TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/110491/1104200.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 19.2 KB | 383 lines

                                                                                BUSINESS, Page 54

LABOR

The Curse of Coal


Vanishing jobs, a ruined economy, broken lives and broken bodies.
One county's misery testifies to the tragedy of Appalachia's
mines.

By TED GUP/LOGAN


    ". . . it is only because miners sweat their guts out that
superior persons can remain superior."

    -- George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier


    Out of work and out of luck, the coal miners of Logan
County, W. Va., come to the Big Eagle Gun and Pawn Shop to offer
up the last thing they have of any worth: their simple gold
wedding bands. The rings, buffed free of inscriptions, fill a
black velvet tray. Dozens more crowd a shelf in the vault. Over
the past five years, more than 1,000 miners and their wives
have come here to slip off their rings and slide them silently
across the narrow glass counter. They walk away with a $15 loan
and a claim stub. In time, their rings are shipped in bulk to
a smelter in North Carolina, where they are melted down -- as
disposable as they once were valued, not unlike the miners
themselves.

    The store is an inventory of broken dreams. From VCRs to
old pocket watches, the lost possessions give testimony to the
legacy that coal mining has left upon Appalachia: unemployment,
a ruined economy, crippling injuries and early deaths. For Logan
County -- and for much of Appalachia -- coal has been a blessing
and a curse. It provided generations with work, solid wages, a
source of immense pride and a tax base for schools, hospitals
and roads. But the mines have exacted a high price in return.
Many miners spend their lives crawling on their hands and knees
in tunnels sometimes no higher than a yardstick, wading through
mud and water, burrowing through unutterable darkness. Nearly
every miner can name a friend or family member who has been
killed, maimed or stricken with black lung disease. "You die
quick or you die slow," says Hassell Butcher, chief of Logan
County's tax department.

    But the casualties of mining cannot be measured by
injuries alone. Generations of young men were lured from the
classroom into the mines, many of them barely able to read or
write. Communities staked everything on King Coal, neglecting
to diversify. And still they cling to it, with vain hopes that
the men will be called back to work. But tens of thousands of
mining jobs have been lost as the process of extracting coal
from Appalachia's deep seams has been transformed by cheaper,
automated methods and by the development of surface mines in the
Western states. Of the 20 most productive mines in the U.S., not
one is in Appalachia. As a result, the number of coal miners in
the U.S. has plunged from about 230,000 a decade ago to 130,000
today.

    As the industry has moved from man to machine, the miners
have lost the political and economic clout to defend
themselves. Union miners produced less than a third of America's
coal output last year, compared with about 45% a decade ago.
Miners claim that the Reagan Administration often favored the
coal companies at the miners' expense, relaxing the severity of
penalties for safety violations. Corruption too has taken its
toll on inspections. Last week dozens of coal companies and
executives agreed to plead guilty to criminal charges that they
conspired to falsify tests for coal dust, the substance that
causes black lung.

    Logan County is a remote and isolated pocket in the
southwest corner of West Virginia, an undulating succession of
mountains rounded by eons and carpeted with hardwood forests.
Many residents live in trailer parks and frame houses that hug
the Guyandotte River system. The people are proud and
charitable, rugged and patriotic. "Culturally speaking, Logan
Countians will damn sure fight for what they believe in, whether
it's fighting the coal companies, the Iraqis or each other,"
says Logan council member Stan Morgan.

    Since 1980, half the county's mining jobs have vanished
and 7,000 of its 50,000 residents have moved away, leaving
divided families and empty houses. Unemployment is officially
12%, but 25% may be more accurate. In Logan, the county seat,
empty storefronts give the town a sorrowful look. Logan High's
1991 valedictorian, Andrea Henry, speaks for many young people:
"Everybody is planning on getting out. There's nothing here."

    The county is well acquainted with hard times and
disaster. In 1921 a dozen or more were killed in the Battle of
Blair Mountain when more than 7,000 armed miners who were trying
to unionize the coalfields fought with sheriffs and federal
troops. In 1960 a mine fire asphyxiated 18 miners, leaving 77
children fatherless. In 1972 a dam constructed of mine refuse
burst open; its 25-ft. tidal wave killed 127 people and
destroyed nearly 1,000 homes. Yet nothing has been as painful
as the slow expiration of the local industry. "Coal made Logan
County -- and it broke it," says county historian Bob Spence.
"The people feel the rest of the world has now passed them by.
It's a tragedy."

