Shirley Cornette would not strike you as the kind of person who relishes a fight. She spends most of her days at home in the trailer where she lives. She is shy and absolutely refuses to be photographed. On the TV in her livingroom, a delicious feast is being prepared. Beautiful colours, exotic vegetables, sizzling on a frying pan. Outside her window, the scene is not so delectable.
Black sludge, trucks and excavators surround her home. Diggers scrape against rock and stone. The once idyllic Coldwater Creek, by the side of which she lives, has been transformed into the site of what Fred Stroud at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) describes as "the worst environmental disaster the southeastern United States has ever seen".
In the dark hours of early dawn on October 12th last year, a coal slurry retention pond, situated four miles upstream from Shirley Cornette's trailer, collapsed, sending 250 million gallons of coal sludge down the mountain. By sunrise, Coldwater Creek was no longer a creek, more a vast glistening trench of black, thick coal sludge. That no one was killed is, as people will tell you, a "miracle".
That the pond collapsed is not. It highlights the flawed state of the laws regulating the coal industry in the US.
On February 12th, the Kentucky Department for Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement announced what many had suspected all along: that the rock barrier between the floor of the slurry pond and the roof of the underground mine underneath it - supposed to be a minimum of 75 feet thick - was less then 10 feet thick in nearly 50 places. Up until this point, Martin County Coal, the local operator, had been trying to pass the accident off as an "act of God". In 1994, the same pond leaked and sent approximately four million gallons of black water into the hollows underneath. The Mine, Health and Safety Administration (MSHA) was called in. Changes were made. It wasn't supposed to happen again, but it did. Ten thousand-fold.
"It's not the laws that are the problem, it's the enforcement of the laws," says Herb Smith, a film-maker with Appalshop, an independent film company based in Whitesburg, Kentucky. Smith comes from a family of coalminers. He has spent the last 30 years documenting life and culture in the Appalachian Mountains, and has seen firsthand the effects the coal industry has had on Appalachian communities.
"I would compare Kentucky's regulation of strip-mining to Mississippi's regulation of race laws in the 1960s," Smith continues. "Basically, you have none."
In December, Kentucky's largest newspaper, the Louisville Courier-Journal, ran a three-part series on the Kentucky Mining Board, the state body responsible for ensuring the safety and protection of coalminers. According to the newspaper, the board "has never formally reviewed the federal convictions of nearly 100 companies and mine officials charged with safety violations in Kentucky since 1990". The paper accused the board of allowing a number of coal operators who have flagrantly broken the laws to skate free.
In the run-up to the presidential elections, George W. Bush came to West Virginia and promised that, if elected, he would ease regulations on the coalmining industry. Gale Norton, the new Interior Minister, is a known advocate of a company's right to police itself, something Kentuckian Dee Davis equates with allowing crack dealers to police themselves. "Self-regulation is a great idea," he says. "I'd like to see it actually work sometime."
As it stands, the coal industry is exempt from many of the environmental laws that have been put in place to keep industry in check. The Kentucky Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Cabinet - the EPA's state body - has no part to play in the legislation that regulates coal. Cabinet spokesperson Maleva Chamberlain says: "We can cringe when we see legislation that we think poses a problem." That's all they can do.
More than half of US electricity is produced by coal, although, as Elizabeth Barret, a film producer with Appalshop, puts it: "If you go to the streets of Washington D.C. and ask them if we use coal to produce electricity, they haven't got a clue."
Thirteen men were killed in Kentucky coalmining accidents last year. Thirty eight were killed nationwide and over three thousand people were injured.
AS FOR how the coal industry has affected the Appalachian countryside, you have only to open your eyes. Entire mountaintops have been torn away, amputated from the land over which they once soared. Deep, gaping wounds scar the mountainsides, the result of strip-mining. Heavy coal trucks trundle along treacherous highways. Billboards advertise coal hauliers' insurance ("Coal hauliers - are your insurance rates too high?") or law firms ("Recently disabled?") or low medical insurance. When the sun shines, there is some reprieve. But when the skies are grey and rain or snow is coming down, and the trees are at their most bare, it is all right there in front of you. Grim and brutal.
At a community meeting in Martin County, Dennis Hatfield, president of Martin County Coal, introduces himself to the 30 or so people in attendance. His audience is fed up, to put it mildly, and throughout the meeting people get up and walk out, heads shaking. "Grass will grow, water will flow, and people's lives will get back to normal," Hatfield says, and there is uproar. "What about the white film on my dishes?" one woman shouts, "That wasn't there until the slurry came." A man gets up and presents to Hatfield a grubby cloth that he had used to silence a drip. The water had stained the cloth black.
Throughout it all, Hatfield remains calm and polite. He is a local man, born and raised in Martin County. He doesn't live there any more ("He got sense," one man remarks). "We have been doing some stupid things to keep 300 people working," Hatfield tells them. This is the crux of the problem. In this part of Appalachia, coal is king. Without it, there is nothing. For all of the environmental degradation, the health concerns, the quality-of-life issues, people are afraid that if they speak too loudly about coalmine safety they will lose what few jobs they have. And the coal companies manipulate that fear.
In the early days, as Herb Smith describes it, there was an "unwritten deal" between coal companies and local communities. "You would deal with the mud, the muck and broken bodies and black-lung consequences, and in exchange there were some jobs," he says.
Today, coalmining is more reliant on machinery than men. More and more, people have to put up with the indignity of life here: a depressed economy, a political system that does them no good, an industry that does not put anything back into their communities, and a countryside in tatters. As Herb Smith puts it: "The deal is off."
On a local radio station's Mountain Talk programme, Pete Ramey, a retired miner, appeals to the Appalachian audience for their support. A mining company has been granted a permit to mine 300 feet from the coal camp town where he lives. He, his wife, Juanita, and their neighbours have been told to expect some "minor nuisance" as a result of the blasting. Dishes might fall out of presses, pictures could fall from the walls, and houses might shake. It's as though these residents have been told to expect a series of minor earthquakes and accept it as normal.
JUANITA Ramey is full of charm, with a go-get-'em attitude. "I want to be active," she says. "I want something done." Pete Ramey tells the radio audience they have raised "$85 in order to pay for legal assistance". This for a court hearing when they will be up against lawyers from the state attorney's office and the Department of Mines and Minerals. It will not stretch very far.
A man calls in and asks Pete Ramey how he built the house he lives in.
"You worked in the coalmines?" he asks. Ramey says that yes, he did, for 37 years.
"So coalmining built that house you're living in?" the caller asks. Affirmative.
"Maybe I'm missin' something," the man says.
Ramey replies: "I worked in the coalmines for 37 years and I never did blast anybody out of their homes."
Glenn Cornette, Shirley's husband, has lived on Coldwater Creek for 66 years. He is filing a lawsuit against Martin County Coal. How far is he willing to go? "As long as it takes," Shirley says. "It could take years to get anything, but . . ." Her voice trails off, as if lost in thoughts of just how long and how hard all of this could be.
What would she say to those who think that she and Glenn are trying to exploit the situation? She lifts herself up off the couch and laughs.
"Tell them to come look," she says, and gestures towards the window.