thornbury ordered Massey to begin supplying one case of bottled water per week to 190 plaintiffs who allege their water was damaged. Yet initially Massey refused to comply with the court order.

Massey and its CEO, Don Blankenship often seem to spend more time in the courtroom than in the coal fields: a jury has awarded $51 million to Virginia’s Harman Mining for Massey’s contract interference that drove Harman into bankruptcy; Massey was ordered to pay a $465,000 settlement to the residents of Sylvester, W.Va., for blanketing their town in coal dust; and $1.54 million to residents of Duncan Fork, Mingo County who lost their well water after Massey mined beneath their homes.

Massey or Blankenship have sued the United Mine Workers and its president Cecil Roberts, Governor Joe Manchin, the Charleston Gazette and even a courtroom stenographer.

And now Blankenship is being sued by his former maid, who claims Blankenship allegedly bullied her for getting the wrong kind of ice cream and “threw McDonald's food around the bus after receiving the wrong breakfast biscuit order,” according to an AP article.

Massey’s record under Blankenship would be farcical, if it weren’t so tragic for the environment, the communities and the people of West Virginia and eastern Kentucky.

Massey subsidiary Martin County Coal is responsible for the worst-ever environmental disaster in the eastern United States, the October 2000 spill of 300 million gallons of coal sludge into two mountain streams in eastern Kentucky.

And Massey operates another large coal sludge dam located just 400 yards above the Marsh Fork Elementary School in Sundial, West Virginia. After numerous citizen protests led by Mountain Justice Summer and concerned local residents, Charleston Gazette reporter Ken Ward discovered that the permit boundaries were inaccurate in Massey’s coal silo application. Massey’s application to build a 168-foot tall coal silo less than 300 feet from the elementary school has twice been rejected by the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection.
Most corporations do the right thing, most of the time. But what should we do as a society about a corporation like Massey? We can’t put a corporation in jail. What we need is a permanent penalty for bad corporations – like the NCAA gave to Southern Methodist University in1987.