    Pete Spradlin was four when his father was killed in a
local mine at 27. Pete was taken in by his grandfather, whose
skull was crushed in a cave-in when Pete was 13. Now, at 44,
Spradlin works the same rolling seam of coal -- Chilton, it is
called -- that his father and grandfather did. Each morning
Spradlin enters the Bantam Mine, crouching to clear the sign
that reads WORK SAFE AND ENJOY LIFE. But Spradlin has had his
own close calls -- a gashed lip that took 16 stitches, a couple
of cracked ribs, a broken finger, two teeth knocked out.

    A gentle and reflective man, Spradlin weighed the career
risks before taking his place in the coalfields. Now, after two
decades of inhaling coal dust, he tries to ignore a nagging
cough but privately frets about black lung. Says his wife Ruby:
"I think it's probably the most hazardous job a man could have.
If he's late for dinner, I wonder what's happened."

    Spradlin operates a shuttle car, ferrying four tons of
coal from the face of the mine to a conveyor belt. The monotony
of the job is numbing. "It's like a yo-yo, all day, back and
forth, all day," he says. Sometimes he is two miles within the
mountain. Often he kneels in mud and water. He has worked in
low-seam coal, a claustrophobic 29 inches from the mine floor
to the roof. To eat his dinner, he has had to lie on his back.
To relieve himself, he squats in one of the myriad byways. When
the day is done, coal dust covers his face and permeates his
overalls. Ruby takes a scrub brush to the washer, the dryer and
the bathtub, trying to remove the sooty coal.

    For all this, Spradlin draws a salary of $40,000. His home
is bright and comfortable. But the price he pays is never
forgotten. "If a man works in the mines until retirement -- if
he lives -- it's going to knock a certain percentage off of his
life, health-wise. You're making good money, but you're getting
bad health doing it." Yet he counts himself among the lucky
ones. He still has a job.

    After a decade in which thousands of mining jobs
disappeared, many Logan County workers face a bitter choice:
stay put and live hand-to-mouth, or migrate. Among the thousands
who have left is 60-year-old Eugene Jones, who was laid off in
September 1990. Like many of his generation, Jones never went
past the sixth grade. "I can write my name and my address and
stuff like that, but I cannot spell hardly anything," he says.
He now lives in Virginia and has been searching for work around
the region for eight months. Recently he drove his pickup truck
five hours to Tennessee to try for a job on a road crew. At the
construction office he was asked to fill out an application
form, but it was beyond his ability. So he took the form and
retraced his five-hour drive back to his wife Wanda Lou, who
filled out the application for him and mailed it in. The stress
is wearing on him and on his marriage. "Sometimes I feel like
raising a gun and shooting my brains out," says Jones. "I feel
like I ain't much, like I'm down on the bottom and I can't get
up."

    No matter how grim the prospect for mining jobs, many of
Logan County's young men still believe there will be a mining
career for them. The Ralph R. Willis Vocational Training Center
is one of the county's best hopes for teaching its young that
there is more to the world than coal. But the most popular
courses in the school are those on mining. One is taught by
David Thompson, 33, who went into the mines at 18. "The only
thing I could see was dollar signs," he recalls. For the next
eight years, the 6-ft. 3-in. miner worked in spaces little more
than 3 ft. high. "I was on my knees eight hours a day --
crawling, bending, twisting," says Thompson. By age 27, his
knees couldn't take it anymore. Since then he has had six
operations on his knees and all the cartilage removed.

    Nonetheless, Thompson and the school train some 600 young
people a year in the basics of mining. "If a person chooses to
do so, who am I to tell him no?" asks Thompson. He has
considered what he would do if he lost his teaching position.
"I would have to go back into the coal mines -- if I could find
a job," he says. And what of his 10-year-old son Justin? "I
realize that's not what I want my son to do," he says.

