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Image courtesy of Adrian Wood and Crosswinds
In this week’s show, we take a look at the health, environmental and financial costs of coal that fall to people living nearby. With the help of our partner podcast Crosswinds, we meet three impacted communities along a railroad connecting coal mines in West Virginia to ports on the East Coast. And we’ll hear how that rail infrastructure was built on the forced labor of incarcerated African Americans.
Adrian Wood, multimedia producer with the Repair Lab at the University of Virginia and producer of Crosswinds Music “A Documentary” by AKTASOK (Valentin Iakovlev) via Pixabay
Making Contact Staff: Credits for Crosswinds Episode 3: “Cost”
Listen to the entire Crosswinds series: Coal Dust Kills
The Repair LabMore Information:
TRANSCRIPT
NAR: You’re listening to Making Contact. I’m Lucy Kang.
The United States is the world’s 4th biggest exporter of coal. And a good chunk of our coal – about 14% – comes from West Virginia. It’s transported by train from those mines to ports on the East Coast, including the Port of Virginia, which is the country’s largest coal-exporting hub.
There, millions of tons of coal are stored in open air piles, which means… all that coal dust just blows onto nearby communities in the Hampton Roads region, including historic Black neighborhoods. It’s well known that coal dust causes serious health problems.
Crosswinds is a podcast mini-series brought to us by the Repair Lab at the University of Virginia. And it dives into this issue through the lens of environmental racism. To tell this story, the producer of the series, Adrian Wood, collaborated with activists and community members who are working to hold these companies accountable. I’ll let them explain more.
INTERVIEW WITH ADRIAN WOOD
Adrian: Crosswinds is an investigative audio documentary about coal dust air pollution in the Hampton Roads region of Virginia that follows the relationships between people who are living in that area and their relationships with each other with the air pollution problem and with the forces that sustain their movement for clean and healthy living.
Lucy: So why did you decide to make Crosswinds and look at the issues of coal dust pollution and environmental racism?
Adrian: Yeah, so with the Repair Lab, we work together as a group of academics, activists, and artists on issues of environmental racism. The work that the Repair Lab does is fueled around and centered around the advocacy of our activists and residents who this cycle brought to us their concerns about clean air in their community in Hampton Roads. So what I do as a multimedia producer is centered around their advocacy and their concerns. And I work to create narratives that support the changes that they’re seeking in their communities.
Lucy: So, we are about to listen to an excerpt from episode three, which is called Cost. Can you set that episode up for us and explain how it ties into the larger arc of the series?
Adrian: Yeah, episode three cost is sort of a historical look at the relationships between the railroad industry, the coal industry and the history of African American labor in the United States and particularly in Virginia.
And it starts out with a story about John Henry, who is an American mythological figure, who potentially was a real person who worked on a railroad that connects the coal fields of Appalachia to the coal export terminals in Hampton Roads. And it’s not just the train tracks that connect those communities. They’re also drawn together by their shared concerns about air pollution and other kinds of pollution that come along with the coal and rail industries. The episode goes on to look at other places that have been affected by coal dust air pollution and what those effects have been like in those communities, what advocacy has been like and how those communities have come together around the issues of coal dust air pollution.
Lucy: You know, something that really struck me about your series is just how, like, it seems to use this model of journalism where it works directly with activists and other people who are impacted, and I’m wondering how you think that compares to a more conventional model of journalism where there’s more of a division in the name of, like, quote unquote, “objectivity.”
Adrian: For me, it made sense to align myself with the protagonists of the series because our goal is clean air. And that is something that we have not just as like a professional goal, but a goal that is aligned with continued life for human beings in this region. So there’s not really like another side to that for me, and I see that as part of the goal of the series and the goal of the story that we’re telling is to support the lives of the people who we’re reporting with. And I think that ideally my role is more collaborative with those communities reflecting on how they would like their words to be expressed, how they would like their context to be presented to people who will probably never meet them.
But the Press Gazette New Media Storytelling Prize that they do every year. So that’s a huge achievement for us. And I think that goes to show that non-traditional methods of reporting can offer something to journalism as a field, as well as to the communities that they represent.
Lucy: Well, Adrian, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me on Making Contact. We’re so excited to share part of Crosswinds with our listeners.
Adrian: Thanks for your great questions, Lucy.
