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Tuesday, June 24, 2003

By Don Hopey, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Subsidence caused by longwall mining has given Don Stark a home where the water buffalo have roamed for more than a year and he is not happy about it.

Stark, who lives in Eighty Four, Washington County, told a crowd of 50 people gathered for a "Coalfield Justice Day" demonstration yesterday at the corner of Fort Couch Road and Route 19 in Upper St. Clair that Pennsylvania's mining law is pro-industry and has allowed the legal destruction of his home and its water supply.

The demonstration, on public property adjacent to the headquarters of Consol Energy, the state's biggest mining company, was part of a coordinated protest by 20 environmental groups in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Kentucky to call attention to what they say is the destruction of coalfield communities, streams, ground water, air quality and homes.

"The house I built fell four and a half feet and split into three pieces," said Stark, a 54-year-old math teacher. " We're still living there because we haven't had any settlement with the mining company."

Stark said "water buffaloes" -- big plastic water tanks refilled by trucks -- sit in his yard and the yards of 26 neighbors undermined by the recently closed Maple Creek Mine, owned by Murray Energy.

"We need water and there should be a time line for permanent replacement," he said. "We need improvements in the law so the mining companies can't string you along for years and years."

In a 50-yard stretch along the southbound lanes of Route 19, demonstrators set up more than 60 cardboard headstones listing the names of people whose homes and water have been damaged by mine subsidence in Washington, Greene and Fayette counties.

The demonstration was held on the grassy corner where Brandon Hudock, the 27-year-old son of a Washington County poinsettia farmer, has been staging a hunger strike since last Friday morning to highlight an ongoing dispute with Consol Energy over damages to the family business caused by mine subsidence.

"The coal company has been dragging this out for six years, since 1997 when the business was first undermined and I plan to continue this until we get a resolution," said Hudock.

Earlier this month, Hudock was fined $300 for parking a Hothouse Floral Co. van with a protest banner in Consol's headquarters parking lot. He said Consol's mining has done almost $2 million in damage to his family's business and drastically changed water flow on their 25-acre farm. Consol has offered to pay $450,000.

Tom Hoffman, a Consol spokesman, said the protesters are ignoring the economic benefits the region gets from mining.

"If they're putting tombstones up, they should put them up to represent the jobs of the miners and the people whose jobs depend on the mining industry," Hoffman said. "That's what's being threatened by the mining law changes they're supporting. Those changes are neither needed nor responsible."