The Dark Lord of Coal Country
The Rolling Stone investigation that forced the resignation of Don Blakenship, the coal industry’s dirtiest CEO
November 29, 2010 12:00 PM ET
On Friday, December 3rd, a week after this article was published in Rolling Stone
,
Massey Energy announced that Don Blankenship will be retiring as CEO
and chairman. “After almost three decades at Massey, it’s time for me to
move on,” Blankenship said in a statement. It’s not clear whether he
was forced out, but the news took nearly everyone in coal country by
surprise. An executive at the West Virginia Coal Association called the
announcement “unreal,” and a leading environmentalist exulted, “Ding,
dong, the witch is dead!” Mineweb, an influential industry publication,
noted a similarity between Blankenship’s sudden exit and that of Gen.
Stanley McChrystal earlier this year: “Both men were the subjects of
highly controversial profiles by Rolling Stone
magazine.”
Blankenship’s exit may be part of a larger strategy to keep
himself out of jail and avoid financial liability for the suffering he
has caused during his decades as Appalachia’s most powerful coal baron.
But it’s good news for Massey stockholders: With Blankenship out of the
picture, it could now be easier to find a buyer for the coal company
that he has turned into a national symbol of lethal greed.
One balmy night this fall, a
black BMW 750LI — a German luxury sedan that costs more than a typical
coal miner makes in a year — pulls into the parking lot of the shaggy
country club in Bluefield, West Virginia. Bluefield is a fading coal
town in a state that is full of fading coal towns. Seventy-five years
ago, when the Pocahontas coal seam was one of the richest veins in
America, and tooling up for the 20th century required massive tonnage of
coal, there was money here, and hope. But now the coal is mined out,
the buildings downtown are vacant, and shiny new Beemers are about as
common as flying saucers.
The driver — a young, tan, L.A.-surfer-boy type — jumps out and opens
the rear door. A tall man, 60, with a thin mustache and a double chin
emerges: Don Blankenship, the CEO of Massey Energy, the largest and most
powerful coal company in central Appalachia. He grabs his dark-blue
suit jacket, which is folded on the tan leather seat beside him, and
slips it on. He wears a red-and-yellow silk tie and tasseled leather
loafers. His hands are chubby and white — no calluses, not a speck of
coal dust. Accountant's hands. His eyes are black and inexpressive.
This article appears in the December 9, 2010 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available now on newsstands and in the online archive.
Unless you live in West Virginia, you've probably never heard of Don
Blankenship. You might not know that he grew up in the coal fields of
West Virginia, received an accounting degree from a local college, and,
through a combination of luck, hard work and coldblooded ruthlessness,
transformed himself into the embodiment of everything that's wrong with
the business and politics of energy in America today — a man who pursues
naked self-interest and calls it patriotism, who buys judges like cheap
hookers, treats workers like dogs, blasts mountains to get at a few
inches of coal and uses his money and influence to ensure that America
remains enslaved to the 19th-century idea that burning coal equals
progress. And for this, he earns $18 million a year — making him the
highest-paid CEO in the coal industry — and flies off to vacations on
the French Riviera.
As Blankenship walks into the country club, heads turn. A hundred
executives from the coal industry have gathered for a two-day conference
on mine safety — a topic that has taken on added urgency since April,
when 29 men were killed in an explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine run
by Massey Energy. The blast, fueled by high levels of methane in the
mine, was so powerful that it twisted the steel rail tracks on the
mine's floor and killed men more than a mile away. It was the worst
mining tragedy in 40 years, but nobody in the room seems to hold that
against Blankenship. As he strides to the podium, he is greeted by
applause and whistles. A handful of students from Virginia Tech rush up
to get their picture taken with him as his fellow coal executives stand
aside, resentment and awe mixed on their faces.
Blankenship is a lousy speaker, using the same deadpan tone whether
he's talking about quarterly earnings or busting a union. But he does
not mince words. After laughing off global warming as a "hoax," he moves
on to the meat of his talk: the tragedy at Upper Big Branch. Instead of
acknowledging any responsibility for the disaster, Blankenship argues
that the explosion was an act of God, caused by a buildup of methane
that had seeped in through a 50-foot crack in the ground. He blames the
federal Mine Safety and Health Administration for contributing to the
accident by altering the mine's ventilation system. "You remember
Watergate?" he says. "Today what you have is MSHA-Gate." He even accuses
Joe Main, the respected head of the agency, of giving false testimony
to Congress to cover up MSHA's culpability in the explosion. "What is
the difference between Roger Clemens and Joe Main?" he asks, referring
to the former Red Sox pitcher who denied using steroids. "We don't know
if Roger lied to Congress. But we know Joe did."
