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This article originally provided by Old Trout Magazine/Alternet
October 30, 2006
Excerpt from The Thirteen Scariest People in America
Scariest Polluter: Don Blankenship / CEO of Massey Energy Co.
by David Roberts
America's most brutal environmental despoiler may be West Virginia's Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey Energy Co., the nation's most aggressive practitioner of mountaintop-removal mining. Massey uses explosives to blow off ridge-tops in the southern Appalachians to strip the coal from within the decapitated peak. Then Massey dumps the "overburden" (everything that isn't coal) into the valleys and hollows below. Some blast sites are "recovered" -- that is, hastily filled with a layer of fast-growing grass -- but the destruction is so profound that no forest will again take root.
In areas where mountaintop removal is concentrated, the destruction to water, air quality and property values is so extensive it all but precludes the development of other industry. Coal has locked rural West Virginia into a death spiral. Over 100 billion gallons of slurry -- a toxic black sludge that results from coal being washed with corrosive chemicals -- are stored often less than a mile from houses and schools. The slurry seeps into groundwater and occasionally breaks from behind earthen dams to flood towns below. Locals are regularly showered with coal dust. The black, brackish public water is unfit for consumption or even bathing. Illness is ubiquitous.
To Blankenship, the human and environmental cost be damned. That the Appalachians are some of the world's oldest mountains and home to what may be the greatest biodiversity of any temperate region in the world seems of little relevance to Massey, and likewise Appalachian culture, with families that date back seven or eight generations on the same land, is being systematically purged from the landscape.
The son of a poor single mother raised in nearby Mingo County, Blankenship ascended the corporate ladder at Massey, ruthlessly suppressed mineworker unions (a mere 3% of Massey employees remain unionized), bullied critics, and essentially underwrote at least one state-wide election through a PAC called "And For the Sake of the Kids." The group ran attack ads aimed at liberal Supreme Court Justice Warren McGraw, who had the gall to rule against Massey in worker compensation cases.
You'd think Blankenship would do better by his neighbors, though he tries.
Every year, in the manner of the Mafia under the late John Gotti, Massey funds a
lavish Christmas party in a small West Virginia town. "Don" Blankenship arrives
in a limo, puts on a Santa hat, and passes out little gifts to the locals --
some of the same people whose ancestral lands he is destroying, whose families
he is impoverishing and whose children he is sickening.
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