NAR: That’s Adrian Wood. They are a multimedia producer with the University of Virginia’s Repair Lab and the producer of Crossroads. Here is an excerpt from Episode 3, Cost.
CROSSWINDS EP 3 EXCERPT
ARCHIVAL AUDIO: [John Henry sung by prison laborers via Lomax Archive]
John Henry went up on the mountain
And the mountain was so tall
Well the mountain was so tall and John Henry was so small
He laid his hammer down and he cried
NARRATION: It’s a classic American tale: A race between John Henry and a steam drill. The challenge? Tunneling through a mountain, constructing a railroad that would reach from coal country to Virginia’s coasts. At the end of the story–
ARCHIVAL: He died with his hammer in his hand
NARRATION: He died with a hammer in his hand.
ARCHIVAL: He died with his hammer in his hand
NARRATION: John Henry is often depicted as a hero, but the story is much more complex. This 1947 recording is sung by incarcerated laborers working on a railroad in Mississippi. It’s from the Library of Congress’s Lomax Archive.
[music ends]
Our journey begins with John Henry’s story, when coal was first chiseled out of Appalachia.
NARRATION: John Henry’s tale is about his life and his labor and his death, but it’s also about the foundations of the coal and rail industries as they fused together in the midst of the Industrial Revolution.
[music – sparse synth chords joined by a minimal beat]
Like many myths, John Henry’s story is rooted in reality – John Henry was very likely a real person, a Black man living in Virginia in the 1870s.
While we don’t have documents that can pinpoint John Henry the individual, given the time period, John Henry was likely a veteran of the Union forces. Lots of Black Union veterans ended up in Virginia at the end of the Civil War, in 1865. At a time when Virginia – along with the rest of the South – was inventing new laws to criminalize Blackness.
[music ends]
ALEXES HARRIS: What we see during this era of the 13th amendment– it’s illegal to
enslave people unless they were duly convicted of something. We see this growth in
black code, the illegality attached to people solely for being Black.
NARRATION: That is Alexes Harris, a sociologist and presidential term professor at the
University of Washington. Black Codes were new laws designed to control Black people by convicting them for so-called “offenses” like loitering, breaking curfew, vagrancy, having weapons, and not carrying proof of employment.
HARRIS: There weren’t physical prisons right at that time– and large scale. And so
people’s bodies, just like in slavery were leased out to private entities to extract wealth,
to extract their labor, to literally extract the lives from these individuals.
NARRATION: Even though the slave economy had collapsed, Virginia and other southern states found a work around to have a pool of forced labor.
[ominous synth chords]
This was called the convict-lease system, and it was deadly. Virginia was in a lot of debt after the Civil War, so the Commonwealth leased convicts to build the railroads that fueled the Industrial Revolution. Nine out of ten convict laborers were African American. Almost all of them worked on the railroad.
[music – the John Henry song from the beginning, shrouded in reverb and ending in an ominous chord]
In 1872, half of all Penitentiary deaths were due to rail work, mostly due to lung disease – silicosis that came from tunneling through mountains. John Henry was likely among those killed by the convict lease system working on the railroad in Virginia.
[beat]
The railroad these men built now connects West Virginia’s coalfields to Virginia’s ports in Hampton Roads. Their labor created the infrastructure that shaped the foundations of the coal industry in these two states.
Forced labor didn’t just fuel Virginia’s coal industry. Convicts were leased to work in coal mines in Alabama and Tennessee until the 1940s, when the convict-lease system was abolished by the Federal government. Even though the convict-lease system was abolished, prison labor is still threaded throughout our economy.
HARRIS: This is a contemporary story, we’re in a contemporary moment that’s built off of this legacy of extracting wealth from individuals who are negatively racialized as Black, but who are also poor and marginalized in other ways. It’s all about extracting wealth, extracting humanity and building wealth for private entities.
NARRATION: Exploitation is laid into the very foundation of these railroad tracks that bring coal to Hampton Roads, where coal dust continues to disproportionately burden Black residents because of where they live. So what happens on the other side of the mountain, where the coal comes from? Let’s follow the tracks to one of the earliest American fossil fuel sources: West Virginia coal.
[soundscape: a coal train passing in the night]
NARRATION: I traced the coal that gets shipped out of Hampton Roads terminals back to about a dozen mines in West Virginia.
