Biggest Coal Polluter Isn’t Power Plants
Coal has been around forever, and thanks to new technology, better metering, and better scientific and engineering practices, it’s cleaner to burn than ever in our human history.
There is one coal user that is totally unregulated and free to burn without ANY of the safegaurds and processes used in the power industry and it’s the Earth!
There is a coal fire that has burned underground in Brennender Berg, Germany for over 300 years! The story starts in the year 1688, when a shepherd started a fire in a tree stump that burned to the roots, igniting a coal seam. The translation for the name of the town is, “Burning Mountain.”
Smoking Hills, Canada, is located close to the Artic Ocean, near Franklin Bay. John Franklin first explored the area in 1826, noting a haze that seemed to be hanging in the air. That haze was actually smoke from a chemical reaction between the lignite, sulphur, and oil shales in the area that caused spontaneous combustion.
On the other side of the world is Burning Mountain, Australia, or Mount Wingen. Scientist speculate that this underground coal seam fire, that’s 2 meters thick, has been burning between 5.000-15,000 years.
Closer to home is Centralia, PA, which lies outside of Wilkes-Barre, PA. The town decided to burn down it’s garbage dump in the early 1960’s. Little did they know that there was an exposed coal seam on one side of the piles of refuse. To make a long story short, the seam caught fire, the fire spread underground, and the town had to be abandoned in the mid 1980’s for the sake of public safety. The fire still burns today, over 50 years later.
On almost every continent on Earth, there are underground coal fires raging, unchecked, under the often serene and picturesque landscapes. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, between 10 and 200 million metric tons of coal is consumed annually by underground coal fires. The U.S. Department of the Interior Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement spends a billion dollars a year on remediation efforts related to coal fires in our country’s 15 coal producing states.
The real problem is that there is not one specific way to effectively fight underground coal fires. The best scientist can hope for is to identify where the fires are and then try to seal any vents to the surface they can find. They do this with ground penetrating radar and via heat seeking satellites.
Underground coal fires represent a significant hazard to any life that lives above them. In St. Louis, there is an underground coal fire that is moving towards a nuclear waste dump. The nuclear material is the waste byproducts of America’s Manhattan Project from WWII. A lady in St. Louis developed alopecea, an auto-immune disease sometimes referred to as spot-baldness, claiming it was from the emmissions from the underground coal seam fire where she lives.
In Glenwood, Colorado, an underground coal seam fire that has been burning for nearly a century reared it’s ugly head in 2002, setting thousands of acres of forest afire.
Here locally, many locals can identify places that occasionally flare up from underground fires. One recently popped up beside Rt. 250, in White Hall. There’s another just over the hill from the power plant, just before the bridge at Gypsy, behind the log church. More sites can be found on the WV DEP’s website, under Office of Abandoned Mines Land and Reclamation.
The really puzzling thing is that there has been very little study as to the long term health effects and environmental impact of these fires by any agency, nor any patented and effective approaches to extinguishing these types of fires.
It is kind of hypocritical for the EPA and environmentalists to be so aggressive towards coal users and producers, when there are coal fires out there raging unchecked. It would seem to be common sense that a responsible and vibrant coal industry would be the best vangaurd for monitoring and understanding underground coal seam fires.
With all the hostility against coal powered generation, it makes you wonder if the objections raised by environmentalists are genuine concerns or just an avenue for revenue for those who claim to be against coal.
Afterall, the reclamation of mines and the extinguishing of such fires would accomplish removing tons of carbon pollution from the air, employ people in doing that work, and make such lands available for develpment. All of this would act to boost the economy and clean up the environment.
Working Without Prosperity
Anyone who works deserves to have some small amount of success, even if that success only consists of the feeling one gets from being a self-supporting and contributing member of society.
West Virginians are in a special circumstance when it comes to work and prosperity. After decades of labor strife, a few coal miners did
see a brief period of prosperity from their labor, but with the shrinkage of unionization and the influence of the UMWA, even that small window seems to be closing.
Before the industrial revolution and the discovery of our rich coal reserves, West Virginians were mainly farmers, trappers, and hunters. As our country moved deeper into industrialization, those who would seek to exploit our rich coal supply for their own greed moved into our state. They cheated landowners, bought political influence, and set up shop at the head of many hollows to establish mines and start hauling out West Virginia coal.
West Virginians themselves have not benefited nearly as much as those absentee landlords who owned and operated the mines they worked in. As a matter of fact, West Virginia continues to be one of the poorest states in the nation, an odd happenstance that is in contrast to our rich energy and timber reserves. What workers of this state have reaped are pollution, destruction, and death.
On December 06, 1907, the Fairmont Coal Company mine in Monongha blew up, creating the worse mine disaster on record in the United States before or since. Official numbers set the count at 361 dead, but this was an era of child labor and the flood of immigrants who worked, undocumented, beside family members who were paid by the short ton for all the coal they loaded each shift. Many old timers claim that the count was far higher, possibly as many as 600, when taking these factors into account.
