Mining Tour is Eye-Opening

By Linda Sodaro

With gas prices increasing almost daily, I decided to follow the vacation-close-to-home directive issued in the Sunday Gazette-Mail and took an enlightening day trip.

Less than an hour from Charleston, with a leisurely itinerary, I’ll share with you my mountaintop removal tour.

10:30 a.m.: depart Kanawha City with Jack Spadaro, tour guide. Jack is a mining engineer with 42 years of experience. He was fired by the Bush administration in 2004 for refusing to doctor a report on the worst environmental disaster ever in the Eastern United States, a coal slurry spill in 2000 in Martin County, Ky. These days he’s an expert witness for folks who find themselves entangled in litigation with coal companies. We head south on the Turnpike to the Cabin Creek exit, arriving at the home of Larry Gibson around 11:15 a.m.

Larry and his kin are holdouts on Kayford Mountain, refusing to move despite 20 years of mining around their property. He’s been threatened in one way or another 130 times over the years. I don’t ask why he doesn’t move, because I already know. We’re both Scots- Irish and giving in is not in our genes. When generations of your family live, die and lie buried in a piece of land, it is sacred, and you don’t just leave. Larry’s tenacity affords visitors the opportunity for an up-close look at mountaintop removal mining. The sight is breathtaking in a way completely unrelated to beauty. I’d seen it in pictures and documentaries, but nothing quite prepared me for the reality. It is an abomination. Scarred earth all around, with a couple of “reclaimed” areas, one of which is a steep hillside full of gullies formed by rainwater. There is no wildlife to be seen, and Jack tells me of a study that found 50 to 60 species of birds in the remaining forested areas of the Gibson property and two species in a nearby reclaimed area.

The air is full of dust stirred up by the heavy equipment and it’s very irritating to my eyes. When we return to Larry’s house, he and his Uncle Vernon tell us of “accidental” mine waste discharges and sickened residents. Blasting occurs for the second time that day as we stand talking.

1 p.m.: We move on down the mountain to Dorothy, a town that experienced one of the coalfields’ all too frequent “act of God” floods in July 2001. Many homes were flooded, but God in His infinite mercy made this happen at 8 in the morning, so no one died. We stop for lunch at a Dairy Queen near Whitesville. The English dog was superb; the mocha Moolatte a guilty pleasure.

At my request we then detour to see Marsh Fork Elementary School, which sits next to a coal silo and just below a slurry impoundment. Billions of gallons of slurry are contained behind the earthen dam. Should it fail, the topography assures a slim survival rate for the students and staff.

Our next stop is downtown Whitesville, home of Coal River Mountain Watch. Vernon Haltram shows us a map that details the extent of MTR mining in the Coal River watershed. It is appalling to see the number of mountains already lost and it only gets worse as he points out areas where more mining permits have been issued. Vernon tells us that the municipal water source is the Coal River, smiling as he says he doesn’t drink it.

Jack and I continue north on Route 3, driving through Sylvester where we see a giant cocoonlike structure looming behind a neighborhood of well-kept homes. Its purpose is to protect the townspeople from coal dust, but I find myself wondering about anyone working inside it.

As he drives, Jack tells me about a permit that’s been issued to allow MTR up to the boundary of Hawks Nest State Park and within sight of the New River Gorge Bridge. If we are willing to allow this to happen to a West Virginia icon so near and dear to the tourism industry, I can only conclude that we have lost our collective mind.

“Hello, Department of the Treasury? West Virginia calling. We’re going to need you to retool our quarter. Just lop the top off those mountains around the bridge. Y’all take care now. Thanks!”

We hit Route 94 to get back to the Turnpike and Charleston, our tour coming to an end near 6 p.m.

This trip opened my eyes to a world I’d only seen in books and movies. It’s left me with many points to ponder. If our elected officials had children attending Marsh Fork Elementary, would it be moved? If coal is so good for West Virginia, and Whitesville is in the middle of the coalfields, why are so many of its storefronts empty? Water is a plentiful resource here, but polluted with mercury, arsenic and selenium, it will be useless. All these are products of MTR mining, and with every accidental slurry spill, the amounts of these heavy metals in our drinking water increases. We take pride in being “Mountaineers.” What are we going to call ourselves when there are no mountains left? And last, what would happen if we stopped believing that coal is all we have going for us as a state and a people?

(c) 2008 Sunday Gazette – Mail; Charleston, W.V.. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.