Q&A with Kris Maher, Author of “Desperate: An Epic Battle for Clean Water and Justice in Appalachia”
This week, Read Appalachia talks with Kris Maher, the author of Desperate: An Epic Battle for Clean Water and Justice in Appalachia, which is out now from Scribner books. Maher reports on the seven-year long struggle to hold Massey Energy accountable for poisoning the water in Mingo County, West Virginia. Maher’s reporting is incredibly detailed, but the book reads like a thriller. While we meet a lot of people in this book, we primarily follow environmental lawyer Kevin Thompson, who heads up the case against Massey. Garrett Robinson, Read Appalachia’s Editorial Intern, also worked with me in crafting the questions—nothing like bookish teamwork! - Kendra
Scribner, 2021
Kendra Winchester: The book begins when you introduce readers to Kevin Thompson, the lawyer who decides to take on what ends up being a seven-year-long case against Massey Energy. When did you first decide to cover the case? And when did you realize that you were writing a book, not just a shorter news story?
Kris Maher: I first met Kevin Thompson in May, 2010, about a month after Massey’s Upper Big Branch Mine explosion in Montcoal, West Virginia, in which 29 miners were killed. I had driven down to Marsh Fork Elementary School near the mine to report on the accident for several days. I was back in Pittsburgh when a source told me about Thompson’s lawsuit and I drove down to Williamson in Mingo County to learn more about it.
I have a very clear memory of that first meeting. Thompson was sitting at his desk in an office he had made out of three connected rooms on the fourth floor of the hotel. A plaque outside the room called it the “John DeLorean Suite.” Inside there were posters and mine maps on the wood-paneled walls, bluegrass music was playing and Thompson was wearing cargo pants a t-shirt. He leaned back in his chair and started telling me the highlights of the case, all of which eventually made it into the book.
When Thompson talked about how his clients had been living with bad water for years and that he was working out of this office while Blankenship sometimes stayed at a four-story house on a mountaintop overlooking Williamson, I could see how the story brought together a number of powerful themes: coal mining and its effects on communities; the environmental problems people had struggled with for years; and finally this unique place where hundreds of people were being represented by a lawyer in an old hotel against a company whose CEO often lived in a mansion looking down on it all. Like Thompson, I didn’t know at the time how I would get drawn into the complexities of the story, and I didn’t know that it would take me years of reporting and writing to tell it.
Garrett Robinson: You very smoothly incorporated a lot of very specific details into this book. What was the process of sourcing and sorting your information like? Did you rely on interviews, or on existing records, or a mix of both?
Maher: Thanks for saying that the details were incorporated smoothly into the book. I think that is mainly the result of rewriting and condensing all of the material that I had gathered. Early on, I developed a chronology of key events in the lawsuit, and then I kept revising that as I came across new information. I spent hours one day with Thompson going over a huge spreadsheet of his thousands of billable hours on the case, and he told me what he thought were important events. I had another similar document from one of his partners. Beyond that I had the transcripts of the court hearings in the case, depositions, reports from regulators and engineering consultants from the 1980s through the early 2000s, reports by experts hired for the case, and news articles and other documents going back to the 1880s.
Each interview I conducted with someone involved in the lawsuit also had its own chronology. Everything had to be fit together. My basement, which has all these documents I gathered, is not a pretty sight!
I interviewed many people for the book, including some who are only named in the book and some who don’t appear at all. For the chapters that go back in time to the Hatfield McCoy feud and the Matewan Massacre and Mine Wars, I spent some days in the West Virginia Division of Culture and History at the capitol, looking up records from those eras. Some of this research was probably more open-ended than it needed to be. I read court transcripts from the trial of Ellison Mounts in 1889 after he was charged with killing a McCoy, and transcripts of the jury selection in the trial of Sid Hatfield in 1921. I discovered that a juror who helped acquit Sid Hatfield of charges that he murdered Baldwin Felts detectives in the Matewan Massacre the prior year was related to someone who worked with Don Blankenship in the 1980s during the violent strike at Rawl Sales a few miles from Matewan. This was just one small example of the many connections to the past that I found.
I prefer to interview people in person whenever possible. I flew to Richmond, Virginia, to interview E. Morgan Massey in his office, where he gave me a copy of the Massey Doctrine that I described in the book. I went to New Orleans to interview Thompson’s partner Stuart Smith in his home in the French Quarter and Thompson’s wife at their house. I made a trip to Point Pleasant to see Thompson’s childhood house and neighborhood, and I visited the Mothman Museum to get a better understanding of the monster that had terrorized Thompson’s hometown.
Robinson: How did you go about familiarizing yourself with the science of water quality?
