First Big Coal Broke the Union. Then It Broke This Town.

[marmar]

from Mother Jones:




First Big Coal Broke the Union. Then It Broke This Town.
A West Virginia community gets wiped off the map.

— By Josh Harkinson


From a chair on the porch of her home in a hollow deep in the Appalachians, Lora can see the top of Montcoal Mountain being blasted off. The explosions a mile and a half away ruffle her curtains, rattle family photos in her living room, and may be why her walls are laced with cracks. A fine gray dust settles on the steps as fast as she can sweep it off. The noise and "fly rock" raining down have forced her daughter and dozens of neighbors to sell their houses and move away. Lora worries she'll be next. "I wouldn't be satisfied with another place," she says, sitting and chain-smoking Pall Malls. "I raised my kids here. Where would a person go?"

But fighting isn't an option for Lora, who asked me not to use her real name for fear of repercussions: The mining operations that are destroying the land also employ her son and son-in-law—good jobs, the only real ones around. "It's the way of life here; there's nothing else," says the 54-year-old grandmother. Like many West Virginia coal towns that have shifted from underground mining to far more destructive mountaintop-removal mining, this hamlet, known as Twilight, is now in the business of burying itself alive.

Many blame Twilight's slow demise on Massey Energy, the state's second largest coal producer (PDF)—and its most controversial. Massey, which merged with Alpha Natural Resources earlier this year, has racked up more health and safety violations in the past decade than any coal outfit in America. In 1997, it opened a surface strip mine near Twilight that now produces 5 million tons of coal annually, all of it dug up and hauled off by about 350 non-union workers (PDF). Many families that weren't lucky enough to land jobs on the strip have left. The area's population has fallen from more than 500 in 1990 to less than 250 today. "With mountaintop removal, they can get the coal easier and quicker with less people," Frankie Mooney, a retired third-generation miner, told me. "People can say what they want to, but there's no security in coal mining no more." ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://motherjones.com/environment/2011/03/massey-energy-twilight-west-virginia

[liberal N proud]

1. Documentaries like this have been told time and again

Yet people can't put two and two together and see that corporation sitting on the edge of town wants to do the same near them.

Can't happen here reigns in America.

[tularetom]

2. These people get crapped on more than almost anybody in America

And yet they consistently elect politicians who enable the crappers.

[Kurmudgeon]

6. WV is still the land of the big W logo..

And I saw yet another imbecile today with a sticker blaming Obama for Bush's decisions.
I've been slowly losing hope for my beautiful state of West Virginia.

[classof56]

3. I'm reminded of the end of the novel "How Green was My Valley"

and the last line: "How green was my Valley then, and the Valley of them that have gone."

It's beyond awful, the way people's lives, our environment, our country are destroyed so the rich can be richer.

Just so sad...

[era veteran]

4. Big coal is so evil, cheap energy is really not so cheap.

K/R

[Citizen Worker]

5. Two films that depict the plight of coal miners and their Union are, Out of Darkness, and Harlan

County, USA.