Moss 3’s Burn and Smoke
In a bold attempt to one-up their prior achievements, the coal bosses and their politicians have come down from the country club for an encore performance at the hillbilly’s expense.
The word “Carbo” means coal, or charcoal. Its origins come from a mix of the Old English word for “hearth,” Latin “to burn,” and likely the Russian word for “smoke.”
The Hearth
I couldn’t look away from those covered belt lines feeding in and out of metal buildings, peculiar and inviting with a hint of danger, like a Dollywood ride for which I was still too short. Those steamy towering stacks. The blinking lights. The rumble of engine combustion and earth crunching under the weight of giant dump trucks and worn out trains full of bituminous coal.
As a Russell County boy about half the size of a fence post, it was with great excitement that I discovered that my granddaddy worked in Carbo, this industrial-flavored theme park. Such grand sights and sounds. My fever-dreamed Lego buildings and Tonka truck rodeos had finally come to life right there, just a slingshot or two away from the Clinch River.
Many people around these parts have strolled by this site on Sundays after church, or parked a spell for some Friday night poor decision making.
Fix your gaze and inquisitions on Carbo’s Moss 3. Behold this progress of man.
And by man I am referring to our granddaddies and uncles and daddies and cousins and boyfriends and deacons and such, carrying their dinner buckets and mashed up Stanley thermoses and stickered hard hats and callused hands and raunchy jokes and backstory nicknames like Pickle or DeeDo or Hawkhead and lips accented with amber trails of a hoot-owl-shift’s worth of tobacco (“backer”) spit.
There was a steady heartbeat in that holler — until there wasn’t.
This central organ — the coal prep plant at Clinch River, or “Moss 3,” as they called it — was the Pittston Coal Company’s grand central depot for washing, cleaning, sorting, and sending coal downstream to the power plant. The rest of that burnable bounty was shipped far and wide, by rail and barge and truck, powering the development of this country and even helping to keep the lights on in far away lands you might have only heard of if you had a cousin stationed at a military base.
The veins of these Central Appalachian coalfields carried many a man’s inbound riches to this very spot — trains rumbling up and down steel rails, Mack trucks snaking along county roads, and haul trucks dusting across gravel roads blocked off by guard shacks, only accessible by official company permission, or from the other side of the ridge on your cousin Donnie’s dirt bike if you brought the beer.
We all know this story down here. It’s more complicated than Hollywood would ever take the time to share with a you-ain’t-from-around-here audience. Yes, people worked hard. Yes, some people got rich. Yes, others were just trying to make it through to that first paycheck after Christmas in any given year. Yes, the turning point in the famous Pittston Strike was quite literally here on these very grounds. The Hearth.
But I’m here to talk To Burn and Smoke.
To Burn
I’m a privileged white man who has greatly benefited from many good old boy networks. I’ve been fortunate to build on other people’s hard work, been able to step through doors that others had to pound on, and received countless other benefits — seen and unseen — that have perpetuated my largely charmed existence these nearly forty-two years.
It is in this context that I can say that this boondoggle —this proposed mega-landfill — goes beyond some typical good old boy “yee haw y’all, look at our small town … rubber stamp here … closed door decision there … so good to see you darlin” kind of stuff.
These cats, John Matney and Clyde Stacy, have made absolute fortunes here and now they’ve come back for more taking, using tactics that have been employed in our region for generations — namely cronyism, backdoor dealing, and public charades. They are also leveraging a dysfunctional system of power that simply makes it incredibly challenging for many citizens to speak out due to fear of losing a job opportunity, damaging their social network, or worse, while elected officials and corporate executives can call the shots behind closed doors.
My Lord. The optics, conflicts of interest, and lack of due diligence are next-level embarrassing and disheartening and need to be addressed.
Here’s the crux of it:
The coal bosses and politicians have teamed up again, this time fashioning green hard hats while steering tax dollars to themselves to clean up coal industry spoils — this after telling everyone they were building an industrial and recreational park for the benefit of local communities, economies, and the environment. They’ve decided to ditch that idea and instead hustle a little more money out of the hillbillies by importing vast quantities of out-of-state trash to their new mega-landfill venture.
There is more than a little speculation that the reason it is hard to get any straight answers from the people elected to give straight answers is in part because the lawyers working for the government right now were actually in charge of approving these public investments in RCR in the first place. The Honorable Terry Kilgore, Russell County Board of Supervisor’s current attorney, headed up the Tobacco Commission the day RCR muscled their way into a meeting to pull $2.9M out of the program during an urgent off-cycle request delivered by former Senator William Wampler Jr., one of RCR’s founding partners.