The line gets a big laugh, but it's pure horseshit. The entire
speech, in fact, is nothing but a desperate attempt to shift blame for
the tragedy and obscure the fact that 29 men died violent deaths in
large part because Don Blankenship ran what amounted to an outlaw coal
mine, racking up more than 500 safety violations and nearly $1 million
in fines last year alone. But if any of the coal executives assembled in
the country club see it that way, no one speaks up. They want to
believe that the coal industry has a bright future, and that Blankenship
is nothing more than a tough-talking local boy made good. As he
finishes his rant, they give him a standing ovation.
"The thing I admire most about Don Blankenship is that he's not
afraid to tell the truth," Ben Parker, an engineering student, tells me
as the applause fades. "He's just like Sarah Palin."
For the past two
decades, Don Blankenship has been the undisputed king of coal in West
Virginia. Other Big Coal CEOs who operate in Appalachia are
business-school types who have offices in other states and leave the
dirty work to their minions. Blankenship, by contrast, is a rich
hillbilly who believes that God put coal in the ground so that he could
mine it, and anyone — or any law — that stands in his way needs to be
beaten down, bought off or tied up in court. Blankenship is hated,
feared and respected, but nobody wants to tangle with him.
"He's a
throwback to the old coal barons of the 19th century," says Cecil
Roberts, the head of the United Mine Workers of America, who has battled
Blankenship for nearly 30 years.
From a strictly business point of view, it's hard to argue with
Blankenship's success: He has taken a sleepy old coal company and built
it into the most powerful economic and political machine in Appalachia.
Massey Energy and its subsidiaries operate 56 mines in the region,
employing nearly 6,000 workers and producing some 40 million tons of
coal a year. Even after the disaster at Upper Big Branch hammered the
company's stock, it's still worth about $4 billion. To the degree that
West Virginia's future is tied to coal, it is also tied to Blankenship:
His company owns more than a third of the remaining coal reserves in the
region.
Blankenship has never hidden the fact that, when it comes to mining
coal, he'll do whatever it takes to make a buck. "It's like a jungle,
where a jungle is survival of the fittest," he told a documentary
filmmaker in the 1980s. "Unions, communities, people — everybody's gonna
have to learn to accept that in the United States you have a capitalist
society, and that capitalism, from a business standpoint, is survival
of the most productive."
In Blankenship's view, being productive means getting coal out of the
ground as fast and cheap as possible, no matter the cost to workers or
the environment. "He has been hugely influential in the coal industry in
Appalachia," says a rival coal executive. "He basically transformed a
gentlemanly, Democratic, union-based industry, where deals were done on a
handshake, into the aggressive, partisan industry that we know today."
Blankenship helped popularize the style of mining known as mountaintop
removal, in which the mountains are removed from the coal, rather than
the coal from the mountains — a practice that has destroyed 2,000 miles
of streams and damaged more than a million acres of forest. He has
fought labor unions and federal regulators at every turn, exposing
miners to dangerous conditions. And he has injected toxic coal slurry
near underground aquifers, a practice that has allegedly sickened
hundreds of residents. "All in all, Blankenship has probably caused more
suffering than any other human being in Appalachia," says Roberts.
A right-wing Republican in a traditionally Democratic state,
Blankenship has also used his wealth and influence to go after anyone
who opposes him. "Unlike the old coal barons, who mostly shunned the
limelight, Blankenship is a very flamboyant character," says Robert
Rupp, professor of political science at West Virginia Wesleyan College.
When it comes to politics, Blankenship doesn't waste time twisting arms:
Massey spent less than $20,000 on federal lobbying last year and has
contributed only $300,000 to federal candidates since 1990. Instead, he
goes for a more direct bang for his buck. He spent more than $3 million
electing a state Supreme Court judge who would provide a favorable
verdict in a lawsuit, funneled nearly $1 million into advertising this
year to improve coal's image, and served on the boards of the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce and the National Mining Association, which has
attacked the Obama administration for waging a "regulatory jihad"
against coal
The real reason that the coal industry in West Virginia is slowly
dying has nothing to do with government regulation. After 150 years of
mining, most of the good, easy-to-get coal in Appalachia is simply gone.
Coal production in the region plunged 13 percent last year — one of the
biggest drops in 50 years. But to Blankenship, the true enemies are the
environmental "greeniacs" who recognize that burning coal has
dangerously overheated the planet. In his view, even something as
innocuous as energy conservation is nothing but a communist plot. "Turn
down your thermostats?" he once scoffed. "Buy a smaller car? Conserve? I
have spent quite a bit of time in Russia and China, and that's the
first stage. You go from having your own car to carpooling to riding the
bus to mass transit. You eventually get to where you're going by
walking.
That's what socialism and the elimination of capitalism and
free enterprise is all about."
