Mountaintop Removal, Massey Energy, and 
Ohio State University President Gordon Gee

Mountaintop removal mining is the most devastating mining practice in the United States.  It causes irreparable damage to the environment and drinking water sources that stem from the Appalachian Mountains into the Ohio River.  Massey Energy Corporation mines more coal by strip mining, which includes mountaintop removal, in Central Appalachia than any other company, at approximately 16 million tons of coal produced from January to September 2008.

Gordon Gee, president of Ohio State University, serves on the Massey Energy board of directors. In a speech Gee delivered at the Brookings Institute on February 9, 2009, he spoke on the need to immediately involve universities in restructuring America’s energy supplies, advocating green energy initiatives to wean the U.S. off its dependence on fossil fuels, and create green collar jobs. He stated, “America’s utter dependence on fossil fuels weakens us in a critical way. As supplies dwindle and our environment suffers potentially irreversible damage, we cannot sit idly by.” Gee now has the perfect opportunity to demonstrate leadership on this initiative by resigning from the Massey Energy board.

What is Mountaintop Removal Mining?

Mountaintop removal mining is a just that, the removal of the tops of the Central Appalachian Mountains to mine coal. 

• First, the mountain needs to be void of all life. All animal life is either scared off by the miner’s activity, or killed during the mining. The coal company removes all trees, plants, and topsoil, and dumps it into surrounding valleys, burying streams and destroying habitats.


• Second, the company detonates millions of pounds of explosives to remove the top 500-800 feet of the mountain. The miners dump this debris, often called ‘overburden,’ in the valley as well. Huge drag lines and machinery remove the overburden and remove the seams of coal from the mountain. One named ‘Maid Marian,’ weighs nine million pounds, and has a 150 meter boom crane with a bucket large enough to hold four dump trucks worth of earthen materials.


• Next, the workers wash the coal. The waste water is called coal sludge, or slurry, and contains coal dust, clay and toxic chemicals such as arsenic, mercury, lead, copper, and chromium. The contaminated West Virginia streams and rivers empty into the Ohio River, from which millions of Ohioans get their drinking water. These slurry impoundments have burst, flooding communities, such as the Tennessee community that was devastated in December 2008 by a Tennessee Valley Authority impoundment.



• Coal companies say that once they are finished removing the coal, they reclaim the land. They spray exotic hydro seed onto the barren rock. There is no topsoil for the grass to take root in, and the seeds are washed away by rain. It is not possible to restore the mountain to its previous state because of instability in the mountain that is left from the dynamite and carnage.

When mountaintop removal mining began, it was expensive. Due to the safeguards of the 1972 Clean Water Act, coal companies had to move the overburden from the mining site to a dump site away from any water sources. However, in 2002, the Bush administration changed the definition of “fill material” in the Clean Water Act to include mining waste. This change made it legal to dump mining waste into waterways and saw a sharp increase in mountaintop removal mining. There was, however, a 100-foot buffer zone from any body of water that the mining companies had to maintain, which they did not. At the end of 2008, the Bush administration abolished this buffer zone rule, making the practice of dumping mining waste into waterways, completely legal. Now, there are no safeguards for the Appalachian mountains or communities.

Massey Energy Corporation

• Two miners in a van, which was parked in front of rock truck, were crushed to death when the driver of the truck failed to notice the van and drove over them. Investigators found that the strobe light on top of the van had been broken and the video cameras designed to allow the truck driver to see all around the truck were not operating. The strobe light had been broken for months, according to worker John Fox.


• On February 1, 2008, Paul Moss was killed when he drove his bulldozer into a natural gas line at Massey Energy’s Black Castle strip mine. Massey knew the gas line was there and told Moss to work anyway, without having marked the gas line.


• On November 20, 2004, Kevin Lupardous, a highwall excavator working for Endurance Mining, a Massey subsidiary, was crushed by falling rocks. When confronted by the Miners Safety and Health Administration about these violations, coal companies spoke out against new safeguards. Anthony Bumbico, corporate safety director for Arch Coal, wrote that it would cost $200,000 to buy and install cameras for all 84 trucks in Arch Coal’s fleet. By comparison, Massey CEO Don Blankenship was paid $9,929,125 in 2007.

Blankenship helped to raise $3.5 million in advertising funds that led to the defeat of a Supreme Court justice, according to a report by ABC News on April 7, 2008. Then, Justice Brent Benjamin, who won the race, refused to recuse himself when hearing a case involving Massey. Only when pictures surfaced of Blankenship with Chief Justice Elliott Maynard on vacation together in Europe while hearing a Massey case, did Justice Maynard to recuse himself from hearing a later appeal.

When ABC reporter Asa Eslocker approached Blankenship for comments on the report, Blankenship responded with “If you’re going to start taking pictures of me, you’re liable to get shot.”  The tape shows Eslocker identifying himself and his intentions twice as he approached Blankenship.  ABC reported that “. . . .Blankenship. . . .then approached the reporter and put out his left hand to grab the camera, twisting the view finder and breaking off the microphone in the process.”  Eslocker also said that Blankenship grabbed his shirt collar with both hands.      

Massey Energy and Gordon Gee, President, Ohio State University

In Governor Ted Strickland’s budget, he is seeking a “6 percent pay cut from unionized agency workings in the upcoming two-year budget.”  But he will not be asking Gee and his senior advisors “who rank among the state’s highest paid public employees,” to take a pay cut.

Gee has been a Massey director since November 30, 2000.  He is the Chairman of the Safety, Environmental and Public Policy Committee, and a member of the Audit, Executive, and Governance and Nominating Committees.

The Board of Directors for Massey must be available for meetings after elections, regular meetings, and special meetings.  According to the Massey bylaws, “Special meetings of the Board may be called at any time by the Chairman of the Board or the President or by any two directors, to be held at the principal office of the Corporation, or at such other place or places . . . . as the person or persons calling the meeting may designate.”

When Gee was the president of Vanderbilt, students, along with Mountain Justice Summer activists, protested Gee’s role on the Massey board.  When the students arrived at Gee’s office, they were met by a spokesman and a security officer.  He refused to speak with the students and ignored their letters asking him to denounce surface mining.

Gee’s place on the Massey board is not listed in his biography on the OSU website.  What is listed is that Gee has been an educator for decades.  Gee started his career in education as an associate professor and associate dean at Bringham Young University and eventually became a full professor. In 1979 he was the dean of the West Virginia University Law School and became the university’s president in 1981 until 1985. From 1985 to 1990 he was the president of the University of Colorado, the president of Ohio State University from 1990 to 1997, president at Brown University from 1998 to 2000, and Chancellor of Vanderbilt from 2000 to 2007. In 2007, he returned to Ohio State University. Clearly, education is Gee’s passion and expertise. 

He now finds himself in a unique position of being able to demonstrate his personal moral standards--resigning from the board of Massey Energy Corporation.