    The federal Mine Safety and Health Administration insists
that the mines are safer now than ever before. In fact,
catastrophic cave-ins are largely a thing of the past. The
number of miners killed each year is between 60 and 70, about
half the annual toll of a decade ago. But MSHA statistics also
suggest that serious injuries -- those that result in some loss
of work -- may be on the rise. After dipping to an annual
average of 9,500 injuries during the mid-1980s, they increased
to an average of more than 12,000 a year over the past four
years, despite a shrinking work force. The MSHA attributes the
higher tally to better reporting procedures rather than an
increase in injuries.

    Many members of the United Mine Workers of America contend
that the MSHA has favored industry for a decade. They point out
that the government agency has refused to publish its list of
mines considered the nation's most dangerous -- once dubbed the
"high-hazard list." The MSHA's chief, William Tattersall, a
former coal-industry lobbyist, says his agency aggressively
enforces the law. He estimates that most injuries occur because
of momentary inattentiveness on the part of miners. Tattersall
is bluntly pragmatic about mining's risks, economic and
otherwise. He says, "The best advice you can give your children
when you're raised in that kind of environment is `Get the hell
out.'"

    Last spring the MSHA stunned the mining industry by
announcing that the agency had found widespread fraud in its
dust-sampling program, designed to prevent black lung. The tests
are done to ensure that coal-dust levels in mines do not exceed
2 mg per cubic meter. The testing device consists of a small
pump that draws air through a filter, which is sent to a
federal lab and weighed for dust content. The MSHA said more
than 500 companies at 847 mines had tampered with the filters.
Civil penalties may reach a record $7 million. Last week 33 coal
companies, 41 executives and two consultants agreed to plead
guilty to conspiring with a testing laboratory to create fake
results.

    In fact, the dust-sampling program has long been riddled
with cheating that goes beyond the kind exposed by the Labor
Department. "The system is so easy to beat," says Larry Bledsoe.
"It's a joke." Bledsoe, 45, worked in the mines of Logan County
for 25 years until injuries ended his career. Bledsoe says that
testing devices were routinely deployed in areas free of dust,
far from where the miners worked. Some devices were even kept
inside plastic bags and lunch pails to ensure clean samples.

    But Jim Campbell, vice president of operations for the
Pittston Coal Group, one of the companies cited for alleged
tampering, bristles at talk of cheating on dust samples. "I've
never seen anyone tamper with the dust-sampling system. It
angers me that people say they try to beat the system. It's
there to protect people."

    An even worse scandal, miners say, is a federal law that
makes it nearly impossible for miners with black lung to collect
disability payments. Congress drastically tightened up on such
compensation in 1981 in response to coal-industry pressure and
fraud among miners claiming benefits. In the past, miners with
15 or more years of employment were presumed eligible. That
provision is gone, and miners must prove that they are totally
disabled. In the two-year period before the change, nearly half
of black lung applicants were approved. Now just 4% prevail.

    Black lung, a condition that develops after years of
breathing coal dust, gradually robs the lungs of their ability
to absorb oxygen. In advanced cases, patients are tethered to
breathing machines that they carry around with leather straps
or on caddies. When some patients travel out of town, they must
calculate the distance and how long their portable oxygen tanks
will last, as if they were living underwater.

    In pressing their claims for compensation, miners are at
a distinct disadvantage. Most lawyers decline to accept black
lung cases because they know that claimants have little chance,
says Dr. Mohammed Ranavaya, a West Virginia physician who has
examined thousands of black lung patients. "It's not an even
playing field, because you have a small-town coal miner vs. a
big, resourceful company. It's David and Goliath."

    That's just how Albert Perry feels. Like his father and
grandfather before him, he went into the mines. Twenty-two years
later, he emerged as a man old beyond his years, his frail
112-lb. frame racked with a convulsive cough. Now 55, he is
rarely out of reach of an oxygen machine. In his struggle to
claim black lung disability, he is no match for Island Creek
Coal Co. Perry never finished elementary school. A collector of
baseball cards, he enjoys the pictures but cannot read the text.
Island Creek has stoutly resisted his claims, arguing that his
condition is the result not of working in the mines but rather
of years of cigarette smoking. "These companies don't think
nothing of you," says Perry. "If you're able to perform, you're
all right, but if you're disabled, you're dirt. They'll spend
$10,000 to knock you out of a $100 bill."