Then there is the 38 miners lost in the Boissevain Mine explosion in 1932, or the Consol #9 mine explosion in Farmington in 1968 that claimed 78 miners(the third such explosion in the mine formerly known as Jamison #9), or Holden, Nellis, Robinson-Ferrell, or Eccles #5 and #6, or the Clinchfield Coal Company’s Compass Mine at Dola, just up Route 20 from Lumberport that killed 22 men. Sago and Upper Big Branch are names of West Virginia mines added to the list of disasters visited upon the people of our state and that have become synonymous with tragedy and loss.
Lest anyone thinking that the plight of West Virginia workers lie only in the dark coal mines of our state, there is also the collapse of a scaffold in a 
cooling tower, known as the Willow Island disaster, that killed 51 workers in 1978.
In fact, the worst industrial “accident” that ever occurred had nothing to do with coal mining, but happened in the New River Gorge area of West Virginia. This was the Hawks Nest Tunnel tragedy. This project of Union Carbide sought to divert the New River for power production to feed the plant in Alloy, West Virginia. Began at the height of The Great Depression, workers dug the 3 mile tunnel in record time, completing it 10 weeks ahead of schedule. The workers, desperate for gainful employment, either 
did not know or understand that they were digging through Silica, a substance that causes silicosis in the lungs and is very damaging and even fatal. Many people have stated that it is impossible to quantify what a workers life is worth, but after years of lawsuits against the tunnel’s contractor, the settlement ranged from $400.00 for an unmarried black man to a $1000.00 for a married white man. In typical West Virginia fashion, the offending company settled $4 Million dollars in lawsuits for a paltry $130,000 dollars. Half of that settlement was claimed by the attorneys representing clients, who also recieved an added secret sum of $20K in the settlement insuring against any further lawsuits, and, on 
the demand of the defendants, turned over all plaintiff files to them. In total it has been claimed that almost 500 workers died from exposure to silica dust. This number cannot be certified since tuberculosis was rampant throughout the country at the time and many may have died and been classified as victims of TB. What is known that death by overexposure to silica is a painful and miserable way to die, with one family member claiming that an affected relative actually kicked the bed they were dying in to pieces when in the throes of a fit of spasmodic coughing and gasping for air.
Families of West Virginia workers also suffered indirectly, through the loss of the 
bread winner and patriarch of the family, but also suffered directly from those who came to our state to rape the land, reap the resouces, and then leave like thieves in the night. Each incident described above represents grieving widows, orphaned children, heartbroken parents, and all the social and economic woes such conditions cause.
Earthen dams had been simple and easy contructs for coal companies to capture coal wastes. That was until the Buffalo Creek Disaster in 1972. Pittston Coal had a dam at the head of a hollow on Buffalo Creek, WV. In a torrent of several days of 
rain, the dam became sodden and soft. On the morning of February 26th, the dam burst. Many residents were still asleep when a wall of muddy coal waste laid waste to everything in it’s path An estimated 132 million gallons of water came roaring down the valley, killing 125 men, women, and children. 1,100 people were injured and 4,000 homes were destroyed. An emergency shelter was set up at the Man High School and survivors combed the wreckage looking for loved ones and lost possessions.
Pittston later claimed the disaster to be an, “act of God”.
An elderly female resident replied, “I never saw God drive the first slate truck up the holler.”
Again, in actions so typical of our state, one of the last acts of departing West Virginia Governor Arch Moore was a settlement of the multi-million dollar lawsuits against Pittston for the insulting sum of $1 million dollars.
Stories of the children who survived the disaster recall how anxious and nervous they would get everytime it rained.
Why is all this worth recounting?
It’s because this is a history of labor in West Virginia. Despite the Mine Wars which shed some light on workers issues. West Virginians have, by and large, been poorly represented by local, state, and federal leaders, and exploited by ruthless corporations. It has been West Virginia workers blood that have purchased many of the country’s safety and health reforms, and it is those reforms that are under attack that we have to continue to fight for everyday.
The UMWA is one of the few unions to have any real success in this area. Those intrepid organizers for the UMWA braved the remote and rugged geography, faced down hired gun thugs, and brought a little social justice to exploited and abused workers in this state.
Another union that helped open the door for West Virginia workers is the Railroad Workers United, who represent railroad workers across North America, and fight the same issues as the rest of us.
It is this lack of representation that should inspire every worker in West Virginia to seek out a union of their choice and actively pursue joining. Unions are the purest forms of democracy in our country because they are ran by the workers, not politicians or absentee corporations. They are also an important source of vital information on issues affecting the industries they represent, giving workers information that is hard, if not impossible, to find anywhere else.
Unions that are organized and active act as checks and balances for people who work for a living and seem to be the ones largely ignored when political parties develop grand platforms promising prosperity and reform, but deliver more of the same year after year. Healthy and active unions hold these people to account for promises made in the heat of campaigns.
The West Virginia AFL-CIO, with whom we are affiliated with, represents over 575 affiliated unions who fight for all West Virginia workers, whether they are union or not. Unions set the bar for wages, benefits, and working conditions for all workers. UWUA Local 304 would like to wish departing longtime President Kenny Purdue a happy retirement and welcome his replacement, Josh Sword, to the top job at the helm of West Virginia’s labor movement.
Josh Sword Kenneth Purdue
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