Many people on Hazel Mountain believe that the water has been taken from them — not by God but by Pittston Coal Co.
Once, people at this community meeting recall, sweet-tasting water flowed over and under the mountain. But that's changed. Over the past half century, they say, the ground water and streams have been cut off and fouled by the coal company's underground shafts and strip mines.
Water is a sore point in Dickenson County, one of the environmental worries that color the relationship between the county's citizens and its most prominent corporate citizen. In the first half of the century, the relationship was marked by battles over wages and working conditions. Since the 1950s, environmental questions have taken on growing importance.
More than 140 families on Hazel Mountain are forced to catch rainfall or haul water from Russell County, sometimes even melting snow on their stoves when ice storms prevent them from driving to far-off springs.
"All the water has been draining out of this mountain since the early 1900s," one long-time resident, Carrol Rasnick, says. "It's going to get worse — not just on this mountain, but down low it's going to get worse."
Del. Clarence "Bud" Phillips, a Dickenson County Democrat who has studied water problems in Virginia's coalfields, says thousands of people in the county have seen their wells and springs destroyed by mining. Most have had their water replaced by public lines, but hundreds more are still waiting to hook up to the county system.
Pittston has paid to replace water for some individuals, but scoffs at the idea that it's responsible for wide-scale water loss in the county. "We've dealt upfront with people on this," company vice president Walter Crickmer says. But "I've had people who live 10 miles away from a coal mine tell me I took their water."
Rasnick, a retired Pittston miner, has been complaining about water problems on Hazel Mountain since 1961. He says it's clear that mining is to blame.
"I appreciate Pittston," Rasnick says. "They gave me work. I'm not against the company."
But he worries about the company's long-term impact on the county — from water loss to economic development and the future of the company's forestlands.
"If you destroy your county," Rasnick says, "you destroy your livelihood and everybody who lives in it."
‘Living in these mountains’
Ask anyone who lives there, and they'll tell you: Dickenson County is a wild and wondrous place. The Breaks Interstate Park, which straddles the county's border with Kentucky, is dominated by the Breaks Gorge, the "Grand Canyon of the South," a testament to the creative power of water on rock. Pittston donated land and money to help create the park.
People in the county tell tales of deer, chased by dogs, running headlong to their deaths off 100-foot "high walls" left by long-ago strip mines. A couple years back, a mountain lion prowled the county's southern edge, slaughtering Luther Chaffin's pygmy goats up on Sandy Ridge.
Down the road, his cousin, Dallas Kiser, 92, tends four vegetable gardens. Luther's brother, James, warns her, "You be careful up in that garden, Dall. Watch for rattlesnakes."
She listens, but it doesn't stop her from growing and canning 200 to 300 jars a year of cabbage, tomatoes, potatoes, corn and cucumbers. "About anything you raise in a garden, I raise it."
Asked why they love the county, many people simply say: "It's home."
"I've been all over the world, from Germany to France to England to the Philippines, and there's not a place — even with the problems we've got — as good as right here," says County Administrator B.L. Ratliff, an Air Force veteran. "There's nothing to compare to living in these mountains."
Ratliff believes it does little good to blame Pittston for the county's environmental and economic problems.
"We've got the hardest-working people in this county that I've ever seen," he says. "But I don't believe in working for you all my life and retiring and then criticizing you. I believe that if I got a problem with you, I'd work it out."
Others say that's the problem: People have been so dependent on the coal company that they've been afraid to speak out. But that's changed as the number of people working for the company has shrunk.
"I think the people are tired of feeling helpless, going up against the corporate giants," says Peggy Mariner, who lives on Hazel Mountain. "I think the responsibility of the coal company goes beyond just providing jobs. Men around here gave their lives for the coal company."
Something in the air
Over the years, the company has been under the ground, on the surface, and, sometimes, hanging in the air.
People around Clinchco recall the sulphur haze that filled the sky in the 1950s.
"You'd wake up in the morning and the coal smoke would be so thick you couldn't see the houses around you," says Ed Reedy, who moved to Clinchco with his wife, Edith, in 1953.
The smoke came from fires burning among heaps of coal refuse, a mixture of rock and coal carted out of the mines. One of the slate dumps was estimated at 100 million tons.
