Lucy Carrigan Freelance journalist Lucy Carrigan, from Clonacody, Fethard, reports from Rural America at Election Time . . . this is one such story, about a coalmining town in Eastern Kentucky.

If there is one thing that permeates the landscape here, both physical and psychological, it is coal. From the grey black scars gashed across the Appalachian Mountains to the coal trucks roaring down the highways to deliver their load to electrical power companies located mostly outside the state. Look further and you find other evidence of coal’s dominion: mass unemployment, a severely depressed economy, an environment always on the brink of yet another disaster, and the manipulation of the lives of the people who live here, at the hands of a power that is not their own.

Everybody here knows someone who has been directly affected by the coal industry. From a stepfather whose legs were crushed in a mining accident this summer, to the hundreds of miners who are still dying - as a result of shoddy health regulations in the past - from coal's favourite malady, "Black Lung Disease." On a local radio station, the DJ jokes about being invited down to eat caviar at a local restaurant . . . "black caviar," he drawls, "what else?" According to the Mine Safety and Health Administration, thirteen people have died in Kentucky mines this year.

In such a landscape, national politics are not at the forefront of people's minds. As one local puts it, "we're either going to have an idiot in the White House, or a man who can't speak to the common people . . . it’s bad, that’s all." But talk about local politics and people react differently. Most fall silent. Some prefer to argue about Gore and whether Lieberman is a "foreigner" or not; or abortion: an elderly man at the local Dairy Queen says that it would be like shooting someone in the head to kill an unborn child. Only one man speaks up. He doesn't care, he says. Print my name if you want to. He says it is all corrupt down here, nothing but back-handers and back room deals. While he talks his friends edge away and talk about something else. "Local politics," says Pat Gish, co-editor of the Mountain Eagle, the local newspaper, "are just one big bad mess."

Imagine. You are an employee in a small town in Eastern Kentucky. Your local County Court Judge/Executive wants to raise the minimum wage from $5.25 per hour to $7.50. When the Judge proposes the bill, he can't think of any reason why it won't pass unanimously. He believes that no judge in the county will vote against it.
At a town hall meeting to discuss the proposal, a woman stands up and begs the judge to drop the proposal. She says she is a single mother with two children working a minimum wage job, and her boss has told her that if the wage is increased he would shut up his business and move out of town. "I need my minimum wage job," she says, "So please don't raise it because you'd be putting me out of work."

 Daisy on slurry pond

The proposal fails

Carroll Smith is a republican. "Hardly a good Republican," Gish says, "he's very liberal." The other county magistrates are Democrats and according to Gish, "much more interested in getting a ton of gravel to somebody's driveway then they are in doing something for the overall good of the county." When asked why he decided to run for the job of County Court Judge/Executive, Carroll Smith grins and says that it was temporary insanity. "My oldest daughter was graduating from High School, and she asked me what she could major in in college that would allow her to come back home and get a job and live at home instead of having to move away, and I couldn't answer her question." Smith speaks with a long, slow, easy drawl and the lines around his eyes crinkle when he smiles. "The truth about it is I still can't answer her question. It's been almost seven years."

Coal is the main industry in this town, the majority of which, once extracted from the earth, leaves the county. So do the profits. The number of people employed in the industry has fallen significantly over the past fifteen years - from 3,000 people in the Whitesburg area in 1985 to 1,000 people this year - despite that fact that production levels have risen. And, because there is such a high level of unemployment - Carroll Smith estimates that between 40 and 50% of the local population is out of work - employers can hire and fire on whim.

Add to this the question of Unmined Mineral Tax. By law, the state is responsible for assessing the amount of tax a company pays for the minerals on their land. The majority of this tax goes back into the mining communities. In Kentucky, it is generally accepted that the state allows coal companies to carry out their own assessments, a practice that locals believe has allowed coal companies to grossly underestimate the amount of minerals in their soil and pay less tax.

Enter a grassroots organisation called Kentuckians for the Commonwealth (KFTC). In 1998, KFTC challenged the State Revenue Cabinet's assessment that in Letcher County there were $83 million worth of coal in the ground. Upon reassessment, the value rose to an astonishing $117 million worth. The companies protested and got the assessment down to $105 million. Joe Childers, General Council for KFTC still believes it is inaccurate. "Political power," he says, "has resulted in a lot of pressure to keep the assessment low."

And always, there is the pervasive and repetitive environmental degradation. On Wednesday, October 11th, just outside the small town of Inez (pronounced eye-nez) in Eastern Kentucky, a coal retention pond burst its banks sending 250 million gallons of coal slurry down into two creeks, one on either side of the valley. In the early hours of Wednesday morning, Glenn Cornette's wife got a call from the coal company warning her that there had been a "leakage," and that she should get anything in from outside that was in the way. Unfortunately, she couldn't quite manage to bring in the roses, the walnut trees, the children's swing, or any of the things that she and her husband had planted to make their small trailer home more home-like. By the time the sun was up, the small creek that runs outside their home was no longer small, and hardly a creek, more a vast glistening trench of black, thick, slimy sludge full of the chemicals used to clean coal.

The only mood to describe Glenn Cornette the following Saturday afternoon is one of resignation. He says the coal company is doing all they can, that they offered him a motel room, and the loan of a four wheel drive. Amid murmurings that the company broke regulations by mining too close to the retention pond or that they put slurry into an abandoned mine, he shows no anger. "It's a bad thing but there ain't nothing you can do about it after it's done," Glenn Cornette shrugs his shoulders.

Glenn Cornette's home