Coal Mines

A RIVER is dammed to form a reservoir, and downstream beaches and marshes shrivel as the dam blockades their supplies of silt.Wastes removed from industrial discharges to clean a waterway are buried, polluting underground water supplies.The history of our modern environmental crisis is rife with unintended consequences of projects and replete with examples simply moving pollution around instead of eliminating it.So it is welcome to see even a small first step that runs counter to both these trends, such as the collaboration between Maryland's Department of Natural Resources and Western Maryland coal companies on a ridge in Garrett County.

The old farmhouse stood along a winding, dirt, back road. It was the last house before the road disappeared into the heavy Wisconsin forest.The farm might have been deserted. Stacks of wood, boards, logs, railroad ties and tools were old and appeared unused.But a light was in the window, and on a fence post was nailed a hand-lettered cardboard sign offering "fresh honey."The only animals in the yard were a friendly dog that trotted to the car and a cat that sat atop a pile of lumber and stared.

LONDON -- Facing mass public protests and a mutiny among members of his Conservative Party in Parliament, Prime Minister John Major reversed ground Monday and sharply reduced the number of coal mines and miners' jobs scheduled for elimination by the government.Less than a week after state-owned British Coal said it was closing 31 of 50 mines and laying off 30,000 workers -- more than three-quarters of Britain's remaining miners -- Michael Heseltine, secretary for trade and industry, told a jeering, raucous session of the House of Commons that the government now intended to close just 10 mines, at a cost of about 7,500 jobs.

/TC MOSCOW -- In a landmark step toward dismantling central control of the Soviet economy, the Kremlin freed Russian coal mines yesterday from the ministerial bureaucracy, granting them unprecedented economic independence under Boris N. Yeltsin's Russian Federation.But despite that major concession, forced by striking miners, President Mikhail S. Gorbachev last night seemed to drop his brief cease-fire with the republics.He accused Mr. Yeltsin of "cheap politics," dismissed Armenia's charge that a bloody Soviet military operation has been launched against it and declared defiantly that the Soviet Union will survive as a "great power."

MOSCOW -- Russian leader Boris N. Yeltsin hailed strikin coal miners last night for stopping the Soviet leadership's slide to the right and warned Mikhail S. Gorbachev that the recent political peace treaty between himself and the Soviet president is Mr. Gorbachev's "last chance."In a televised interview following his trip last week to the militant Kuzbass coal basin in Western Siberia, Mr. Yeltsin sought to cement his political alliance with the burgeoning workers' movement and fend off allegations that he had conceded too much to Mr. Gorbachev.

MOSCOW -- Shunning an invitation to stand beside President Mikhail S. Gorbachev on Red Square, Russian leader Boris N. Yeltsin marked yesterday's traditional labor holiday with the striking Siberian coal miners who have reshaped Soviet politics by rediscovering workers' power.Before a crowd of miners in Novokuznetsk, Mr. Yeltsin signed an agreement to accept the transfer of Russian coal mines from the heavy-handed jurisdiction of the Soviet ministerial bureaucracy to new financial independence under the Russian Federation.

Washington--The first great scandal of the new political season is upon us, and the guilty candidate may never recover.I refer not to a congressional investigator's report that Republican Dick Thornburgh, now running for the Senate in Pennsylvania, refused for years as attorney general to follow up leads about the BCCI mess.That multinational banking outrage is trivial beside what Democrat Jerry Brown did within minutes of starting his third try for president. He has committed the sin that drove another Democrat out of contention in 1988 -- a sin so dreadful it is denounced from the pulpits of the land: plagiarism.

MOSCOW -- It is Anatoly V. Malykhin's ninth day on a diet of mineral water and cigarettes. His square-jawed face looks like the kind they used to put on propaganda posters about the heroic working class of the world's first socialist country.Normally, he works as a tunneler deep in the Yesaul Coal Mine in Novokuznetsk, 2,000 miles and four time zones to the east.Now, he sits nervously in a two-room suite seven floors up in the Hotel Rossiya, next to the Kremlin. He is a key leader of the strike that has closed one-fourth of the Soviet Union's coal mines and brought dozens of coal-dependent factories to the brink of shutdown.

MOSCOW -- In a landmark step toward dismantling central control of the Soviet economy, the Kremlin freed Russian coal mines yesterday from the ministerial bureaucracy, granting them unprecedented economic independence under Boris N. Yeltsin's Russian Federation.But despite that major concession, forced by striking miners, President Mikhail S. Gorbachev last night seemed to drop his brief cease-fire with the republics.He accused Mr. Yeltsin of "cheap politics," dismissed Armenia's charge that a bloody Soviet military operation has been launched against it and declared defiantly that the Soviet Union will survive as a "great power."

LOGAN COUNTY, W.Va.-- In the dark of the pit, his helmet lamp spears the black and catches the sparkle of swirling rock dust in the air. Sooner or later, Danny Kegley figures, that dust may kill him.The mine timbers beside him could bring death much faster. They snap and crackle with the weight of millions of tons of rock.Either way, it's a gruesome end. Mr. Kegley shrugs. Some unseen tug takes him back down into the coal mines every day."I don't know what it is. It's in the blood, I guess," he said.

