Our Roots Run Deep as Ironweed: Appalachian Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice

2. "We Became Two Determined Women": Pauline Canterberry and Mary Miller Become the Sylvester Dustb

chapter 2 “We Became Two Determined Women” Pauline Canterberry and Mary Miller Become the Sylvester Dustbusters Mary Miller and Pauline Canterberry, the “Sylvester Dustbusters,” at the entrance of Elk Run Coal Company. Photo courtesy of Giles Ashford. After coal is mined, it must be chemically cleaned and crushed in order to prepare it for burning in coal-fired power plants. Communities neighboring such plants, such as the town of Sylvester in Boone County, West Virginia, contend with massive amounts of coal dust in the air, making life unbearable for some residents. Pauline Canterberry and Mary Miller, who are known as the “Sylvester Dustbusters,” have been fighting coal dust in their community for nearly a decade. I conducted interviews with Pauline and Mary during the summers of 2006 and 2007. pauline: Sylvester was the place; everybody wanted to move here because there were no coal mines. This town was never a coal camp. In 1945, when I lived in Whitesville and went to Sherman High School in Seth, I traveled through what is now Sylvester every day to get to and from school. This spot of land through here was a golf course and a small aircraft landing strip. They lotted it out in 1949, and people began to build houses here. [Living in Sylvester] got you away from the coal-dust communities and everything. Once anybody moved here, they didn’t leave. It was a wonderful place to live, it was a wonderful place to raise your family, and to me, it was just as close to Camelot as you could get. mary: When a home would go up for sale, it would be sold within two or three days—that’s how bad people wanted to move into Sylvester. I’ve lived here fifty-two years. This was such a beautiful little town. pauline: Sylvester was a wonderful place to live up until Massey Energy decided to put in a [coal] preparation plant. They already had a facility over there—an underground mines.1 They cut the bluff off [which was between the mine and the town of Sylvester] and put the processing plant right on top of the ridge where they had cut off the hillside—right in the direct airflow of the town. When we found out the preparation plant was being put over here, there were fifty-four letters [from residents] of this town to the DEP2 asking them not to [approve the permit for the facility]. Not only that, we had petitions with over 75 percent of the town’s signatures on it asking them not to put the preparation plant in. [We] knew it would simply destroy the area—we knew what would happen. This facility sits in the western side of Sylvester, and the wind blows from west to east 90 percent of the time, which means 90 percent of the time [the dust] is pouring over the town of Sylvester. Just as soon as they got it finished and it started into operation, which was in April of 1998, it instantly began to cover the town in coal dust. Within one 28 chapter 2 month we were completely covered. It was horrible. We could walk outside here on [sunny] days like today and the sun looked like you was looking through a kaleidoscope, there was so much coal dust in the air. You couldn’t do nothing outside—you couldn’t have cookouts outside, you [couldn’t] hang your clothes outside when you wash[ed] them. It just plastered our homes. And not only that, then it began to seep through your windows and inside your home. Coal used to travel in lumps—even on your railroads. Now it is crushed into very fine powder, and it can seep in anywhere. Our homes were just polluted completely with it. And I mean, right now, in order to get all the coal dust out of our homes, we’re going to have to take them apart and rebuild them because there’s no way you can get it all out—there’s just no way you can do it. It comes in under your windowsills, it’s everywhere. Your attics are full of it, everything is full of it. Your filter from your air conditioners and your furnaces are full of it. You have to change them every two weeks or a month—constantly. They’re full of coal dust. So...