Thunder on the Mountain: Death at Massey and the Dirty Secrets behind Big Coal - Softcover

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DEATH AT UPPER BIG BRANCH
 
 
In the morning darkness of April 5, 2010, Tommy Davis left his home with its cluttered yard for work. A sinewy, forty-three-year-old who rides Harleys and hunts black bears with a bow and arrow, Davis had worked at a Massey Energy Company surface mine for twelve years. Four months before, drawn by higher pay and the chance to work with as many as five of his relatives, including Cory, his son, he had transferred to Massey’s Upper Big Branch deep mine about forty-five minutes away in Raleigh County in the Coal River Valley.
The day before had been Easter Sunday. Work at Upper Big Branch had been suspended so miners could enjoy their usual paschal activities. Families attended church, searched for Easter eggs with their children, and ate baked ham dinners. An early shift had started at midnight but did little more than maintenance work. The first regular production run began at 6 A.M. Dawn that Monday, April 5, promised temperatures in the 70s, unusually warm for the fickle early spring of southern West Virginia. There, snow showers and wind quickly change back and forth into sunny days that bring out ramps, a wild-growing onion with a pungent garlic aroma that is a seasonal delicacy in this part of Appalachia, and the chirping of spring peeper frogs.
Known as UBB, the fifteen-year-old mine is nestled on the west side of a narrow valley marked by Coal River, which after spring rains is a brown, wildly churning stream capped by small wavelets of white water. Potato chip bags, bits of clothing, and other trash cling to tree limbs after floods push the river over its banks. Next to it, on a CSX Transportation rail branch line, hopper cars clatter in for loading at the valley’s half a dozen or so mining operations. Scattered here and there amid the hardwood trees and rock outcrops are reminders of just how hazardous coal work can be. Occasional roads of industrial-grade gravel leading to coal mines have signs boldly lettered AMBULANCE ENTRANCE.
UBB was operated by Performance Coal, one of Massey Energy’s more than forty subsidiaries that had been overseen by former Massey Energy board chairman and chief executive officer Donald Blankenship, who is a tall, jowly man with a prominent double chin and steady, penetrating stare. Coal River, about thirty miles south of the state capital of Charleston, has been the epicenter of a drama that has featured the highly controversial Blankenship for more than a decade. A native of Central Appalachia, Blankenship parlayed an extraordinary gift for crunching numbers with an indefatigable work ethic he learned from his single mother into becoming Big Coal’s best-known, and most notorious, corporate executive.
As he did at many of his company’s operations, Blankenship flew around in a company helicopter like a twenty-first-century William Westmoreland, the celebrity general of Vietnam War fame whose penchant for statistics and body counts has become legend. Blankenship moved about, checking production numbers here and solving minor problems there, such as micromanaging when and if an overtime shift got a lunch break. He spent much of his time pushing faster, more efficient, and cheaper production, demanding reports of the output of each mine several times during each work shift. He battled safety and environmental regulators; bankrolled state political candidates who favored the coal industry, including judges; and waged an intense public relations war against ecological activists, whom he despised and dubbed “greeniacs.” His cantankerous ploys were often successful. He was effective in his move to block national legislation stemming coal-related emissions of greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change. His tenacity prevailed when a West Virginia judge ruled that big concrete silos filled with coal did not harm mountain schoolchildren at the Marsh Fork Elementary School near Massey’s huge Edwight “mountaintop removal” surface mine in the Coal River Valley. This same mine also has a 3.8-billion-gallon pond of dark toxic sludge from mine tailings held back by an earthen dam high above the school. While Massey eventually contributed to build a new school at a different location, children for years endured the threat of breathing carcinogenic compounds from coal dust and drowning from a possible dam break.
In this type of mining, which became widespread in southern West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky over the past two decades and has been targeted by celebrity protests and local ecologists who regularly employ guerrilla tactics to snare media attention, hundreds of feet of dirt, rock, and trees—“overburden” in mining company parlance—are lopped off like the cap of a Coca-Cola bottle by powerful explosives and gigantic drag lines.
