Word: pittston
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...TAKES A LOT of water to operate a coal tipple, and the one out on Buffalo Creek in Logan County, West Virginia was no exception. The tipple, owned by the Pittston Company through its Buffalo Mining subsidiary, used almost 500,000 gallons every day, two shifts a day and six days a week, pumping between 400 and 500 gallons of waste-filled water every minute. The waste was refuse from the coal mine, about 500 tons every day. Nobody knew what to do with...
Nobody could decide whose fault the disaster was. Republican Gov. Arch Moore, facing a tough campaign for re-election in November, disclaimed any fault of Pittston's. (Later, in the face of mounting public pressure, he would appoint an ad hoc committee to investigate the disaster; the committee turned up damaging evidence against the company.) Pittston said nothing, except that the disaster was an "act of God," although a Pittston lawyer told Ben Franklin of The New York Times that "in the long term, the responsibility rests with Pittston." But the people of Buffalo Creek, the survivors, knew where...
Before he could win his clients all that money he would have to overcome several barriers, not the least of which was the high-priced and high-powered legal talent of the Pittston Company's resources. Few people, attorneys or laymen, write lucidly about the intricacies of the law, but Stern's book is easily comprehensible, and even exciting. Stern writes with almost clinical detail of the two Pittston legal strategems he discredited. The first was the "act of God" theory. Stern proved that the disaster was the result of Pittston negligence, and when the company tried then to show...
What makes the $13.5 million judgement especially remarkable is that Stern won it mainly through pleading what he termed psychic impairment. At first the Pittston attorneys characterized this as mere "puff and blow," until witnesses' breakdowns during hearings convinced Judge K.K. Hall that this was not so. Teams led by prominent psychologists (including Harvard's Robert Coles) found anxiety symptoms in all survivors of the flood, even those who had made it to safety. They watched friends and relatives carried out of their arms, or pulled older folks out of the water with bodies smashed, to have them die from...
...support what has become an industry of corporate giants. Some 1,200 companies work small mines, but they account for only 40% of output. The other 60% comes from 15 companies, led by Peabody Coal of St. Louis and Consolidation Coal of Pittsburgh. Only three of the 15-Pittston (No. 5), North American (No. 10) and Westmoreland (No. 13)-are independent; the rest are subsidiaries of bigger companies. Six are controlled by oil companies; two are "captive" producers of metallurgical coal for U.S. Steel and Bethlehem...