But it was the disaster at Upper Big Branch that brought Blankenship
into the national spotlight. "It was his coming-out party," says Jeff
Biggers, author of
Reckoning at Eagle Creek, who has written
widely about the coal industry. "People in the coal fields had been
dealing for years with the brutal repercussions of how Blankenship
operates. Now the rest of the country was getting a look." In a Rose
Garden speech not long after the disaster, President Obama seemed to
point his finger directly at Blankenship. "This tragedy was triggered by
a failure, first and foremost, of management," Obama said. Massey's
stock price plunged, cutting the value of the company by at least $2
billion, and a group of powerful shareholders filed a lawsuit against
Blankenship and Massey's board, accusing them of mismanagement. On top
of everything, the Justice Department announced a criminal investigation
into the Upper Big Branch explosion. As a senior official in the Labor
Department told me flat-out: "We would like to see Don Blankenship go to
jail."
Blankenship lives in
Mingo County, West Virginia, just a few miles from where he grew up.
It's one of the poorest, sickest, most economically depressed regions in
America. Blankenship's house, which sits near the polluted waters of
the Tug Fork, is an oasis of money and privilege in a landscape of
rusting 4x4s and abandoned appliances. From the road, it looks like an
estate in the Hamptons, with neatly trimmed hedges and a broad curving
drive. The property is surrounded by a high steel fence, with cameras
mounted near the automatic gate. The house itself, fittingly enough, is
an old mining superintendent's building, built back in the days when
coal barons like Blankenship hired armed guards to mow down striking
miners with machine guns. Nearby is a helicopter landing pad, as well as
a spacious garage for Blankenship's vehicles, which reportedly include a
Bentley. Across the river, perched on the mountaintop like a castle, is
Blankenship's corporate party house, a baronial estate where he
entertains industry executives and politicians with superb views of his
broken world.
Blankenship was born just down the road in Stopover, Kentucky, a tiny
collection of shacks and mobile homes. His mother, Nancy, was a McCoy, a
descendant of the infamous mountain clan that was always warring with
the Hatfields. Soon after Blankenship was born, his mother divorced her
husband, who was serving in Korea, and moved across the border to
Delorme, West Virginia. She used her divorce settlement to buy a
convenience store and gas station, where she worked for the next 40
years.
Today, Delorme is more a memory than a town — a few houses scattered
along the banks of the Tug Fork, a tiny post office, a vinyl-sided
Pentecostal church and a sagging building by the railroad tracks where
you can drive up and buy beer. The trailer that Blankenship and his
three siblings grew up in is long gone, as is his mother's store, both
wiped out by occasional floods and constant poverty. But back in the
1950s, when Blankenship was a kid, the Norfolk and Western Railway still
rumbled through, and it was a lively place. "There were seven bars in
town," says Jack Murphy, who grew up with Blankenship. "It got rough
sometimes." Blankenship watched bar fights from his living-room window,
sometimes climbing up on the roof of a nearby barbershop to get closer
to the action.
Blankenship takes pride in the fact that he grew up in such a
hardscrabble place. "I have trapped muskrats for 50 cents and hunted
two-cent pop bottles in order to buy a one-dollar baseball," he told a
rally of West Virginians last year, trying to establish his street cred
as a boy from the hollows. But his biggest influence was clearly his
mother, who worked nearly 100 hours a week. Blankenship often helped her
in the store, adding up sales numbers in his head. From her, he learned
his first lesson in Darwinian economics: In a place as tough as West
Virginia, only the strongest survive.
"He was a very competitive kid — he didn't like to fail," says Eddie
Croaff, a childhood friend. "He loved baseball and was a pretty good
shortstop." Croaff, a former coal miner himself, says that even as a kid
Blankenship liked to calculate the odds of risky behavior — like the
chances of being killed if he went around a blind corner on the wrong
side of the road in his black Chevy Camaro. "He was always trying to
figure out what he could get away with."
Blankenship was president of his high school class and enrolled in
Marshall University in Huntington, where he majored in accounting and
earned his degree in just three years. He worked in a Kentucky coal mine
one summer, but was "a mediocre miner," says Darrell Ratliff, his
foreman at the time. "I don't want to say he was lazy, but I had to make
him move once in a while." After graduation, Blankenship took a job as
an accountant for the Keebler cookie company in Macon, Georgia. He got
married, had two kids, settled down. Then in 1982, at a moment when he
was in between jobs, he got a call from Massey offering him a job as an
office manager. Blankenship, who was 31 at the time, accepted. He would
later say that it felt like predestination.
Blankenship went to work at a Massey subsidiary called Rawl Sales
& Processing, located just a few miles down the road from where he
had grown up in Delorme. A.T. Massey, as the company was then called,
was founded in 1920, and it reflected the patriarchal benevolence of its
era; its executives were known for their genteel manners and their
generous donations to local philanthropies. It was also deeply
anti-union. In 1984, Massey tried to break the United Mine Workers by
announcing that each of its mines would be treated as separate companies
— a move that would effectively enable them to reopen as nonunion
operations. Determined to hold Massey accountable for its subsidiaries,
the union went on strike that fall. Blankenship, who by then had been
named president of Rawl, found himself in the middle of an epic battle
in the coal fields of West Virginia.
