Posted on Wednesday, September 19, 2007 - 1:43 pm:

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In 1972 a West Virginia governor's commission asked a twenty-three-year-old mining engineer named Jack Spadaro to investigate the Buffalo Creek disaster. . . .

[Spadaro spent] the next thirty years studying impoundment dams, and in 1996 he joined the U.S. Mine Health and Safety Administration (MSHA) to ensure better regulation of existing slurry ponds and dams.

Two days after the Martin County spill, Spadaro was named the number-two man on a team sent to investigate the causes of the pond break. What the team found was disturbing. After a 1994 spill from that same impoundment pond had released 100 million gallons of slurry, an MSHA engineer made nine recommendations that needed to be addressed before the impoundment pond was used again. Martin County Coal Corporation, which was responsible for the pond break, followed none of the recommendations.

. . . Spadaro found that at least five Martin County Coal executives were aware of . . . the risk of another slurry flood, but did nothing. By the end of 2000, Spadaro and the other investigators thought they had collected enough evidence to charge Massey Energy of Richmond, Virginia, the parent company of Martin County Coal, with willful and criminal negligence.

And then George W. Bush was elected to his first term as president.

It is no secret, and no surprise, that Bush, along with Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, received millions of dollars in campaign contributions from the coal industry. Massey Energy alone donated $100,000 to a Republican Senate campaign committee headed by McConnell. I mention the Kentucky senator because, aside from being the Senate's lead opponent of campaign finance reform, he is also the husband of Labor Secretary Elaine Chao - to whom MSHA answers.

Within days of Bush's inauguration, a new team leader, Tim Thompson, was named to the Martin County investigation. Thompson told Spadaro and the other investigators to wrap up their work immediately. The investigators wanted to cite Martin County Coal for eight violations, including willful negligence. Thompson and Dave Lauriski, MSHA's new assistant secretary, whittled that down to two menial charges.
Spadaro refused to sign the report and resigned from the investigation team.

On June 4, 2003, Spadaro was placed on administrative leave. That day he was called to Washington, D.C., supposedly on MSHA business. While he was gone, federal officials searched his Beckley, West Virginia, office and changed the locks."(19)

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On the third of July, I drove across 10,000 acres of boulder-strewn wasteland that used to be Kayford Mountain, W.Va. -- one of the most hideous mountaintop-removal sites I've seen. But right in the middle of the destruction, rising like a last gasp, is a small knoll of untouched forest. Larry Gibson's family has lived on Kayford Mountain for 200 years. And most of his relatives are buried in the family cemetery, where almost every day Gibson has to clear away debris known as "flyrock" from the nearby blasting.

A short, muscular man, Gibson is easily given to emotion when he starts talking about his home place -- both what remains of it and what has been destroyed. Forty seams of coal lie beneath his 50 acres. Gibson could be a millionaire many times over, but because he refuses to sell, he has been shot at and run off his own road. One of his dogs was shot and another hanged. . . In 2000, Gibson walked out onto his porch one day to find two men dressed in camouflage, approaching with gas cans. They backed away and drove off, but not before they set fire to an empty cabin that belongs to one of Gibson's cousins. This much at least can be said for the West Virginia coal industry: it has perfected the art of intimidation.(20)

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In Clay County, Ky., It Takes Some Doing To Avoid a Sizemore
The Wall Street Journal(24)

. . . Meet the powerful Sizemore clan, whose grip on this isolated mountain county is surpassed only by the violence that clings to its name. Bombings, murders, alleged jury tampering, bootlegging -- the saga of the Sizemores weaves together all the strange and troublesome themes of politics in Appalachia's hamlets.

There is Sheriff Harold Sizemore, whose father and predecessor as sheriff was killed in a backwoods hollow by a sniper's bullets in 1969. There is County Judge Carl "Crawdad" Sizemore. There is Constable "Black Jack" Sizemore, whose father was shot in the back by a county sheriff in 1922. And the tax assessor is James Sizemore, called a "double Sizemore" because his parents were both Sizemores.

. . . Indeed, with control over the two largest sources of jobs -- the schools and the county payroll -- the Sizemores hold sway over much of Clay County's populace. Few folks hereabouts, including the Sizemores' political opponents, will criticize them

. . . To understand Clay County's contradictions, one must first understand the Sizemores -- which isn't easy since many Sizemores can't untangle their own family tree.

"There are about four or five sets of us, but as long as you're a Sizemore, you're a Sizemore, no matter what," says Black Jack Sizemore, the constable. "Above all, we stick together."

. . . They first came into prominence hereabouts because of what is now known as the great Sizemore feud of 1931. . . And before the killing stopped, family members recall, nine Sizemores were dead, including a deputy sheriff ambushed by his two first cousins in an argument over election results.

Even today, their critics say, the Sizemores preserve their special brand of justice in Clay County. Consider the murder trial of Stevie Sizemore, a wealthy coal operator arrested in 1980 for gunning down two union organizers on a back road before a crowd of witnesses.

. . . From the first pound of the gavel in the cramped mountain courtroom, the Sizemores were as thick as the fog here on a spring morning. Escorting the jurors was Sheriff Harold Sizemore. Handling the records was a county clerk who was married to a Sizemore.

. . . That apparently wasn't enough for some clan members. According to investigators and affidavits filed with trial testimony, some family members waged a campaign to influence jurors.

. . . Looking about the courtroom, state prosecutors knew they were in trouble. So when the jury deadlocked with only a single guilty vote, despite four eyewitnesses who identified Mr. Sizemore as the killer, Ms. Goodman, the prosecutor, says she considered the single guilty vote a victory. . . No member of the Sizemore clan admits to jury tampering, but one senior family member, Granville Sizemore, acknowledges the practice isn't unknown in Clay County. "It's what we down here call, 'knowing the jury,'" he says.

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