ARCHIVAL ADVERTISEMENT: For many, coal and west virginia are synonymous. Coal
is abundant and cleaner than ever before.
JUNIOR: The coal dust is just everywhere. It doesn’t matter if there’s a coal mine right
next to you or if you just, you know, live here.
NARRATION: This is Junior Walk – he’s an environmental advocate and he lives next to a coal mine in the southern part of West Virginia, in a tiny town named Eunice.
ADRIAN: Can you tell me about how coal dust has affected you personally?
JUNIOR: The coal dust has always been a problem here. When they were first putting
that mine in there, the dust was absolutely awful. I could literally put a record on my
turntable and play it, uh, and then like leave it be for 24 hours and then try to play the
same record again, and it wouldn’t play because of how much dust had accumulated just in 24 hours. Yep. So I could imagine what the insides of my lungs look like.
NARRATION: Junior was a new volunteer with Coal River Mountain Watch, an environmental accountability group, when an explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine killed 29 people – the biggest coal mining disaster in recent American history. It was 2010.
[music – ominous chords]
ADRIAN: Where were you when that happened?
JUNIOR: I was trying to get to my home and I couldn’t because the road was completely
blocked. I was like, what’s going on? Why are all these, you know, ambulances and stuff
Here? And I remember being real concerned, because I had a cousin who was younger than me. He was 18 years old at the time, and, uh, he worked in ‘em mines. Couldn’t get ahold of nobody to figure out if he was in ‘ere, if he was all right or what and set there for like about an hour waiting to see what was up. Finally got ahold of somebody and figured it out, you know, he was late for work that day and that was the only thing that kept him from being in there.
[music – ambient ominous chords]
NARRATION: Now, Junior’s a full-time advocate for community health. He’s a watchdog for coal company environmental violations.
JUNIOR: These companies, they will factor the fines and things like that, that they get
from these environmental problems into the cost of doing business. When we find
something where we can force them to take workers and equipment away from actively
mining coal to go back and fix something – that’s not only the fines that they get for that,
but also the lost production time where they’re not mining coal.
NARRATION: Junior and his group focus on environmental accountability as a way to directly disrupt the mining that has hurt them, because the legal system won’t do that. For the Upper Big Branch Explosion, the companies were fined and the CEO, Don Blankenship, went to prison for a year. But the mining continues. The year of the explosion, the mine’s parent company, Alpha, paid a $209 million settlement on top of a 10.8 million dollar fine.
[music – slow bass riff with ambient chords]
So, what did the families think of this? One person who lost her brother said, “”It wouldn’t have mattered what happened in this courtroom today, it wouldn’t have been enough.”
[music fades out]
JUNIOR: Why is it that we prioritize that money that’s bein’ pulled out of that mountain
and goin’ into the pockets of the people who own that company and not the health and
the longevity of them people who live down beside that coal mine?
[music – ambient chords begin again]
NARRATION: Junior is white, but living in coal country, he sees and deals with something Hampton Roads residents of color might recognize: the way health is pulled out of them at no cost to the corporations doing it.
[music – drums join ambient chords]
There are terrible, spectacular disasters like what happened at Upper Big Branch. But there is also the slow, daily violence of coal dust – an unwelcome intruder in their lives, homes, and bodies. Further down the railroad, we can follow the coal to a community in Baltimore – where we will find the second largest coal terminal in the country.
[Train ambi]
[Transition music fade in]
MIDROLL
Salima Hamirani: I’m jumping in to remind you that you are listening to Making Contact. If you like today’s show and you want more information, or if you’d like to leave us a comment, visit us at our new website, FOCMedia.org. There you can access today’s show and all of our prior episodes. Okay, now back to the show.
[Transition music fade out]
[soundscape – coal train passing on a bridge]
NARRATION: CSX is the name of the rail company that connects the railroad tracks outside Junior’s window to the export terminals on the east coast. CSX doesn’t own all of the terminals it delivers to, but in Baltimore it does own one, in a neighborhood called Curtis Bay. The neighborhood is mostly poor and working class. It’s surrounded by environmental hazards including a medical waste incinerator, a landfill, gas, and oil storage as well as the CSX coal terminal. Residents have complained about the effects the terminal has on them for decades, including coal dust, but a few years ago, things came to a head –
[scene tape–local reporters talking about the explosion]
WBAL, WJZ: December 13th, 2021. An explosion at a CSX coal silo rocking Curtis Bay.