UBB is a deep mine situated a few miles north of Edwight on the same side of the road. Unlike strip mines on the surface, deep mines can run thousands of feet into the earth. The aboveground section of the deep mine is a tangle of metal buildings, conveyor belts, and tall supporting towers that jut up dramatically from the narrow valley. The mine is of crucial importance to Massey because it taps the Eagle Seam of incredibly rich metallurgical coal that is in tremendous demand, especially in Asian countries such as China that are in a construction boom, building skyscrapers, bridges, and high-speed passenger trains. Despite the Great Recession, demand had started spiking for metallurgical coal in late 2009 and kept pace through the following two years. During the first half of 2010, met coal exports from the United States would reach 39.8 million tons, a 62 percent increase. Another advantage of Eagle Seam coal, as with most of the product in southern West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky, is that it can also be used to fire giant steam generators at electric power plants in the United States, which depend on coal for at least 45 percent of their electricity.
Despite its long-standing reputation for cutting corners and costs, Massey Energy was struggling to catch up with the unexpected Asian boom. In 2009, Upper Big Branch was cited by the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration 515 times for safety violations, nearly twice the national average. It was fined a total of $382,000 just for UBB in 2009. During the previous month alone, UBB had been closed for safety violations more than sixty-one times by MSHA—more than any other mine in the country. Massey officials had a perpetual feud with MSHA over changes in ventilation plans at the mine. Since January 2009, the mine had been cited forty-eight times for air-related problems. Miners were fearful of the erratic airflows and the unusually high number of air-lock doors. These are like watertight doors on a ship and can be shut to manipulate airflow. They are cheaper to install than other, safer types that don’t break the airflow pattern when opened and are less prone to being opened or closed unintentionally. At UBB, the doors were constantly being opened for work. Air is critical in any mine, but it was especially important at a huge one like Upper Big Branch, whose geology was unusually “gassy” with methane and whose shafts stretched for miles underground. Workers in such mines are more prone to injury or death by being ripped apart or crushed by debris from an explosion, burned by fire, or suffocated by toxic gases such as methane or carbon monoxide.
Many claim that Massey Energy was under intense financial pressure to produce, since its stock price had been sagging. According to a lawsuit filed on April 29, 2010, by the Macomb County Employees Retirement System, an institutional investor in Massey stock, “the number of violations at Massey mines had dramatically spiked in 2009 as the Company ramped up production attempting to reverse a year-long slide in profitability during which its stock price had collapsed from more than $80 per share to as low as $10 a share.”
Still, to miners like Tommy Davis, Massey was a godsend. Unemployment was running better than 10 percent in Raleigh and surrounding counties. If there were jobs in the tiny burgs that dot the hollows, they tended to be at gas stations, pizza joints, or the ubiquitous Dollar General stores offering cheap merchandise. Fast-food jobs like McDonald’s can be thirty miles away, and low-paying work at a Walmart farther still in places such as Charleston or Beckley. Mining, by contrast, paid upward of sixty-eight thousand dollars a year, or more than double the state average annual salary. Deep-mining could pay even more. “You might make twenty-four dollars an hour at the surface mine, but in a deep mine, I make thirty-one an hour. That’s a hundred forty to a hundred fifty dollars a day more,” Tommy Davis said. The extra money was a big help when it came to paying the bills and raising children, not to mention his love of motorcycles and pickup trucks, which sit in his yard.
On that Monday after Easter, Tommy Davis parked his car at the mine and hopped aboard a mantrip, a kind of low-slung truck or railcar that can carry up to thirteen miners stuffed aboard with their helmets; battery packs; metatarsal-protective, steel-toed boots; and self-rescuers—temporary breathing apparatuses used if the mine becomes smoky or otherwise short of air. The shift began with problems. After being closed for the holiday, some sections of the mine had been flooded by underground water. Workers dealing with pumps had gone to work wearing long johns and heavy pants, since they expected to work in the cold. “You would have a thermal shirt on, a jacket, gloves, or a beanie … but that day was miserably hot,” miner David Farley recalls. Some men even stripped to their shorts. Another oddity: air seemed to be flowing in an opposite direction that morning. Miners later recalled it being a telltale sign that something wasn’t right.
One miner who seemed especially spooked going to work that day was Gary Wayne Quarles, a thirty-three-year-old man so large and round at three hundred pounds that he was nicknamed Spanky. He had just gone through a painful divorce and was staying with his father, also a miner and also named Gary, and his mother, Patty, at their trim double-wide trailer home off a small creek near Naoma not far from Upper Big Branch. Besides doting on his eleven-year-old son and nine-year-old daughter, Quarles enjoyed hunting for deer and wild turkey with his father and friends. The night before, he had gone out to a Hooters restaurant in Beckley. With him were Jason Gautier, a former Massey employee then working with another coal firm, and Nicolas McCroskey, also a Massey worker. Quarles was morose at the meal. He and McCroskey told their colleague that “something bad was going to happen” at Upper Big Branch. The next morning, the younger Quarles anxiously went to his job.