Maher: I read what the experts in the case had to say about the water quality in reports and depositions and court hearing transcripts. I interviewed the experts that Thompson hired several times. I also contacted the experts that Massey had hired to see if they would talk to me. They wouldn’t. There were also several helpful reports by state regulators who had studied the water. I spoke to one who is quoted in the book and another who provided background but isn’t quoted. I reached out to a scientist in the federal government who had studied the water, but he wasn’t responsive after numerous attempts to secure an interview. Perhaps the most helpful person was Ben Stout, a stream ecologist who knew more about coal slurry impoundments and slurry than anyone else I had found. I interviewed him in his classroom and office at Wheeling Jesuit. Stout was in an interesting position, because he never wanted to work for either side in the case. He wanted to maintain his impartiality and conduct his own research on the water quality in the area and provide it to whoever was interested. In the end, his work proved to be extremely helpful to Thompson, because Stout determined that the water was unsafe for people to drink and he believed that coal slurry was the likely source of the contamination.
Winchester: Did you find any similarities between Mingo County and the Flint water crisis?
The two situations are interesting to contrast. On the surface, there are important differences. Flint is a city, of course, while the four communities in Mingo County are in a rural corner of West Virginia.
But I think the water problems in both cases can be related to the legacy of industrial activity, as well as the low-income status of the communities. In Flint, the drinking water problems were discovered years after auto manufacturing there declined, which had hurt the local economy and left the city with a water infrastructure that was hard to maintain. In Mingo County, the water problems were discovered after the mountains in the area had already been mined out. If the areas had been wealthier, their water infrastructure problems might have been addressed more quickly. In Flint, the cost-cutting that resulted in lead leaching into people’s drinking water might not have occurred in the first place. In Mingo County, a municipal water line could have been built to Williamson much sooner – preventing people from living for years with contaminated water coming from their taps.
In both cases, outside experts (in Flint, it was Marc Edwards of Virginia Tech, and in Mingo County, it was Ben Stout) played key roles in identifying that problems even existed, after environmental regulators had downplayed the issue. So that’s another parallel.
Winchester: This story is written for a wider audience, not just folks from Central Appalachia. How did you go about helping people from outside the region better understand Mingo County’s history and its people?
Maher: That’s a great question. I was drawn to the history of this part of Mingo County along the Tug Fork between Williamson and Matewan and wanted to convey it in a way that didn’t repeat stereotypes or aspects of the feud legend that didn’t have a clear basis in the historical record and might have been sensationalized repeatedly to fit the purposes of whoever was telling the story.
I read as many accounts as I could about events like the Election Day fight in 1882 between the three McCoys and Ellison Hatfield and its aftermath, and about the Matewan Massacre in 1920. Two perspectives I relied on heavily were Altina Waller’s in “Feud: Hatfields, McCoys and Social Change, 1860-1900,” and Rebecca Bailey’s in “Matewan Before the Massacre: Politics, Coal and the Roots of Conflict in a West Virginia Mining Community.” Both works place the violence and corruption of the area in the context of social and economic change before and after the arrival of the coal industry. I spoke to both Waller and Bailey about their work to make sure I was understanding it and to ask my own questions.
Just as important to me were the perspectives of people who live in the four communities that sued Massey over their drinking water. They had their own thoughts about the area’s history as it had been handed down to them through family members. The important thing to me was to convey that this wasn’t just a story about a water contamination lawsuit, and Blankenship wasn’t the person you might have thought he was from reading national press coverage of him. You have to have some appreciation of the past to understand the players in the present day drama.
To me, one of the beautiful things about this story is that there are so many connections to the past that vibrate in the present. Don Blankenship’s mother was a McCoy, and he grew up in an area that appears to have been part of Devil Anse Hatfield’s land holdings. He later lived as an executive in a house built around 1914 for a U.S. Steel official. Blankenship had numerous people working under him named Hatfield and some clearly had ties with the Hatfield McCoy era. As I mentioned before, some of those people and some of Thompson’s clients had family who were around during the Mine Wars and living in tents in the 1920s because they had been evicted by coal operators. Some of Thompson’s clients had been involved in the 1985 strike at Rawl Sales that approached the 1920s Mine Wars in its violence.
Sometimes the story seemed to me to have some of the narrative dynamics of a Western. Thompson rides into Williamson to help the people. Instead of a gunslinger, he’s a lawyer, of course. But then it turns out he isn’t a perfect hero by any means, which makes the story far more interesting.
Winchester: Desperate is published with Scribner, an excellent publisher out of New York City. What was it like working with people who may not be familiar with the region or with the story you wanted to tell with this book? And what was the editing process like for you?
Maher: I was fortunate that the first editor I worked with on the book never asked me to simplify any aspect of the story. The second editor I worked with had already edited a book that took place in Mingo County and also never asked for any changes to how the region and people were portrayed.
I was very aware that the national media often portrays issues in Appalachia in a shorthand way that oversimplifies the reality on the ground. I think this is harder to avoid in newspaper articles where there often isn’t very much space to describe the background to a situation. Or perhaps reporters aren’t as informed as they should be and are too quick to follow in the tracks of other reporters. I think the only solution for this is immersing oneself in the area and talking to as many people as possible on all sides of an issue. I talked to environmentalists, former Massey executives. I spent a lot of time with Thompson, but I also was able to talk to Blankenship and spend time with him in Williamson, in his home in Sprigg, and in Pikeville.