WBAL Reporter 1: The explosion shook houses and blew out windows. It spread coal
into the air and into people’s lungs.
WBAL Reporter 2: The explosion happened during normal coal-loading operations.
WBAL Reporter 1: Caused by a buildup of methane on the conveyor belt.
WJZ reporter: The blast could be felt miles away, some saying it felt like an earthquake,
they felt their buildings shake for a while.
[music – dramatic synth chords and plosive sounds in background]
RESIDENT 2: I went outside and said, there’s something going on at the coal pier.
NARRATION: Curtis Bay residents gave public comment following the explosion.
RESIDENT 2: I smelled, like everyone did, coal burning.
RESIDENT: Sitting in my living room and then this loud boom. Nobody knew what to do.
RESIDENT 5: It felt like someone picked up the house and dropped it back down.
..We demand that CSX and everyone be held accountable for what they are doing to
our communities.
[music ends]
NARRATION: Coal in Curtis Bay Terminal is stored both in silos as well as open piles. The dust in the silos is extremely explosive and even a small spark can cause a chain reaction of detonations. The design of the facilities contributed to the explosion in 2021 – they weren’t being ventilated well enough, so the methane buildup caused the coal dust to explode, even though the facility passed prior inspections.
A few months after the explosion, two residents filed a class-action lawsuit. It would require CSX to provide a $5 million medical fund for Curtis Bay residents for continuous exposure to coal dust.
LUCY NAR: This is Lucy, just jumping in here to say that a federal judge has since approved a settlement by the rail company – but for the lower amount of $1.75 million. Okay, back to the story.
[music – dramatic guitar riff with keys]
NARRATION: John Scheinemann is a co-founder of Coal Kills Baltimore, a group that is
demanding a clean and healthy environment in Curtis Bay.
[music fades out]
JOHN: We, uh, organize around the coal piers in Curtis Bay neighborhood in South
Baltimore.
NARRATION: He described the consequences of the explosion for CSX.
JOHN: In the wake of the coal pier explosion, the silo explosion, the state, along with
CSX, came to, uh, an agreement that they would be fined $15,000 and give $100,000 to
a local based community organization. $15,000 state fine and $100,000 buyoff to a
community group is not climate justice.
NARRATION: All of the fines issued to penalize CSX came from OSHA, the federal agency that oversees worker safety. None of the fines mention the health, safety, and well-being of residents of the adjacent neighborhood. This accountability structure leaves a big hole when it comes to a lot of people who experienced harm due to the explosion – and continue to be harmed by the coal dust.
[music – guitar riff]
TERREL: I can like, remember like taking a video where like the dust was just blowing
off of the piles.
NARRATION: This is Terrel Askew, John’s co-organizer with Coal Kills Baltimore,
TERREL: It was a, it wasn’t an overly windy day, and it was just like blowing off of the
Piles. One of the weirdest things about Curtis Bay is the coal pier is right across from a, um, recreation center where there’s a children’s play area. Literally they’re right in the like crosswinds of the coal piles.
NARRATION: In Curtis Bay, the silo explosion was a dazzlingly violent event. But coal dust is something residents deal with in a silent way every day, and that cumulative impact can be as significant as an explosion – it’s just not as visible.
TERREL: CSX doesn’t care about the lives that they hurt. But then they’re also part of a
system, honestly, that sees lives being destroyed as the price of doing business.
JOHN: You can throw as much money as possible at dressing things up and
beautifying, but as long as the coal is blowin’ off the pier and polluting the bay and
polluting the bay and polluting the neighborhood, you’ve got a problem.
[music – guitar riff joined by bass and drums]
NARRATION: There are very straightforward ways for dust to be mitigated at sites like this one – like better ventilation, spraying the coal with water or creating a physical barrier between the coal and the community. Coal dust is a choice by the company, in this case CSX, to forward the cost of that mitigation on to residents, who instead pay for it with their health and well-being.
[soundscape – coal train passing]
[music fades out]
NARRATION: We’ve followed the coal from mountains to the shore. Now, we’re arriving at our final stop: Hampton Roads, Virginia. Today, coal dust from the export terminals in Hampton Roads continues to disproportionately burden African American residents due to where they live. It’s from the same coal seam in West Virginia that made the dust that clogged Junior Walk’s record player; the same coal seam that made dust that exploded inside the silo in Curtis Bay, Baltimore.
