Desperate
An Epic Battle for Clean Water and Justice in Appalachia
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Set in Appalachian coal country, this “superb” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) legal drama follows one determined lawyer as he faces a coal industry giant in a seven-year battle over clean drinking water for a West Virginia community.
For two decades, the water in the taps and wells of Mingo County didn’t look, smell, or taste right. Could the water be the root of the health problems—from kidney stones to cancer—in this Appalachian community? Environmental lawyer Kevin Thompson certainly thought so.
For seven years, Thompson waged an epic legal battle against Massey Energy, West Virginia’s most powerful coal company, helmed by CEO Don Blankenship. While Massey’s lawyers worked out of a gray glass office tower in Charleston known as “the Death Star,” Thompson set up shop in a ramshackle hotel in the fading coal town of Williamson. Working with fellow lawyers and a crew of young activists, Thompson would eventually uncover the ruthless shortcuts that put the community’s drinking water at risk.
Retired coal miners, women whose families had lived in the area’s coal camps for generations, a respected preacher and his brother, all put their trust in Thompson when they had nowhere else to turn. Desperate is a masterful work of investigative reporting about greed and denial, “both a case study in exploitation of the little guy and a playbook for confronting it” (Kirkus Reviews). Maher crafts a revealing portrait of a town besieged by hardship and heartbreak, and an inspiring account of one tenacious environmental lawyer’s mission to expose the truth and demand justice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wall Street Journal reporter Maher debuts with a comprehensive account of the seven-year legal battle waged by residents of southern West Virginia against the state's largest coal company, Massey Energy. At the center of the story is attorney Kevin Thompson, who took on the case in 2004. Since the 1980s, the well water in Rawl, W.Va., and nearby communities had regularly run black, and townspeople had suffered "high incidences" of cancer, kidney failure, and Alzheimer's disease. Thompson set out to prove that a local coal preparation plant's impoundment—a reservoir created to store coal slurry—was not only leaking into the groundwater but that before it had been built, the plant had illegally injected hundreds of millions of gallons of slurry into abandoned mines. Maher documents Massey's long history of defying environmental and safety regulations, noting that from 1995 to 2006 company mines had nearly 2,000 injuries and 24 deaths. (In 2010, an explosion in Massey's Upper Big Branch mine killed 29 miners.) Though reading about the flurry of legal filings grows tedious at times, details of Thompson's financial and marriage troubles make his battle to secure a $35 million settlement for his clients seem all the more heroic. Readers will be appalled at how hard these communities had to fight for a modicum of justice.
