The Dark Lords

Rolling Stone magazine ran an excellent follow up story on the American mining disaster in April 2010 , when 29 men were killed in an explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine run by Massey Energy. It was the worst mining tragedy in 40 years. Instead of acknowledging any responsibility for the disaster, Blankenship, the company CEO, argues that the explosion was an act of God, an 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. 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!" 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. 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.

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...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. "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.
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...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 Cecil Roberts, the head of the United Mine Workers of America, who has battled Blankenship for nearly 30 years.
"He's the embodiment of an imperial CEO," says one expert on corporate governance.

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 compensation claimants 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."

In the days after the Upper Big Branch disaster, 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. 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 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; 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. 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 theorised 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.

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."

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."

Blankenship announced that he was retiring a week after Goodell’s Rolling Stone story appeared. Massey Energy itself will probably not last long in its present form: although it’s reportedly looking for companies to buy, more likely is that it will end up being swallowed by a larger player.