    The lives of Logan County's miners rest in the hands of
four dozen state and federal inspectors who police the county's
157 mines. Many of the inspectors are no doubt honest, but
corruption runs as deep as the seams of coal. Four years ago,
the Labor Department launched a major investigation into bribery
at the MSHA's field office in Logan County. The probe has
produced some shocking tales. Former coal-company employee Larry
Vannatter says he provided an abundance of favors to inspectors
when he worked for Logan County mine operator and consultant
Phil Nelson. Vannatter says he was told to make sure that
federal and state inspectors got whatever they desired: cash,
groceries, rifles, tires, even a donation to a local church. The
role was a curious one for Vannatter, whose father had been
killed in a mining accident three months before Vannatter was
born. "My conscience bothered me all along," he says, "but I got
two little boys I had to feed."

    Federal mine inspector Jack (Black Jack) Massey says his
payoffs began when he found a crisp $100 bill under his jacket
in the backseat of his car after inspecting one of Nelson's
mines. During the next several years, Massey says, Nelson gave
him more than $8,000 in cash as well as knives, hams, turkeys
and season tickets to University of West Virginia football
games. Massey's job was to inspect for electrical hazards, but
instead of citing the mine for violations, he repaired problems
and was paid by the mining company for the work. In February
1990 federal agents pressured Nelson to wear a concealed
microphone during a conversation with Massey, in which the
inspector asked for monthly payments. The following September
he pleaded guilty to accepting a bribe.

    Federal inspector Tommy Hinchman had a different job: to
review mine ventilation plans. Hinchman says Nelson paid him for
help in drafting those plans, the same ones that Hinchman would
later approve as an inspector. Says Nelson: "All Tommy
Hinchman's done -- if he's guilty of anything -- was move me to
the front of the line to get me through something. Common
courtesy." In July Hinchman pleaded guilty to accepting a
gratuity from Nelson.

    Hinchman was sentenced to four months of home confinement,
with permission to leave only for work and for church. But life
has dealt Hinchman a more severe punishment. Instead of a
government desk job, he now works in one of the private mines
whose ventilation plans he approved. He complains of the
physical rigors and of how, hours after he exits the mine, his
nostrils are still black with coal dust. And in the mining
community in which he lives, he must endure the suspicions of
those who feel betrayed. "I did not jeopardize the health and
safety of the coal miners -- I respect them," he says, his eyes
filling with tears.

    Nelson, who has not been charged with any criminal
wrongdoing, says Vannatter's allegations are grossly
exaggerated. It was either pay up or be shut down by petty
violations, he claims. "Do you think I created the system and
I'm the only one that done it? No, buddy, the system created me.
I am a victim; so is everybody else in this state who tries to
do business," says Nelson, who insists he would never put the
miners at risk. "I would rather lose everything I've got right
now than cost a man his life."

    In February 1990, a 39-year-old miner named Millard David
Frye was killed in a Logan County mine. Corruption did not
cause his death, but just days earlier inspector Massey had been
recorded telling the mine's consultant, Phil Nelson, that Massey
might be able to influence the inspection of the mine. As for
other mines, Massey suggested he "could cut down on where the
inspectors go."

    Frye had worked in the mine only since the previous
October, when he was called back to work after a long layoff.
He was a quiet man who enjoyed squirrel hunting and had a
12-year-old son and a 17-year-old daughter. A few weeks before
he was killed, Frye told his wife Gail about a close call he had
at the mine. "It was like he knew when something was going to
happen," says Gail. "I'd ask him, `Don't that scare you? How can
you go back in there?' He'd say, `You just go in.'"

    One of the first to reach the accident scene was inspector
Massey. For nearly half an hour he tried to resuscitate Frye,
but it was too late. Frye had been crushed by a 9-ft. slab of
rock. His fellow miners took up a collection, which was matched
by the mining company, and gave Frye's widow $4,000 for burial
expenses. At the foot of the grave in Forest Lawn Cemetery is a
marker that reads WE LOVE YOU DAD. His widow worries about her
son, who can barely bring himself to talk about the loss. For
now, young Michael shows little interest in the mines. The
question remains: Will he have a choice?