[music – gentle synth notes and chords]
The price that Black residents of Newport News and Norfolk pay for living next to the coal terminals is not conceptual or abstract. I asked Donquitta Clements, a Newport News resident, what she pays annually in health costs just around the coal dust for herself and her children.
[music ends]
DONQUITTA: One thing that I noticed in my own child is the two toddlers always have a
cough. It’s like they’re stuffy every day. That’s a daily fight. They’ve never been diagnosed with anything allergy wise. when we lived in 23608, never had the problem.
NARRATION: 23608 is the zip code for the uptown Newport News – miles away from the coal export terminal.
DONQUITTA: I feel like I probably buy congestion medicine at least twice a month.
ADRIAN: [tape] how much do you spend on that?
DONQUITTA: Oof. About $150 a month.
ADRIAN: [tape] How much do you spend on a ventilation system typically, if you had to
estimate?
DONQUITTA: To get the new one we got was $10,000.
NARRATION: That’s about average for a new HVAC system.
DONQUITTA: And don’t forget, you have to then separately get an AC unit that goes on
the outside of your house,
ADRIAN: Which is another three or four hundred?
DONQUITTA. Thousand. And, our ventilation system, we noticed that where you put
your filter at turns black – you know you’re supposed to change it every month? Not
even two weeks. So you have to make the investment to try to help yourself.
[music – synth arpeggios in background]
NARRATION: If you’re just an individual paying for all this gear to manage your health and air quality, it adds up fast. All that stuff Donquitta just mentioned – the filters, the ventilation system, plus the cough syrup for the lingering symptoms – it’s like $14,000 down, then another $250-350 a month, which is like $4000 a year. And that doesn’t count doctor’s visits.
[music – synth arpeggios joined by digital beat]
It’s good that these improvements are available to Donquitta and her family, though it’s not fair that they have to pay for them – but most people in this neighborhood are not going to be able to afford this extra gear. These costs aren’t being volunteered by Donquitta and her community. They’re being extracted to build wealth for private companies.
[music stops]
One way to look at this is to compare it to the accountability costs paid by coal and rail
companies at the other places we’ve visited this episode.
[music – descending piano sample, strings and an r&b beat]
At our first stop in West Virginia, Upper Big Branch mine exploded in 2010. Alpha paid a total of a $209 million settlement, which was 5 percent of their revenue that year. By the way, Alpha is the same company that owns the majority of the Dominion coal export terminal in Newport News.
At our second stop in Baltimore, a silo exploded in the export terminal. CSX paid 3 one
thousandths of a percent of their annual profit in fines. – that’s three zeroes on the other side of the decimal. CSX is the same rail company that ships to the export terminal in Newport News.
The average income in Donquitta’s zip code is $39,000. Someone like Donquitta would be spending almost 10% of her total income on protection and symptom management alone. But this isn’t a completely fair comparison because Donquitta and her family don’t benefit at all from the coal, unlike the corporations we’re talking about.
[music stops]
From the very foundations of the first tracks that were laid to ship West Virginia coal through Newport News and Norfolk, the costs of this industry have never been paid by those who profit the most. We can trace it back to John Henry’s footprints in the dust under the first railroad tracks that shipped coal to Hampton Roads. The work that he was forced to do ended his life, but it brought the investor in charge of the project tremendous profit.
[music – synth reprise of John Henry]
Today, America’s coal export industries echoes the burdens placed on John Henry and his contemporaries by industry and by the state. These forces pulled labor and life out of them in order to lay the foundations for a major part of the fossil fuel economy. And now, from where coal originates in West Virginia to where it gets exported in Baltimore all the way to Hampton Roads, people continue to deal with poisoned land, water, and bodies – invasions on a cellular level.
[music fades out on sad ominous chord]
[Outro music fade in]
NAR: That was producer Adrian Wood, with an excerpt from episode 3 of Crosswinds, which was produced through the University of Virginia’s Repair Lab. To learn more or to find out where to hear the whole series, go to our website at focmedia.org.
And that does it for today’s show. I’m Lucy Kang. Thanks for listening to Making Contact.
[Music fade out]
