Let's talk about property and violence

West Virginia Gazette
June 02, 2005
Bryan McNeil

Coal companies trample on public, private property

In an Associated Press story that appeared in the May 24 Gazette, John Snider, vice president for External Affairs for Arch Coal, Inc., said that trespassing constitutes an act of violence. Fearing protests against mountaintop removal mine sites this summer, he suggested that protesters coming onto private property are committing a violent act.

Property rights are one of the more absurd ways the coal industry tries to explain mountaintop removal. Coal companies cannot justify mountaintop removal in any ethically or socially sane way, so they turn to property rights. A coal company invoking property rights is like the little boy who takes his ball and goes home because he is afraid of losing.

So, let’s talk about property and violence.

This is an example of a "mitigated stream".

For this argument alone, I’ll concede that coal companies have the right to lease land and remove coal using methods approved by state and federal regulations. But the streams affected by valley fills — even the little ones the industry insists aren’t streams at all — belong to the citizens of West Virginia. They are common property. The coal industry has buried well over 1,000 miles of West Virginia public property under valley fills. On down the line, streams become filled with silt, also former coal company property. Everyone would love for companies to keep that property to themselves. For their part, Arch Coal subsidiaries have more than 50,000 acres under surface mine permits, according to the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection. That’s more than 78 square miles. Arch-owned Catenary Coal and Hobet Mining are the state’s two largest surface mines.

Roads also belong to the citizens. But across Southern West Virginia, gates block access to roads that still appear on Department of Highways maps. Even now companies, including Arch, are actively seeking abandonment of roads near mountaintop removal sites. Those miles, too, are lost public property.

After the flood in Mingo County, June 2004

Mountaintop removal doesn’t just affect public lands. Retired coal miner Joe Barnette of Artie has made repeated structural repairs — foundation, roof and interior walls — on his home that is only 15 years old. Over Barnette’s protests, coal company officials maintaining the valley fill and sediment ponds routinely cut the curve in front of his house, visibly eroding more of his private property. None of these problems occurred before a coal company began mountaintop removal within sight of Barnette’s home in 1996.

Five times since then, but never before, the creek and road (both property of West Virginia), along with Barnette’s yard (private property), flooded and filled with debris. The debris used to be a coal company’s private property.

There are fancy legal ways to deny that flood debris actually came from a mine site to avoid liability for damages. After the 2001 flood in Dorothy, DEP inspectors issued an emergency cessation order against the Princess Beverly mine because the stream of debris led directly to the toe of its eroded valley fill and clogged sediment ponds. The Surface Mine Board vacated that order because the storm exceeded the required design criteria of the valley fill. The fill was only required to withstand a 10-year storm — a storm the intensity of which can be expected once every 10 years, on average. Just how long are valley fills expected to remain in place? Can citizens of West Virginia expect valley fills to be removed and streams (public property) returned after only 10 years?

Despite the legal acrobatics, anyone who wants to see it can trace a direct and continuous line of mining debris back to the valley fill and sediment pond from whence it came. I’ve done it several times, at least once at an Arch mine. Forgive me for trespassing.

These were once the lush life sustaining mountains of Appalachia.

Finally, to call trespassing an act of violence is obscene, given the graphic violence the coal industry practices in the course of conducting business. According to the Institute of Makers of Explosives, the coal industry consumed 67 percent of the explosives purchased nationwide in 2003, the most recent year for which information is available. West Virginia consumed 332,000 metric tons — more than any other state. If mines blast about 250 days a year, that works out to about three million pounds of explosives used in West Virginia each day. That is equivalent to 4,636 “bunker buster” bombs, each of which contains 647 explosive pounds. Is this West Virginia or Afghanistan?

The message here — and it’s not at all hidden — is that coal company property rights mean more than those of average citizen's in Southern West Virginia. They have for more than a century. To review the irony, coal companies trample on citizens’ property rights as a routine business practice. When citizens complain, coal companies whine about their own property rights. It seems obvious that citizens would become upset. Can you blame them? It might be funny, if only it didn’t kill people. Some trespasses are mighty hard to forgive.

McNeil has a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of North Carolina. His research in West Virginia’s coalfields examines grassroots citizen efforts to reform the coal industry. He is a native of West Virginia and coal miner’s grandson.

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