The same morning, Tommy Davis’s mantrip entered the mine at a downward angle and traveled miles into and hundreds of feet beneath the mountain surface. Going to work was a family affair for Davis, and then some. Of the sixty-one miners working the 6 A.M. to 3 P.M. shift, there was his twenty-one-year-old son, Cory, and his brother Timmy. A nephew, Josh Napper, was a newcomer who had moved in with his grandparents not far from Dawes to work the coalfields because he had lost his job as a registered nurse in south central Ohio. Another nephew, Cody, was also on the shift.
The mantrip ride took about half an hour and transported the miners nearly five miles into the mountain to a longwall mining apparatus. Other miners went to another section hundreds of yards away that was being prepared for a repositioning of the longwall device at a later date. Considered the most efficient and profitable method of deep-mining, the longwall is a massive and expensive drilling rig that runs one thousand feet, back and forth, ripping out coal. Its spearhead consists of two devices called “shearers,” which are covered with ultra-hard bits and 158 water-spray nozzles to keep coal dust down. The shearers roar back and forth, up and down, a seam. At one end, called a head end, coal is pushed onto conveyors, belts that whisk it miles to the surface, where it can be classified, washed, and prepared for shipment by railcar or truck to domestic or global customers. When the device reaches the “tail end,” it reverses course and moves back to the head end again, screaming and straining as it rips out big chunks of black coal. Typically, the mined area, held up by hydraulic jacks from the tremendous force of the mountain bearing down on it, is eventually buried as the jacks are moved and the mine roof collapses behind it after miners and machinery are moved away. The longwall device then moves ahead, eating into the mountain. Gary Wayne Quarles was one of several miners operating the device that day.
Davis said it seemed a routine shift. He spent part of his time laying track in the area where the longwall was due to be placed. “It’s pretty low, maybe fifty inches in the highest part, and I’m six foot four inches tall,” he said. “In some sections, you have to crawl on your hands and knees.” Some of his relatives were on roof-bolting assignment that involved pounding metal bolts the size of car hubcaps into the mine ceiling to hold up the roof. According to a MSHA report, Massey supervisors on the surface got a call from miners near the coalface at 7:30 A.M. About 11 A.M., the longwall machine ran into a problem and shut down. A retainer holding a hinge for a ranging arm had come loose. Without it, the longwall could not operate. That cost money for Massey, then struggling to boost its stock price after production flaws had tanked it to the ten-dollars-a-share level. After repairs and tests, the longwall machine resumed operation at 2:15 P.M., toward the end of the shift. Up top, miners started to prepare for the next shift as they gathered their gear, including their heavy mine jackets marked by fluorescent orange and silver stripes—Massey Energy’s colors.
Down below, around 2:30 P.M., Davis and a nephew quit their shifts a little early and started heading for the surface on the mantrip, stopping for a few moments to chat with his son and others. It was, he said, the usual macho miner camaraderie “trying to get each other’s goat.” He and his nephew were about two hundred feet from the surface when he suddenly felt the wind at his back. His nephew jumped and took shelter in front of the mantrip, and Davis started running for the opening. Moments later came a second whoosh of air, this one far more powerful. “I felt this wind and all this shit coming out—rocks and wood. I made it outside and was trying to get my bearings. I thought it was a major rockfall, but then I remember them all back there: my son, my brother, my nephew, and the others.”
Another surviving miner, Steven Smith, described the experience this way: “Before you knew it, it was just like your ears stopped up, you couldn’t hear, and the next thing you know, it’s just like you’re in the middle of a tornado.”
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A massive explosion had ripped through UBB’s maze of shafts, headgates, tailgates, and mining rooms, rolling at least seven miles underground, turning abruptly at right angles along shafts and, at times, looping around and inundating the same spaces twice. MSHA investigators believe the blast started when the longwall machine hit a stretch of sandstone. Shearer bits on the longwall machine created a big splash of sparks as it hit. “Coal and shale are soft and the shearer can bore right through them. But sandstone sparks quite a bit,” says Gary Stover, a former Massey mine engineer who now brokers coal-land deals for Penn Virginia Resource Partners in Chesapeake, West Virginia. The sandstone was apparently so tough that some...