As a local boy, Blankenship might have been expected to be
sympathetic to local workers who were trying to improve safety in the
mines and feed their families. But as president of Rawl, Blankenship put
profits before people. To him, the union was nothing but a drag on
Rawl's profitability — and he quickly turned the mine into a flash point
in the larger strike. Blankenship erected two miles of chain-link fence
around the facility, brought in dogs and armed guards, and ferried
nonunion workers through the union's blockades. The strike, which lasted
more than a year, grew increasingly violent — strikers took up baseball
bats against the workers trying to take their jobs, and a few even
fired shots at the scabs. A volley of bullets zinged into Blankenship's
office and smashed into an old TV. Frightened for his safety,
Blankenship slept in a different bed every night. But in the end, he
proved stronger than the union: In 1985, the United Mine Workers gave
in.
The strike marked a turning point in the decades-old struggle between
coal barons and their workers. "The union tried to make a stand and
failed," says Les Leopold, director of the Labor Institute in New York.
"After that, their power in the region declined." For years afterward,
Blankenship kept the TV with a bullet hole through it in his office as a
souvenir — and a reminder to others of what a tough motherfucker he is.
Blankenship's success as
a union buster, combined with his mastery of financial arcana,
catapulted him through the ranks at Massey. "Don could always tell you
exactly what the numbers were," recalled E. Morgan Massey, the grandson
of the company's founder. "The numbers drive every decision he makes."
In 1992, only a decade after starting out at Massey, Blankenship was
appointed chairman and CEO.
At the time, Appalachia's coal industry faced increasing competition
from big Western mines and from natural gas, which is cheaper and
cleaner. To cut costs, Blankenship started blowing up mountains to get
at the coal, since blasting is cheaper than digging. He also used
Massey's financial strength to buy up smaller coal companies that were
having a rough time, often at fire-sale prices. "Blankenship is a master
at recognizing and taking advantage of distressed assets," says Bruce
Stanley, a lawyer who grew up in Mingo County not far from Blankenship.
In 1997, hoping to sell more of a special type of premium-priced coal
used in steelmaking, Blankenship set his sights on a small outfit called
Harman Mining.
First, Blankenship bought the company that processed Harman's coal
and broke its contract with the smaller firm.
"I didn't know it at the
time, but his goal was to replace my coal with cheaper, lower-quality
coal from his own mine," says Hugh Caperton, who served as president of
Harman. Then, after offering to buy out Harman, Blankenship used
information he had obtained during the negotiations to buy up the coal
reserves around Harman's mine, effectively making the company
unattractive to other buyers. "His goal was to drive me into bankruptcy,
so he could buy me for nothing," Caperton says.
Caperton lost a company he had spent 10 years building, and his 150
employees lost their jobs. Not long afterward, Blankenship stopped in to
see his vanquished rival. "It was one of the strangest conversations
I've ever had," Caperton recalls. "He just walked into my office, and if
I would have had a couch, he would have laid down on it. He said, 'I
don't understand why people don't like me anymore. In high school, I
played ball. I was really popular.' " Then Blankenship abruptly stood up
and left.
Despite Blankenship's power, Caperton decided to fight back. He sued
Massey, arguing that the company had set out to destroy him. In 2002, a
jury awarded Caperton $50 million in damages.
Blankenship was furious. "He took this fight personally," says
Stanley, who represented Caperton in the case. "His whole persona is
based on the idea that if you mess around with Don, he will take you to
the wall." Massey appealed the verdict to the state's Supreme Court. But
rather than trusting in the wisdom of the justice system, Blankenship
tried to rig the outcome in his favor. In 2004, he spent $3 million — an
enormous sum in West Virginia politics — to finance a political hit
machine to take down Justice Warren McGraw, who was likely to serve as
the swing vote in the court's decision. The group deployed every sleazy
trick in the book, accusing McGraw of letting child rapists out of
prison and putting them to work in local schools. The smear tactics
worked: McGraw was defeated, replaced by an industry-friendly judge
backed by Blankenship. In 2007, the court overturned the $50 million
verdict against Blankenship by a vote of 3 to 2. His $3 million
investment had saved him $47 million.
"Don didn't put $3 million into the election because he wanted a fair
and balanced court system," says Robert Rupp, the political science
professor. "He wanted to buy himself a favorable verdict."
But Caperton kept fighting. Then in January 2008, he got a mysterious
break: A plain brown envelope was delivered to his attorney by an
unknown person. In it were photographs of Blankenship and Spike Maynard,
the chief justice of the state Supreme Court, vacationing together on
the French Riviera. "The photos were visual evidence of what everyone
suspected," says Caperton. "Blankenship was again trying to influence
the court."