FROSTBURG -The state fined Constellation Energy $1 million for contaminating wells in Gambrills by dumping millions of tons of ash from its power plants in old gravel mines there. But with the state's blessing, another energy company is dumping hundreds of thousands of tons of ash into active mine pits in Western Maryland. Eighteen-wheel trucks routinely deposit steaming loads of ash from the Warrior Run power plant at a hillside coal mine overlooking the hamlet of Carlos just south of here.

BARTON -- The search for two miners buried in the collapse of a wall of rock into an open coal pit was slowed yesterday by fears that the cliff could crumble again. Rescue workers removed more than half of the huge pile of dirt and rock that fell Tuesday morning, trapping two miners who had been working at the Tri-Star coal mine, which straddles the Garrett-Allegany County line. The miners, whose names were not released, were operating heavy equipment, a bulldozer and a large backhoe, said Bob Cornett, acting district manager for the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration.

Across the country, coal mines have been asked by federal officials to "Stand Down for Safety" today - to take time off to go over safety procedures. The unusual national focus on improving mine safety follows, of course, the deaths of 16 West Virginia miners just this year. And it mirrors a time-out for safety Thursday in that state. But a day of emphasis on safety cannot make up for years of lax mine safety regulation and enforcement by the Bush administration, as detailed in a report released last Tuesday by the Democratic staff of the House Committee on Education and Workforce.

QITAIHE, China - The sign near the small coal mine where Liu Quanju's husband and son died makes clear in bold red characters that, at least in words, the government supports mine safety: "Managing methane is a great responsibility. Fulfill your duty at work and inspect conscientiously." Such signs urging safety in coal mines are as ubiquitous as the proclamations by political leaders on the subject. But in a state where propaganda often runs counter to reality, all the posters and proclamations serve merely to underscore just how unsafe China's coal mines are. Many mine operators and their government patrons are reaping financial windfalls from the nation's energy-hungry economic boom, by producing as much coal as possible as cheaply as possible - a credo that is not recorded on propaganda signs.

What does country music star Loretta Lynn's Grammy-nominated album have to do with the Baltimore Sun? The clue is its title, Van Lear Rose. The "rose" refers to Lynn's late mother, Clara Marie Butcher Webb. Van Lear was the place, along Miller Creek in Eastern Kentucky's Johnson County, where Lynn's father, Melvin "Ted" Webb, worked in the coal mines for many years. Here's where the Sun connection comes in. Van Lear, founded in 1909, was named for Van-Lear Black (1875-1930), a Sun publisher and chairman of the A.S. Abell Co., then the owner of the Sunpapers.

GRUNDY, Va. -- The yellow ribbons begin 5 miles outside of town. Pinned to telephone poles, traffic signs, storefronts and fast-food restaurants, they lead down a winding mountain road to the stately red-brick buildings of the Appalachian School of Law. Two more ribbons, their bows as big as basketballs, flutter on the rustic arbor outside the student lounge, silent reminders of one of the strangest campus crimes of recent years. On Jan. 16, a gunman entered the fledgling law school and shot six people, police say, among them the school's academic leader, Dean L. Anthony Sutin, a former senior Justice Department official who had turned his back on Washington to teach the sons and daughters of coal miners.

A RIVER is dammed to form a reservoir, and downstream beaches and marshes shrivel as the dam blockades their supplies of silt.Wastes removed from industrial discharges to clean a waterway are buried, polluting underground water supplies.The history of our modern environmental crisis is rife with unintended consequences of projects and replete with examples simply moving pollution around instead of eliminating it.So it is welcome to see even a small first step that runs counter to both these trends, such as the collaboration between Maryland's Department of Natural Resources and Western Maryland coal companies on a ridge in Garrett County.

The old farmhouse stood along a winding, dirt, back road. It was the last house before the road disappeared into the heavy Wisconsin forest.The farm might have been deserted. Stacks of wood, boards, logs, railroad ties and tools were old and appeared unused.But a light was in the window, and on a fence post was nailed a hand-lettered cardboard sign offering "fresh honey."The only animals in the yard were a friendly dog that trotted to the car and a cat that sat atop a pile of lumber and stared.

LONDON -- Facing mass public protests and a mutiny among members of his Conservative Party in Parliament, Prime Minister John Major reversed ground Monday and sharply reduced the number of coal mines and miners' jobs scheduled for elimination by the government.Less than a week after state-owned British Coal said it was closing 31 of 50 mines and laying off 30,000 workers -- more than three-quarters of Britain's remaining miners -- Michael Heseltine, secretary for trade and industry, told a jeering, raucous session of the House of Commons that the government now intended to close just 10 mines, at a cost of about 7,500 jobs.

Washington--The first great scandal of the new political season is upon us, and the guilty candidate may never recover.I refer not to a congressional investigator's report that Republican Dick Thornburgh, now running for the Senate in Pennsylvania, refused for years as attorney general to follow up leads about the BCCI mess.That multinational banking outrage is trivial beside what Democrat Jerry Brown did within minutes of starting his third try for president. He has committed the sin that drove another Democrat out of contention in 1988 -- a sin so dreadful it is denounced from the pulpits of the land: plagiarism.