I had a very clear intention that I didn’t want to try to portray this as a story about a good guy and a bad guy. I wanted to get to the point in my understanding of both Thompson and Blankenship where I could point to their life experiences, give some context to the decisions they made, and include the perspectives of people who knew them in ways that I couldn’t through my interviews and observations.
The editing process was very helpful to me, and I enjoyed collaborating with an editor. There was one painful time where I turned in a first draft that was far too long and my editor said I had to cut it in half before she would read it. But that was a necessary learning exercise in how to write a book. I had to condense the story so that it wouldn’t get bogged down in details that I found interesting but would otherwise slow the narrative.
Robinson: There are lots of themes in this book that are common to a lot of the conversation about environmentalism in Appalachia. Did you find yourself fitting information into those frameworks, or did it come as a surprise to you when those themes emerged?
Maher: I found that there was a lot of overlap between Thompson’s lawsuit and the environmental fights taking place during this time, especially in West Virginia involving Massey Energy. Thompson isn’t an environmental activist but he had allies who were. People who worked for the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition or Appalachian Voices were concerned about issues like coal slurry impoundment safety and mountaintop removal mining. Thompson and these groups, including Coal River Mountain Watch, had a common adversary in Massey Energy. The difference was that Thompson was suing the company on behalf of communities where people were alleging that their health (or property) had been harmed by the company’s practices. He obviously wasn’t engaged in protests or actions like tree sits that groups like RAMPS, Radical Action for Mountains’ and People’s Survival, were.
At the same time, Thompson was outraged when he saw people suffering and he believed that coal companies were to blame. He did support his clients lobbying for increased regulations of coal slurry storage in West Virginia. He wanted the evidence he discovered in the lawsuit to be used to improve safety across the state. He eventually had cases in Mingo, Logan and Raleigh counties against Massey. He also had cases involving coal dust and flooding exacerbated by surface mining.
Winchester: What was your favorite part of the book to write?
Maher: I enjoyed writing the very long epilogue to the book. One reason is that I found it easier to write those sections than to set up the background about the case in the beginning. Another reason is that so many threads came together and were resolved in those years after the primary action of the lawsuit. Blankenship goes to prison and then emerges and launches a short-lived political run. The U.S. attorney in Charleston brings indictments in Mingo County that even involve the judge who had presided over the water lawsuit – justifying Thompson’s paranoia about the risks that he and his staff faced in Williamson. Thompson and Blankenship have one more face-to-face meeting. And we get to revisit Rawl and the other communities to see how life is moving on, or not, several years after the lawsuit is resolved.
I also had fun writing the chapters that focus on Thompson and Blankenship and their early lives and careers before the lawsuit. There are some interesting parallels: they both went to Marshall University and didn’t know their real fathers and they had careers for a decade or so that took them around the country before they came to Mingo County. They are both extremely driven to the point where other aspects of their lives are dwarfed by their work. But Thompson is emotional and Blankenship is cerebral. Thompson is loose and even disorganized, while Blankenship is meticulous. Thompson is a hand’s-off manager, and Blankenship is a micromanager.
I also loved being able to write about the lives of the people who lived in Rawl, Lick Creek, Merrimac and Sprigg. The details they shared with me made me feel as though I could glimpse their lives and a world that is much different from the one I grew up in: Carmelita Brown describing to me the smell of the acetylene gas from the carbide in her grandfather’s mining lamp; Larry Brown describing his experience of being born again and building his church at the head of Rawl hollow and baptizing people in the Tug Fork; Frank Coleman describing growing up in Matewan and shipping off to Vietnam when he was far too young and coming back to work in the mines until he was disabled like so many other miners I spoke to. James Berlin Anderson telling me about riding back in the hills with his friends in high school, and nailing road signs to trees so they could find their way at night. Sometimes I wish I could have an entire book about each of the people I got to know.
Winchester: What are some other books about Appalachia that you would recommend?
Maher: I would recommend the books by Altina Waller and Rebecca Bailey that I mentioned earlier. A few other more recent books I’d recommend include The Road to Blair Mountain: Saving a Mine Wars Battlefield from King Coal by Charles B. Keeney, for an understanding of the way that opinions about coal and labor and environmental activism have been shaped in West Virginia in recent years. Death in Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight Against the Drug Companies that Delivered the Opioid Epidemic by Eric Eyre is a remarkable book about the opioid epidemic in West Virginia. It is also notable that much of Eric’s book takes place in Mingo County during the roughly the same time that Thompson’s lawsuit was taking place. As Thompson said to me, “It’s amazing that Eric’s book takes place in the same place and time as yours and has an entirely different set of villains.”
About the Author
Kris Maher has been a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal since 2005, writing about environmental issues, coal mining, labor, regional economics, and other topics. He has reported on the Flint water crisis, PFAS drinking water contamination, and Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch Mine disaster. He covered the trials of Jerry Sandusky, Bill Cosby, and Don Blankenship and has also written features for the Journal’s front-page “A-hed” column on topics ranging from extreme pogo athletes to the coldest town in the US. He lives in Pittsburgh with his son and daughter. Follow him on Twitter: @Kris_Maher
