One Year After Settlement

(This will likely be my last blog entry about the mountains. Thanks for following. love )

It's been a year since the water suit settled.  I didn't really write about it at the time because there was a lot to process and it was important to be mindful of potential effects on the case.

While the outcome was a success, settling a case doesn't really mean justice was served.  It means the company admits no fault but agrees to pay the plaintiff anyway.  It also means that both parties compromise on what they believe to be a reasonable settlement amount with the goal of both of them feeling like they had to give up more than they wanted to.  

My dream ending to the case would have included a ruling that forced the company to admit their negligence and set a legal precedent towards people never be poisoned by coal slurry again in addition to forcing them to take a bigger financial hit for the crime inflicted on these communities.

Although, there is a big part of me that was hoping for a more dramatic win I still have to count this a good start on the road to protecting families and communities.  For every case that goes to court, there are a whole lot more folks whose coal horror stories never make it into a courtroom.  

The bravery of the communities of Merrimac, Lick Creek and Rawl, who were poisoned and took on Massey coal with a small legal staff, stands in and of itself as a victory.  Also, the stamina of the clients and the staff serving the case is a testimony to human perseverance. The whole thing took 7 years to get to the moment where a settlement was reached and another year of processing before folks would even see any compensation for their case.  

There where many other victories along the way, starting with wining the legal battle which got folks off of their contaminated well water and onto municipal water.  The first judge banned the injection of slurry in Mingo County, and this case likely influenced a moratorium on slurry injection in the state. 

Additionally, medical monitoring was awarded, which provides screening for the illnesses folks are at a higher risk for due to their exposure to the contaminated water.   This program will serve epidemiological purposes, finding trends in the health of the community, which will give great insight into the effects of the toxic slop of chemicals and heavy metals on the human body.  No such research exists yet, and we have yet to discover just how many other communities have been subjected to similar circumstances.

On a different note, coming out on the other side of working with a legal staff doing the hard work of taking on environmental cases in coal country, I have to say while good still stands strong, I understand evil with a new sense of grandeur and complexity.  It may be no secret to you but it was news to me that actual willfully evil people exist.  They do bad things, they understand their impact and they don't care as long as they come out on the upswing.  Then there are the insurance companies and defense lawyers that hide behind their jobs and working for the "good" of their clients in service to horrors and atrocities.  It really was like the movies where the bad guys are actually, well bad, rather than misguided or misunderstood.  

A friend of mine thought it was hilarious it has taken me this long to figure out that this side of humanity is real and not a movie portrayal.  So I'm still adjusting to the understanding that the better side of something doesn't always exist and there isn't necessarily any reward for attempting to understand people who deliberately harm other people.  I guess in this case the only better side to bad people is that good people are just as real, way more wonderful and continue to stand for what is right.

In other news, lawyers serving the people need more financial support.  They do not have coal money to line their pockets with and the people they serve are often economically poor.  Big companies can kill cases simply by holding them up for so long in court that the lawyers working the cases go bankrupt.  While this is a dramatic statement it's actually reality, like the fact that bad people exist.

If you’d like to help protect communities in West Virginia please consider donating to The Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (OVEC) http://ohvec.org/join/index.html#donate, Keeper of the Mountains http://mountainkeeper.blogspot.com/p/donate.html and/or Appalshop https://npo1.networkforgood.org/Donate/Donate.aspx?npoSubscriptionId=10058.  I am recommending these organizations because I know people who work there or people who have worked with them recommended them to me.  Basically I know they are doing good work.