Rising Level of Intimidation Against Anti-Mountaintop Removal Leaders

On April 3, Larry Gibson met a Washington Post reporter in Charleston to take him up to Kayford Mountain. Larry had recently strapped a big "Stop Mountaintop Removal" sign on the back of his well-bumper-stickered pickup truck. He predicted that there would be problems because of the sign.

By the time they got to Marmet, 4 miles from where they started, chatter about Larry and his sign start coming in over the truck’s CB radio.

"Who is that driving that truck?" "Where do they think they will get their electricity?"

Larry was intentionally driving the coal-hauling route through Marmet, so the reporter could see what the communities along the route look like and what they go through with all the coal truck traffic and the coal dust on the homes. It was coal truck drivers’ voices coming in over the radio.

The CB chatter became insults, and then escalated into deliberate planning to try to run Larry and the reporter off the road.

Once the pair was on the dusty dirt road at the base of the Kayford Mountain, a trucker yelled "Dust them! Dust them!" as he zoomed by them at almost 40 mph (on a road posted 18 mph). Larry was pointing out the bright orange, contaminated water flowing alongside the road.

"They are more scared of me than I am of them. They will react without thinking, which makes it even more dangerous," Larry told the reporter.

On the way up the mountain, Larry had to weave from side to side as they listened to the truckers’ plans to block the road ahead of them.

"I don’t have anything against the people who are angry at me and cussing at me. The industry has instilled fear in them, and that’s who their anger should be directed to, not me," Larry would later say.

"The reporter wasn’t used to seeing the kind of struggle that we have to go through in order to survive. The people who live out in the hollows, and the creeks and the mountains are in a struggle just to survive," said Larry.

Unfortunately, this was not the only recent act of intimidation. People active with OVEC and Coal River Mountain Watch and other groups are noting an increase in threatening behavior from people who support mountaintop removal coal mining.

A few days after the Washington Post reporter witnessed the threats, when a group of first to sixth grade students from a homestead school in New York (see story page 14) came to visit Kayford Mountain, the intimidation continued.

"When there are a few cars with me, I have come to expect that they will talk about it on the CB. But this time there were eight or nine cars following me up the mountain. The homestead school had come to West Virginia to study issues around coal. They have started a renewable energy and environmental justice program at their school in New York. They had never seen anything like this," Larry said.

One trucker tried to pull his trailer across the road to block the oncoming cars. The coal truck barely missed a couple of the cars.  

The following day Larry attended the Department of Highways Weight and Safety Enforcement Advisory Committee meeting with one of the homestead school parents to tell the committee what they had seen. They talked about the danger that the truckers put her and the school children through.

"We didn’t do anything," she said. The truck driver had hurled insults and rude gestures at them as she drove past the truck with four school children in the car.

"We’ve got to find a way to scale down these threats. Until we can bring those who are being driven by fear to intimidate people and those who are fighting these injustices together, we will not be able to win. We are smarter than this … citizens fighting against citizens. We are being used against each other. We need to start talking collectively about these issues," Larry said.