Other than that it should be noted that they have also received sizable campaign contributions from the RCR owners, and that the attorney for the Industrial Development Authority, Will Wampler III, is the son of an RCR partner, the aforementioned Senator Wampler Jr.
The part that might be hardest for me to believe is that, on top of all of this, they seem to be expecting a hero’s welcome for coming to the rescue.
“Mr Peabody’s coal train done hauled it away,” John Prine sang.
I had a hard time wrapping my head around this big bowl of conflict-of-interest soup so I tried to map it out. The first image represents the period when the initial deals were done to get the project moving. The second image is our general present-day situation. There may be a few details missing but these seem like the high points. If you want a detailed accounting of everything, go check out the documents and hard work happening on the No to Moss 3 Landfill Facebook page.
My trash train highlight reel:
- A few coal barons and at least one politician parachuted in to start up a new “mine reclamation” company called Russell County Reclamation (RCR).
- Using their direct or indirect influence over the people making the funding decisions, so far they have obtained almost $8 million dollars in public grant funds intended for economic diversification.
- The previous landowner, a subsidiary of Alpha Natural Resources, presumably decided the responsibility of cleaning up the mess was too much for them to bear, so they handed the property over to their buddies at RCR to get the job done, juiced up on taxpayer money. (If we have learned anything all these years, it’s that it’s expensive business for coal companies to put the land back to the way they found it, especially when you have CEOs to pay out after bankruptcy).
- RCR changed the reclamation plan from forest land to a park for industrial and recreational usage at which time their reclamation bond obligation decreased from $7M to $3M. On top of that, the new post-mine land use plan will save them significant reclamation costs since they no longer have to put the land back to original approximate contour and they can leave all of the rail line, power supply, and more on the site.
- RCR and/or its affiliates are continuing to extract and sell coal from this site while performing reclamation activities supported in part with public grant funds.
- Early on, RCR spun up a flurry of support from public officials based on selling a vision of the intended end use of this reclaimed land, which they said would be industrial and recreational land. The Industrial Development Authority committed to further develop this site following reclamation.
- RCR is now pivoting behind closed doors to convert it to a mega-landfill that will ship in thousands upon thousands of tons of waste from regions lying far beyond quiet little Russell County.
- Just two months ago, RCR secured another $1.2M in public funding to keep this train rolling on down the tracks.
- Russell County government officials, presumably representing the people of Russell County, continue to use highly conflicted attorneys who seem to be stonewalling any type of sincere public engagement and due diligence.
The people who got us into this mess simply can’t be the ones to get us out of it.
Smoke
These are business men. “Serial entrepreneurs” as Harvard Business Review or your fancy friend on LinkedIn might call them. As such, rest assured there is money to be made from importing trash during their coalfield victory lap.
“Highest and best use” of this land as they say in this show business.
Now, I am no economic development prodigy, but I just don’t see the county attracting any new companies to co-locate their advanced manufacturing operations or whiz-bang-widgets-R-us tech startups under a mountain of Hefty trash bags from New York City.
It is also hard to imagine families coming for long weekends from Lexington or Roanoke or Charlotte to lazily canoe down the Clinch and spend their cornbread money in St. Paul or Lebanon.
What I do see are these Clinch River communities, who are currently working hard to rebuild themselves from the ground up after being hammered by the decline of coal and poor leadership, being set back by powerful forces that remain out of their control — yet again.
Haven’t these communities, these families, these hills and creeks and critters, haven’t they all given enough to you gentlemen?
Can’t you just clean up the land, give it back to the County, and head on back across the mountain to chase your next business venture?
As for the Russell County government, it’s hard to imagine being able to rebuild any sliver of confidence among constituents without taking the very basic steps of operating transparently, sharing all documents and communications regarding this ordeal, and finding new attorneys who aren’t representing the people of Russell County under such embarrassingly obvious conflicts of interest.
Oh, the irony. The coal bosses have come back to make money using public dollars to clean up coal mines, only to then bring their empty coal trains home full of everyone else’s trash.
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We wrote this song some years ago, but I think it’s just now found the right home:
The views expressed in this piece are mine alone and do not reflect my employer, family, friends, or anyone else.
