Tuesday, 23 March 2010, the coal giant Massey Energy Company acknowledged the need to replace the Marsh Fork Elementary school in southern West Virginia, and offered $1 million to assist in that effort.

Marsh Fork Elementary is a sandcastle, waiting out the tide. 

It sits at the mouth of Shumate hollow, in the Coal River Valley.  Adjacent to it, Goals Coal Company (subsidiary of Massey) runs a preparation plant, with a silo just 225 feet from the school, which has been independently studied and found to be polluting the school with fugitive dust.

400 yards up the hollow from the school is the Shumate Dam, a 385 foot earthen wall built to contain almost 3 billion gallons of liquid coal waste.

(Aerial view of Marsh Fork Elementary and the Shumate impoundment.  Photo:  Vivian Stockman.)

The dangers to Marsh Fork Elementary are obvious and well documented, but have long been played down by the responsible parties and regulating agencies.

For years, local residents and school board officials have been skinning their teeth, trying to drum up enough money to move the school off of the hollow, and out of danger.

Massey CEO Don Blankenship wrote a letter to the President of the Raleigh County School Board, pledging the $1 million, and saying,

We understand that you wish to replace the current school because it is over 70 years old and located in the floodplain.

Questionable Integrity

Jackie Browning was a bulldozer operator for Massey when construction began on the Shumate Dam in 1991.  (Reported by Dan Heyman, 2005).  His job included driving the dozer back and forth to compact the layers of fill material. 

By federal law, these layers must not exceed one foot in thickness; but Browning had to compact layers 5 to 10 feet thick, often sopping with excess moisture, which he found to be ineffectual (imagine trying to make a sculpture out of runny oatmeal). 

He also witness large amounts of scrap of wood and metal being dumped in with the dam’s fill material, which is also prohibited, because when it rots away it leaves void space where water will infiltrate and weaken the dam.  With billions of gallons in a pond, the force exerted over time on one weakened point can lead to a localized blowout.

Browning told WV Public Broadcasting in his interview,

“Believe me…They could care less how that dam’s built.”

Jim Elkins, an inspector with the Miners Safety and Health Administration, issued violations to Massey twice in 1998 for its fill layer infractions.  He said,

It’s reasonably likely an accident would occur if the condition continued to exist.

MSHA later declared that the problems had been fixed, and ended up fining Massey a total of $680 for the two citations.  Here’s a little perspective on how grievously that fine hit Massey’s pocketbook.

In 2007, I was arrested for public intoxication in Blacksburg, Virginia, thrown in the tank for the night, and fined $71.  Not too bad.  But then I calculated my fine in proportion to my income in 2007, and Massey’s fine in proportion to its income from operations in 1998 (p.43). 

I was charged 500 times more (proportionally), for a night of unsavory drunkenness in a college town, than Massey was, for nineteen years of endangering hundreds of lives in a WV holler. 

That’s federal regulation at work.

For two decades, Massey has created a situation of extreme danger for Marsh Fork Elementary and the community of Sundial.

“Floodplain” is a euphemism.  There would be nothing planar about the flood, if the dam were to fail.

Other Catastrophes for Children of Marsh Fork are Slower Moving

Marsh Fork is a place of learning, full of West Virginia’s youth.  It should be an incubator for young minds, a window to a world bigger than what they see between the blasted ridge tops, pay-day loans and Planned Parenthood offices, and billboards inscribed “Coal Keeps the Lights On.” 

But in through the window comes coal dust, shook off the open conveyors of the prep plant next door, and right into the air vents.  Kids get sick.

Even the most vigorous talent is smothered when forced to slog on in poor constitution, just as Oscar Wilde’s wit was broken on a Pentonville treadmill.  But them, just little budding spirits, geniuses for Appalachia.

Ed Wiley is a Sundial resident who started Pennies of Promise, a grassroots effort to raise funds for the relocation of Marsh Fork Elementary.  In 2006, he marched 455 miles from Charleston, WV to Washington, D.C. to bring attention to that cause.

Ed welcomed me into his home that November, on my very first visit to Coal River.  He told me about his granddaughter Kayla falling ill from the coal dust that infiltrates the Marsh Fork school.  He told me how he used to work for Massey, cleaning up the Martin County, Kentucky spill and making emergency repairs to the Shumate dam. 

His view of the Marsh Fork debacle is up close, it’s from the angles of a grandparent and a mine worker, and of course, it’s deeply personal.

Just a Start

$8.6 million for a new school, out of harm’s way, to replace Marsh Fork Elementary.  If Massey Energy were to cover the entire cost, it would represent 1.3% of the company’s Total Cash ($676.7M).

Senator Robert C. Byrd commented today on Massey’s contribution, calling it “a welcome and good start.”  It certainly is.  But he then added an oblique, kind of fatherly critique,

As Massey Energy moves to acquire Cumberland Resources through a stock offering, and helps pay for mountain top mining music concerts, I would hope that they will continue to keep the welfare of the young students at Marsh Fork Elementary in their hearts and in their minds.