The photos prompted the court to rehear the case. This time around,
Maynard agreed to recuse himself — but so did another justice, who had
publicly called Blankenship a "clown." The court once again found in
favor of Blankenship. But this time, the case attracted national
attention — especially after a crew from ABC News tried to interview
Blankenship outside his office. "If you're going to start taking
pictures of me," he told the crew, shoving the camera away, "you're
liable to get shot."
Last year, Caperton won a major victory in the case. Citing "extreme"
conflict of interest, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the state judge
whose election was backed by Blankenship should have recused himself
from the case. "It was a huge victory for one of the most basic aspects
of the rule of law — the right to a fair hearing," said James Sample of
the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law.
Yet last year, when the state Supreme Court took up the issue for a
third time, it once again found in Blankenship's favor — this time
citing a legal technicality to rule that the West Virginia courts had no
jurisdiction in the case.
"It was a travesty of justice at every level," says Caperton, who has
refiled the case in Virginia. In fact, the whole case was so outlandish
that John Grisham used it as the basis for the plot in his novel
The Appeal. As Grisham told Matt Lauer on the
Today Show:
"A guy owned a coal company, he got tired of getting sued. He elected
his guy to the Supreme Court — and now he didn't worry about getting
sued."
Blankenship often argues
that he is the embodiment of a successful capitalist — that the jobs he
provides put food on people's tables and allow them to buy houses and
cars and all the other necessities of modern life. But there is a larger
question he doesn't address: Why, if the coal industry is so good for
West Virginia, is there so much sickness, death and economic decline in
the state — especially in the very area where Blankenship lives?
David Joe Mollett lives up in Lick Creek, just a few miles from
Blankenship's well-manicured estate. His father went to work in the coal
mines when he was 13 years old. The small house where Mollett lives
with his sister and his brother is pretty much all that their father
left them after decades in the mines. On the once idyllic ridge behind
them, a huge Massey operation has begun removing the top of the
mountain.
As a kid in the 1980s, Mollett remembers filling up a glass of water
at the kitchen sink and seeing black stuff floating in it. "Sometimes it
smelled of rotten egg, sometimes it had a rainbow on top," he recalls.
The water came from a well out back; families in the area had been
drinking water out of the ground for generations. Now, all of a sudden,
they started to get sick. In high school, Mollett got rashes, bad ones,
on his back and arms. He had diarrhea, stomachaches. In 2000, he was
bombing around on his four-wheeler when he suddenly passed out
completely. He was rushed to the hospital, where doctors discovered he
was in complete kidney failure. He spent three years on dialysis, then
finally had a transplant. "The doctor told me that my kidney failed
because of the water I'd been drinking," he says. In addition, two of
his sisters suffer from severe kidney problems.
The Molletts aren't the only ones getting sick. More than 700 people
in the immediate vicinity have reported health problems that they
believe are related to water from their wells, and four have died from
their ailments. Symptoms range from rashes and ruined kidneys to birth
defects and brain cancer.
According to a lawsuit filed by Mollett and his neighbors, the cause
of their sickness is clear: Massey, they say, poisoned their drinking
water. Back when Blankenship was running Rawl Sales, he needed a cheap,
quick way to get rid of millions of gallons of coal slurry — the toxic
runoff that comes from washing coal to remove impurities. The slurry is
laden with a host of heavy metals known to be deadly to humans —
arsenic, lead, cadmium, manganese. "Blankenship decided it would be
simpler and cheaper to inject the slurry into old coal mines
underground," says Kevin Thompson, a lawyer representing Mollett and
others in the community.
During the 1980s, the company injected more than 1.4 billion gallons
of slurry underground — seven times the amount of oil spilled into the
Gulf of Mexico during the BP disaster this spring. According to the
lawsuit, Massey knew that the ground around the injection sites was
cracked, which would allow the toxic waste to leach into nearby drinking
water. But injecting the slurry underground saved Massey millions of
dollars a year. "The BP oil spill was an accident," says Thompson. "This
was an intentional environmental catastrophe." Massey denies any
wrongdoing in the case. But after Blankenship started pumping the slurry
underground, he took steps to make sure that he and his family did not
suffer. Around the time that his neighbors were starting to get sick,
Massey paid to build a waterline to bring clean, treated water directly
to Blankenship's house from Matewan, a few miles away. Yet he never
offered to provide the water to his neighbors, some of whom can see his
house from their windows.
Nor was the epidemic in West Virginia the only catastrophe caused by
the way Blankenship disposed of coal slurry. In October 2000, a large
slurry pond at a Massey subsidiary in Martin County, Kentucky, broke
open and spilled 300 million gallons of black, toxic sludge into
surrounding creeks. It was one of the nation's worst man-made
environmental disasters. Massey paid $3.5 million in state fines for the
breach, but only $5,600 in federal penalties.
