Mountaintops, communities permanently altered in West Virginia

Editor’s note: This is the second in a three-part series examining the impact of the coal industry on health, the environment and overall quality of life for the people of West Virginia. The first part looked at residents beginning to speak out in the aftermath of January’s chemical spill. The final part, published Wednesday, explores the drug addiction that has set in as coal fades, and its impact on the state's children.

RALEIGH COUNTY, W.Va. — Every day around 4 p.m. near Rock Creek the ground rumbles.

The thunder comes with the shift change at the coal mines. It’s the sound of surface mining, as hundreds of acres of mountain summits are pulverized and decapitated to extract coal close to the surface.

It’s the reverberation of the pressure to keep energy prices low, Rock Creek resident Junior Walk said.

“That’s definitely felt by West Virginians every day at 4 p.m. when they set off their blasts.” Every day but Sunday, that is.

Walk comes from a legacy of coal and said he has felt its environmental impact from an early age. The house he grew up in had well water tainted by sludge from a coal company on the ridgeline above his house.

“It didn’t take long before our water started going bad,” he recalled. “It would come out of our tap blood red every single day, and it was like that for seven years” before the house was hooked up to municipal water.

His father and grandfather both worked in mining, a path he reluctantly followed after high school. Walk was accepted to college but couldn’t afford to go.

“I was stuck here,” he said. He took a job at the coal prep plant alongside his dad.

“And some days I’d be in the basement of the plant, waist deep in coal sludge,” he said. “No goggles, no respirator. Just a pair of fishing waders and plastic boots that came up along our waist.”

“Doing that for 12 hours a day wears on you. Then I looked at my dad. He’s in pretty awful health. I didn’t want to be in that same state when I got to be his age.”

Walk said his dad has a workplace arm injury, diabetes, circulation problems and a Parkinson’s-like illness that doctors haven’t been able to diagnose. Walk believes years of working in the plant poisoned his father with acrylamide, a chemical used in coal processing.

Walk floated around minimum wage jobs and flipped burgers before a friend of the family eventually offered him a job as a security guard at a strip mine. The up-close vantage point of mountaintop removal turned his stomach.

Opposition to MTR has reached Capitol Hill. Congressional House Democrats — none from West Virginia — last year proposed the Appalachian Communities Health Emergency Act (PDF), calling for a moratorium on MTR until studies can assess its impact on health. Citing initial scientific evidence, the lawmakers said immediate action was warranted to cut off new MTR permits and increase environmental and human health monitoring.

The proposed law has a lot stacked against it, starting with economics. Mountaintop removal offers more bang for the buck as a cheaper, easier way to mine.

“The incentive is this allows you to mine thinner seams of coal,” Bill Price, president of the West Virginia Sierra Club, told Al Jazeera. “They’ve been mining in Appalachia for a long time, so much of what is left in regards to coal reserves is that thin, closer-to-the-ground coal.”

Price, the son of a miner, grew up in West Virginia’s southern coal hills. He remembers how the coal companies paid for school band uniforms and gave Christmas gifts to the needy. The local school was on coal company ground.

“Every aspect of your life was controlled or branded by the coal company,” he said. “I think what people are waking up to is that, yes, the coal company has done that but what’s going on today isn’t that kind of coal mining.”

“For years now in West Virginia and central Appalachian states, there’s been this atmosphere of deregulation and anti-regulatory rhetoric,” Price said.

The state’s water crisis is creating an opportunity to change that, he said. “People are united around a common cause of [the] human right for clean, safe water.”

Local opponents to MTR see the slow awakening as a new front in the state’s legacy of organizing.

“The people in the union recognize that organizing is the only way we’ve been able to obtain anything coming back to our communities — any fairer treatment, any better living conditions,” said Maria Gunnoe, a community organizer for the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition.

Like other locals speaking out against MTR, Gunnoe turned to activism when surface mining began to hit her personally.

In recent years, for example, she and her family have had to take on coal companies for access to family cemeteries, which they say have been ripped apart by blasts and heavy earth moving equipment.

“In some cases, these are historic cemeteries,” Gunnoe said, noting that William Chapman “Chap” Cook, a Union soldier in the Civil War, is buried in the Cook Mountain Cemetery. “This is where our heroes lie. This is our Arlington Cemetery, so to speak.”

“Back years ago, they thought the closer they were to the sky, they don’t have to travel that far to heaven,” said Danny Cook, William Chapman Cook’s great grandson. “To me, it’s a sacred place.”

Danny Cook tries to visit family cemeteries at least once a month to keep a watchful eye, but said he has encountered resistance from the coal company that owns and mines the land surrounding the cemetery. State law prohibits mining within 100 feet of cemeteries. Alpha Natural Resources did not respond to Al Jazeera America’s request for comment, but a company representative denied violating the cemetery rule in a 2013 statement to Coal Valley News.

Last year, for example, Cook and other family members were granted permission to visit several cemeteries near the Twilight Surface Mine complex, owned by Alpha Natural Resources but were delayed for hours. Then the situation got more hostile, Cook said, when they were surrounded by mining employees and ordered to turn over personal cameras.

When they arrived at the last cemetery, they found the original access road had been destroyed and a hastily constructed dirt path just wide enough for one vehicle erected up the sheared-off rock face to allow the family access.

“They had just put in an access road for us,” with at least 13 hairpin-turn switchbacks, he said.

In the cemetery, the family found broken and overturned headstones. Another mess to clean up.

“I’m not against coal mining. What I’m against is the way they get the coal, by blowing off the top of the mountain," Cook said. “They know there are other ways to get the coal.”