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Terrible working conditions and the inability of the workers and company officials
to negotiate health, safety and pay issues led the way to militant unionization of the industry. But before the time that
unions became acceptable, there have been many fatal skirmishes between the workers and company guards, and in some cases,
outside hired guns were even used. A security organization in the early days know as the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, were
hired by many large companies to help curb the spread of unionization. Thugs like these are guilty of murdering countless
coal miners.
And not just the miners themselves, but there are proven documented cases where they rode train cars and opened fire on strike
camps with no mercy and killing workers, their wives and even children. They showed no mercy at all. In many areas in the
southern coalfields, you can see the sites and battlegrounds where these murders took place. Even in Kanawha county, you can
still find bunkers and foxholes where gunfire was exchanged in this deadly struggle to improve working conditions for the
miners.
Immigrants were often hired to work the mines because of the steady flow of immigrants into the country in the early 19th
century. Miners who were trapped underground during explosions did not even have the courtesy of having their remains removed
from the mine. The area where they were entrapped was often sealed up and new entries were began and work was rarely interrupted.
"Permanently sealed off and somewhere inside, another statistic sleeps until the resurrection", as one author phrased it.
Most of the immigrant miners were not even known by their given names as one place in Kanawha county reflects that
"Italian # 14, perished in this mine and maybe, only those who worked beside him knew who he was.
Also because of coal mining and lax safety laws, there have been those who have died because of negligence on the coal company
and states behalf. Take for instance the Buffalo Creek Flood of 1972. Three sediment ponds that were built and supposedly
maintained by the Pittston Coal Co., were under built, over filled and never maintained. The state and federal mine agencies
never inspected these ponds and what few times they did inspect them, they were deemed safe. After much warning from the residents
of Buffalo Creek to local and state officials in way of begging them to investigate, on February 25, 1972,
130 million gallons of water, coal sludge and debris busted loose from its banks taking with it two other dams below and leaving
125 dead 7 missing and countless injured and homeless. And in 2002, it happened again just a few miles from Buffalo Creek.
But luckily, no one was injured and the coal sludge dam was much smaller than the one at Buffalo Creek.
Coal sludge dams were called many different names throughout the years. Slush ponds, sediment ponds, sludge ponds, sediment
enclosure areas and many more names. But they all had one thing in common. They contained nothing but polluted water, were
filled with everything the coal company couldn't sell and was an accident waiting for a place to happen. I am not so sure
as to the exact number of sludge dams that have been built in this state to hold coal sediment but I do know that the state
of West Virginia is well aware of the consequences of these earthen impoundments and the devastation they can cause.
In the early days of coal mining the dams were never regulated or designed to last. They were usually just earthen enclosures
at the mouth of a mountain hollow and filled with everything in the world. The water usually came out from underneath them
and this made for the erosion of the dam base giving way to some future give away of the entire dam itself.
Laws have slowly been entered into legislation governing how we mine coal and what we must do with the by products of the
mineral. But because of the lack of environmental studies in decades past, much ecological damage has been done to our streams
and our lands. Damage that will take years to recover, if in deed it ever will. We not only learn how to safely mine coal
over the years but we also learn how to protect our environment, unfortunately after we almost destroy it in the process of
achieving wealth. Wounds do eventually heal in time but the scars that are made will never vanish and it must
be a constant reminder of how important it is for us to study and do research before we interfere with the natural balance
of our planet.
Before the West Virginia legislature enacted the Dam Control Act on or about 1973, sediment dams from coal preparation facilities
were never engineered or studies done to determine where a dam could or could not be built. The laws now demands that sediment
dams have to be constructed with good solid material and constructed with water overflows to help rid the dam of to much water
build up during snow melt and heavy seasonal rains. Companies had two specific needs, (1) they needed a supply of water to
pump to the tipples for coal cleaning and (2), they needed a somewhere to deposit the refuse and coal slag that came from
the tipple that could not be sold. They usually hauled this refuge up hollows and filled it in blocking the flow of the natural
stream. As the water level increased, they would pack more refuge on top of the slag dam building it higher and higher. These
poorly constructed reservoirs would prove to be a disaster waiting to happen.
(See Buffalo Creek Flood on menu bar.)
The things left underground after a mine has worked out will remain there and quite possibly never see the light of day again.
But on the surface it can be a different story. Abandoned equipment, tipples, buildings and a multitude of other things still
dot the West Virginia landscape. Coal preparation plants called tipples, were constructed to process the mined coal and clean
it of any non-burnable minerals that may be inside the coal. They range anywhere from a single story load-out to massive 8
story five acre complexes that can process thousands of tons of coal on a daily basis.
Their huge hulking skeletons can be seen mostly beside railroad tracks where waiting coal cars once carried the coal that
they processed to steel mills and power plants. The cost of building these facilities varied as well as the size of the structures.
The coal was stockpiled near the tipple and was processed through them to separate the rock or slate, from the coal. Coal
has different grades, some types of coal from different seams may have a lower volatile rating than other seams. The low grade
coal was sometimes mixed with other high volatile grades to acquire a special blend of coal for a specific need.
(See "Tipples" on the menu bar.
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