Thunder on the Mountain: Death at Massey and the Dirty Secrets Behind Big Coal by Peter A. Galuszka (review)

In the Appalachian coalfields, “the contradictions are enormous” (xxiv). How could a land of such immense mineral wealth have such high levels of poverty? How could one of the most beautiful landscapes be stripped away to access the black rock below? How could a people who value the land be so divided over “the war on coal”? In this amazing book, investigative journalist Peter Galuszka gets to the heart of these divides by focusing on Appalachia’s most despised coal firm—Massey Energy and its CEO Donald Blankenship.

A longtime reporter on global energy news, Galuszka first learned about the coalfields after his family moved from suburban Bethesda, Maryland, to Harrison County, West Virginia, in the early 1960s. His exposé focuses on the traumatic explosion at Massey’s Upper Big Branch (UBB) Mine on April 5, 2010, that killed twenty-nine miners. Caused by years of safety cost cutting, in 2009 the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) fined Massey $382,000 and shut the mine down numerous times (9). Readers will be heartbroken to read testimonials like those of disabled miner Gary Quarles, who discusses his son’s horrible death in this book, which is so far the best narrative account of what happened.

Coal is still king in West Virginia. Aided by the slogan that coal “keeps the lights on,” Galuszka reminds readers that much of this black gold flows out of the region to fuel the “insatiable demand” of Asian countries needing metallurgical coal for steelmaking (2). Thus, the story of Big Coal in West Virginia is the story of globalization. Steel once produced in Youngstown, Pittsburgh, and Wheeling, West Virginia, now comes from China and India, fueled by West Virginia coal.

Galuszka’s best writing comes in describing the rise of A. T. Massey and Don Blankenship. Created in 1920, Massey Energy developed a reputation as a “stickler for watching expenses,” (83) and its notorious “Massey Strategy.” After purchasing a union mine, A. T. Massey would stop production until the contract expired, and then reopen it on a nonunion basis. If former union miners protested, the company reverted to tried-and-true tactics like filing injunctions to halt picketing, and hiring private security forces. As a youthful manager, Don Blankenship used this strategy to perfection during the 1984–1985 strike in Mingo and Logan counties, winning his first major victory over the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). As others followed suit, UMWA membership dropped in Central Appalachia from 120,000 in 1978 to about 14,000 today. Rising from a poor background in Mingo County, Blankenship emerged as a “robber baron” (34) who bank-rolled Republican politicians, mocked “greeniacs,” and divided communities. Blankenship emerged as an “egocentric bully,” but one who could quip: “I’m the one who will die with the most money” (45, 56).

For those trying to understand the continuing public debate about the “war on coal,” Galuszka shows how culture and politics were intertwined for Don Blankenship. During an over-the-top 2009 Labor Day rally atop a mountaintop-removal site, Blankenship hosted Fox News’s Sean Hannity and conservative musicians like Ted Nugent. The author notes the genius with which Blankenship tapped a “huge store of working-class resentment” (183). Stressing jobs, patriotism, and the right to bear arms, Blankenship could incite the masses to push state politicians to weaken proposed safety laws and see the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) as an overregulating enemy of their livelihoods.

In language reminiscent of Harry Caudill’s Night Comes to the Cumberlands (1963), Galuszka paints a bitter indictment of the power of a single industry economy. There were 475,000 miners in Central Appalachia in the 1940s, but that number fell to about 38,000 in 2012 (73). In addition, coal companies paid $379 million in severance taxes to West Virginia, but only a small...