Sometime after World War II, the slag piles around Clinchco caught fire. Some speculate the company set the fires to burn off the coal and produce "reddog," a crumbly rock material used in road beds. The company says the fires started spontaneously from heat and pressure in the dumps.
However they started, the blue-flamed fires burned and smoldered through the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s.
"I think most people accepted the way it was," says Phillips, the state legislator who remembers the burning slate piles from when he was a boy. "The coal companies didn't seem to be concerned about it. And there were no state or federal authorities to help you."
The fires stopped when Pittston reclaimed the dumps using new methods to extract the leftover coal. Crickmer, the Pittston executive, says the slate piles were unavoidable byproducts of mining produced long before laws were passed to police the industry. "It's not because any coal companies went out to create a problem 50 or 75 years ago."
Booms and busts
Dickenson County's coal economy was notorious for booms and busts: up in the 1920s, down in the Depression, up again after World War II, hitting bottom in the ’50s. By the summer of ’54, 2,000 miners were out of work in the county, and 1,000 families were getting by on surplus government food.
In the 1970s, the oil crisis helped send coal on an upswing. At the same time, technology was transforming the industry, allowing the company to dig more coal with fewer workers. Underground, "longwall" machines operated with awesome efficiency: A giant disc studded with steel bits cut through the coal like a buzz-saw, sweeping back and forth along a block of coal longer than a football field. Above ground, longwalling drew complaints from homeowners who said their houses were buckling as the ground collapsed to fill the void left by the big machines.
The company bought some houses ahead of time, paid some homeowners after the damage was done, and turned away others' claims.
Jack Clay, an ex-miner who worked for a Pittston subcontractor, persuaded the company to replace his mother's trailer with a new double-wide. But he says it refused to compensate him for damage to his house. Like many miners, he didn't give much thought to the industry's practices when he was working.
"Probably 60 percent of the houses they undermined, the man who owned it was working underground and undermining his own place," Clay says. "Yes, we need the mining. We need the business in general. We don't ask that the mining be stopped. All we ask is that it be done responsibly. If they cause damage, make it right."
Changing times
Longwall mining brought other, deadlier problems. The night of June 21, 1983, a whistling, roaring sound, followed by a wall of flame, rushed through the corridors of Pittston's McClure No. 1 Mine in Dickenson County. For a couple of seconds afterward, one miner later testified, "there wasn't no air at all."
A spark had ignited a buildup of methane gas. Six men and one woman died in Virginia's worst mine disaster in 25 years. The United Mine Workers of America blamed the company and lax government regulation, noting a history of safety problems and four previous deaths in the mine. The company denied responsibility, but the state fined it $47,500 for safety violations that caused the deaths.
The explosion aggravated an already souring relationship between the company and the union.
The ’80s had turned bad for the coal industry. In 1984, when Paul Douglas took over as Pittston's chairman, the company was losing $79 million a year.
Douglas said Pittston needed to change if it wanted to compete with overseas rivals that produced coal cheaper. The company laid off 4,000 UMW miners and demanded concessions on health insurance and non-union hiring.
In 1988, its contract with the union ran out. UMW members kept working without an agreement, but Pittston cut health benefits to 1,500 widows and retirees. If the UMW went on strike, the company promised, it would hire replacements.
The UMW had been a fixture in Virginia's coalfields for almost half a century. Now Pittston was ready to break the union.
"I believe they will strike and the company will merrily go about replacing the work force," one Wall Street analyst predicted. "Some of the men will cross the picket lines. There are a lot of unemployed people out there."
‘People stuck together’
It was no ordinary picket line: Hundreds of men and women, wearing the UMW strike uniform of camouflage jackets and pants, sat down in roads, blocking coal trucks from going in and out of Pittston mines. State troopers dragged them away and threw them on buses.
On April 24, 1989, the strike was less than 3 weeks old, but things already had heated up.
The troopers hauled more than 200 protesters to the Dickenson County Courthouse in Clintwood. Hundreds more people converged on the county seat, honking horns and clogging the streets with their cars and trucks.
One courtroom was jammed with men and women waiting to be processed on strike-related charges. Someone found a rope and nearly 100 men used it to slide out of an open courtroom window, scraping themselves on a hemlock tree and then fading into the camouflage-wearing crowd. Some men commandeered a coal truck and wheeled it through town, beating on the sides with shovels. |