Mollett, a tall, quiet guy in his late 30s with hair down to his
shoulders, says his life has been destroyed by the company's toxic
waste. The drugs he takes for his kidney ailments have made him a
diabetic, and he can't walk far without his leg swelling up. "Massey
should have done more studying before they did this," he says, leaning
against the kitchen counter in his small, dark house. "They don't care
about people, about what happens to them."
On the evening of January
19th, 2006, Blankenship was at a reception with some railroad executives
at the Greenbrier, the grandest resort hotel in the state. The
Greenbrier is one of his favorite haunts, a place where he can have a
drink and unwind with his fellow CEOs. Sometime around 6 p.m., Drexel
Short, a senior vice president at Massey, motioned to Blankenship to
step into the hallway. There had been a devastating fire at a coal mine
run by Aracoma Coal, a Massey subsidiary. Ten men working in the deepest
section of the mine had donned their respirators and managed to grope
their way to safety through the smoke-filled tunnels. But two men who
had become separated from the group were missing.
Blankenship talked briefly with Short about how to handle the
situation. Then he went back into the reception at the posh resort and
rejoined his pals. Two days later, the two men — Don Bragg, 33, and
Elvis Hatfield, 46 — were found dead in the mine, overcome by the smoke.
Blankenship went to the church where families of the miners were
holding vigil, but he didn't offer his condolences. "He didn't say a
word to me," recalled Bragg's wife, Delorice, a mother of two who worked
as a nurse at the local hospital. "In fact, he avoided looking at me."
It was the only time she saw him during the entire ordeal.
Delorice had been born and raised in coal country; she understood
that mining was a dangerous job. But in the weeks after Bragg's death,
she heard from friends who worked in the mines that Massey was always
cutting corners on safety, pushing for more coal. A subsequent
investigation showed that the fire had been caused by an improperly
maintained conveyor belt. In the previous year, Massey had racked up
more than 90 safety violations at the mine. "It wasn't a mine fire that
killed my husband," Delorice told me not long after the disaster, her
eyes hardening. "It was greed."
Massey offered Delorice a small settlement, but she took the company
to court, believing that management should be forced to pay for its
negligence. During the proceedings, her lawyer unearthed two revealing
memos. The first indicated that Blankenship knew personally that there
had been a problem with a conveyor belt nearly a week before the fire
broke out. In the second, dated three months before the disaster,
Blankenship appeared to order the superintendents of Massey's mines to
ignore safety concerns in favor of increasing production. "If any of you
have been asked by your group presidents, your supervisors, engineers
or anyone else to do anything other than run coal (i.e., build
overcasts, do construction jobs, or whatever), you need to ignore them
and run coal," Blankenship told them. "This memo is necessary only
because we seem not to understand that the coal pays the bills."
The memo created a furor in the mining community. "Throughout
Appalachia, there's tremendous support for the coal industry," says
Rupp, the political science professor. "But one thing that they will not
tolerate is any compromise to the safety of miners. That is where they
draw the line. In West Virginia, if you are seen as someone who
willfully puts miners at risk to make a buck, then you are in trouble.
It's political dynamite."
In the end, Aracoma Coal pleaded guilty to 10 criminal charges in the
disaster, including one felony, and paid $4.2 million in penalties. The
company also admitted that one of the violations — the failure to
replace a key ventilation wall — "resulted in the deaths" of Bragg and
Hatfield. But as part of the plea deal, prosecutors agreed not to pursue
any charges against any Massey executives, including Blankenship.
Delorice Bragg was furious — and not just because Blankenship had
shown up for his deposition in his Bentley. In her view, prosecutors had
given him a get-out-of-jail-free card. "If Massey executives have done
nothing wrong and bear no criminal responsibility for the fire that
killed Don and Elvis, then why do they need the deal?" she asked when
the plea bargain was announced in court. To Delorice, the message was
clear: In West Virginia, nobody messes with Don Blankenship.
The entrance to the
Upper Big Branch mine is just off a twisting, narrow road that cuts
through the Coal River Valley near Whitesville, West Virginia. It is one
of the most valuable underground mines that Massey owns, not only
because the coal seam is six feet thick — a rarity in Appalachia these
days, when many seams have been mined out — but because its high-grade
coal commands a premium on the market. Massey employed nearly 200 miners
to work in three shifts around the clock, running an enormous,
high-tech machine that moves back and forth across the mine's wall like a
giant meat slicer, shearing off coal. "They mined a million dollars
worth of coal a day in there," says Gary Quarles, a Massey miner whose
son worked at Upper Big Branch.
With so much profitable coal to be had, the focus was on productivity
at any cost. The safety record at the mine was abysmal — and it was
getting worse. Last year, citations by the Mine Safety Health
Administration at Upper Big Branch doubled to more than 500 — including
200 for "significant and substantial" violations that MSHA considers
"reasonably likely to result in a reasonably serious injury or illness."
