Weekly Mulch: When Will Our Water Be Clean?

Discussion of Ashley Judd and the folks attempting to mock her environmental views on Mountaintop Removal Mining.

Don Blankenship is in more hot water. Maybe one day this coal conman will be ousted, or better yet…arrested

The New York Times had a revealing article late last week comparing mining practices at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine to other mines in the area – in particular, the TECO Coal Corporation’s E3-1. The differences in company culture and practices are stunning, and the big picture drives home the point that Massey Energy’s negligence almost amounts to homicide.

Though Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey, has made his lack of concern for safety well known, it’s worth digging a bit deeper into Massey’s corporate structure to see where else responsibility might lie.

In the late afternoon of April 5th of this year, an explosion ripped through the Upper Big Branch Coal mine. It killed 29 of the 200 or so miners that were working underground that day. Mining is a dangerous business, especially coal mining where the material you are mining is the same material that holds up the roof. There is also the added problem that coal is carbon, and where there are large amounts of carbon there will be volatile hydrocarbons, specifically methane. A methane and or coal dust ignition is the likely cause of the explosion at the Upper Big Branch Mine.

The Upper Big Branch mine disaster has me thinking about my family. Grandpa Egnor was a coal miner in West Virginia in for 25 years. He mined coal in conditions that we can’t begin to imagine today. When I was just a little child he told me about how sometimes they would mine along seams that went back into the wall of the mine. They would dig out the coal, sometimes only 36” tall use a little cart to slide back further and further from the tunnel, working over their heads to break out the coal and send it back towards the tunnel. It was the first time in my life that I ever felt what it must be like to be claustrophobic.

He did it for the same reason that miners in WV do it today; it was the job that paid the best that is if you did not want to be a moonshiner. The dangerous, back breaking work in the mine allowed him to keep his 13 kids fed and a roof over their heads. But it came at a cost, black lung. By the time Dad (the youngest of Grandpa’s children) was 11 Grandpa’s time in the mine was drawing to an end. He would cough and hack all the time. Never being a large man he began to shrink in stature and strength.

“Originally posted at Squarestate.net“

My Dad’s family left West Virginia then, mostly because his mother decided that she would not let her youngest sons go into the mines like their father and older brothers had. Grandma Georgia was a woman of strong will. She insisted that Grandpa move the family away form the dangers of the mines, and that is what they did. It is how my older uncles all wound up in the auto factories, but that is another story.

As with Glenda Owens, the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition and other environmental groups vehemently oppose confirmation of Joseph Pizarchik as head of Office of Surface Mining based on his record as advocate for coal operators over environmental concerns.

When things seemingly couldn’t get worse, the president introduces new ways to raise the misery index.