Most telling of all, MSHA issued 61 withdrawal orders at the mine,
temporarily shutting down parts of the operation 54 times in 2009 and
seven times in 2010. Such a high number of withdrawal orders is
virtually unheard of in the industry — yet federal inspectors, not known
for being tough on outlaw coal operations, failed to close down the
mine. "It's like someone driving drunk 61 times," said Celeste
Monforton, a former policy adviser at MSHA.
The most serious violations involved the ventilation system, a
complex operation that requires miners to constantly move curtains
around to funnel fresh air into the mine. But at Upper Big Branch,
supervisors pushed miners to cut corners and evade inspectors. "When an
MSHA inspector came to the section, we'd hang the curtain — but as soon
as the inspector left, the curtain came down again," miner Jeffrey
Harris later testified. "Some people would tell the inspectors about
these kinds of ventilation changes, which were made for their benefit.
But the inspectors told us, 'We need to catch it,' and that didn't
happen very often." In parts of the mine, Harris added, "the air was so
thick you could hardly see in front of you."
The explosion occurred just as miners were changing shifts around 3
p.m. on Monday, April 5th. The force of the blast, which was likely
caused by high levels of methane ignited by a spark, ripped apart
massive mining machines as if they were a child's toys. The fire turned
90-degree corners and rounded a block of coal 1,000 feet wide, killing
everyone in its path. The destruction was so bad that rescuers walked
past the bodies of four missing miners on the first day without noticing
them.
In the days after the disaster, Blankenship could be seen heading in
and out of the company building where families waited for news, his eyes
fixed on the ground, a mix of what looked like guilt and anger on his
hangdog face. His presence only served to enrage family members. "He
just stood there and let others do the talking," says Quarles, whose son
died in the explosion. In interviews, Blankenship denied that his mines
are more dangerous than others, and dismissed the high number of safety
citations at Upper Big Branch. "Violations are unfortunately a normal
part of the mining process," he said.
For the first time in his life, Blankenship suddenly found himself in
the midst of a crisis that he could not buy his way out of. The media
coverage of the disaster was relentless, and industry insiders wondered
openly if he would have to step down as CEO of Massey. Even longtime
champions of Big Coal began to use him as a punching bag. During a
Senate hearing on the tragedy, Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia —
perhaps the single most valuable ally the coal industry had — took the
extraordinary step of personally rebuking Blankenship for his
recklessness and hypocrisy. "I cannot fathom how an American business
could practice such disgraceful health and safety policies while
simultaneously boasting about its commitment to the safety of its
workers," Byrd said. "The Upper Big Branch mine had an alarming — an
alarming — record. Shame!"
Blankenship took the abuse from Byrd — and then got on with the
business of being Don Blankenship. He recruited a team of heavyweight
consultants from the Bush era, including lawyer Robert Luskin, who
represented Karl Rove in the Valerie Plame spy case; a PR firm called
Public Strategies, run by former Bush communications chief Dan Bartlett;
and Dave Lauriski, the head of MSHA under Bush. Together, they cobbled
together a survival strategy that Tom Sanzillo, a financial analyst who
specializes in coal, calls a "blood war" against MSHA. "His goal," says
Sanzillo, "is to turn the tables on investigators and turn the Upper Big
Branch disaster into a referendum against the federal government."
The first prong of the strategy is to delay and discredit the
investigation. Massey tried to challenge MSHA for refusing to allow the
company into the mine to collect its own evidence, but a judge dismissed
the complaint as grandstanding; it was as if a murder suspect had
demanded that police grant him access to a crime scene so he could
examine the bloodstains himself. But the ruse allowed Blankenship to
suggest that MSHA was conducting the investigation in a secretive way — a
charge that fit well into the larger narrative he was constructing
about the disaster.
The story that Blankenship is peddling has taken several turns. First
he argued that MSHA itself was responsible for the explosion at Upper
Big Branch because its ventilation plan didn't allow methane that had
accumulated in the mine to be removed quickly enough. Then, on November
17th, he suddenly theorized that the explosion had been caused not by
methane but by natural gas, which is rarely a problem in coal mines. In
short, he suggested, the disaster had been unavoidable.
It's a good story — but it has little to do with reality. For
starters, testimony from miners makes clear that high levels of methane
were a persistent problem at Upper Big Branch. Two miners told
The New York Times
that the mine had been evacuated for dangerously high methane levels
three times in the previous two months. "Finding explosive levels of
methane regularly," one miner wrote nine months before the explosion,
documenting conditions in the mine. "Section has low air. Company
constantly trying to fool inspectors."
What's more, Blankenship's version of events conveniently ignores the
role of coal dust in amplifying the explosion. Coal dust is a constant
problem in underground mines. It's usually handled by good housekeeping,
and by scattering limestone dust in problem areas to neutralize the
coal's volatility. Shane Harvey, the general counsel for Massey, insists
that Upper Big Branch was adequately dusted before the blast. But of
1,800 samples collected by MSHA after the explosion, only 400 had been
properly treated for coal dust. Even more damning, logs of inspections
by mine employees show that eight conveyor belts contained excessive
amounts of coal dust only hours before the explosion.
All of which raises a legitimate question about federal regulators:
If Upper Big Branch was a disaster waiting to happen — full of coal
dust, choked with dangerous levels of methane, a tinderbox waiting to
ignite — why didn't federal inspectors shut the mine down? "Because
nobody shuts one of Don Blankenship's mines down," says miner Gary
Quarles. "It has never happened. Everyone knows when mine inspectors are
coming, you clean things up for a few minutes, make it look good, then
you go back to the business of running coal. That's how things work at
Massey. When inspectors write a violation, the company lawyers challenge
it in court. It's all just a game. Don Blankenship does what he wants."
But if the mine was so dangerous, why didn't the miners themselves
speak out? Because if they did, they would lose their jobs. "No one felt
they could go to management and express their fears," a miner named
Stanley Stewart testified after the disaster. "We knew that we'd be
marked men and the management would look for ways to fire us. Maybe not
that day, or that week, but somewhere down the line, we'd disappear.
We'd seen it happen. I told my wife I felt like I was working for the
Gestapo at times."
Ten days after the disaster,
MSHA released a preliminary report that suggested the obvious: The
blast was likely caused by an explosive combination of methane and coal
dust. It will be months before the agency concludes its investigation,
and even longer before federal prosecutors decide whether to pursue
criminal charges against Massey. But it is highly unlikely that
Blankenship will ever see the inside of a prison cell. The coal industry
has more than a century of experience in structuring its companies to
shield its executives from criminal liability, and Blankenship continues
to disavow any responsibility for the deadly explosion at Upper Big
Branch. Although he refused to talk with
Rolling Stone for this
article, Blankenship recently told industry analysts that he has "a
totally clear conscience" about the tragedy and does not believe that
Massey "contributed in any way" to the disaster.
But whatever happens in court, Blankenship's days as the king of coal
are over. The era of Big Coal is coming to a close in West Virginia.
Even Senator Byrd, the biggest booster the industry has ever known,
admitted as much before his death earlier this year. "The greatest
threats to the future of coal do not come from possible constraints on
mountaintop-removal mining or other environmental regulations," Byrd
warned, "but rather from rigid mind-sets, depleting coal reserves and
the declining demand for coal as more power plants begin shifting to
biomass and natural gas as a way to reduce emissions. West Virginians
can choose to anticipate change and adapt to it, or resist and be
overrun by it."
Blankenship still holds an iron grip on Massey's board of directors.
"He's the embodiment of an imperial CEO," says one expert on corporate
governance. But the board may soon find itself forced to choose between
Blankenship and the company's survival. In early November, the Labor
Department moved to shut down a Massey mine in Kentucky that has racked
up nearly 2,000 safety violations in the past two years. Pressure from
environmental activists has forced big lenders like JP Morgan Chase to
decline financing for mountaintop-removal operations, which could hurt
Massey's bottom line. And big shareholders are beginning to turn against
the company. "The mine disaster was an eye-opening event for us," says
Brian Bartow, general counsel for the California State Teachers'
Retirement System, a large pension fund that is a major holder in Massey
stock. "We re-examined the risks that the company was running in the
way it does business. In our view, it has a lot in common with the
subprime mortgage crisis — there are a lot of risks here that Massey is
not acknowledging."
I ask Bartow if he believes Blankenship should resign. "He should," he says. "He clearly doesn't get it."
Blankenship could still orchestrate a smooth exit for himself,
perhaps by selling Massey to a rival company. But however his career
comes to an end, his story is a deeply tragic one. Given his local roots
and his business acumen, he might have helped West Virginia turn toward
the future and imagine itself as something more than a landscape to be
raped and pillaged by greedy industrialists. Instead, he has become just
another coal baron, a symbol of all the worst impulses of American
capitalism.
"One thing that is hard to take about Don Blankenship is how he
betrayed his own people," says Bruce Stanley, the lawyer who grew up in
Mingo County. "West Virginians have always looked at their plight and
blamed outsiders: 'It's the coal barons and lumber kings from the North
who have come in and stolen our resources, left us poor and broken.' But
Blankenship is a Mingo County boy. He took over control of a coal
company and rose to the top — and it turned him into an asshole.
Blankenship could have easily been a hero, not a villain. He could have
said to the people of Appalachia, 'Let me show you how to pick yourself
up by your bootstraps. Let me show you how to make something of
yourself.' Instead he said, 'Fuck it — I'm king.' "
If any of this troubles Blankenship, he doesn't let on. By his own
accounting, the bottom line provides all the proof he needs of his
virtue. "I don't care what people think," he once said during a talk to a
gathering of Republican Party leaders in West Virginia. "At the end of
the day, Don Blankenship is going to die with more money than he needs."
