DESPERATE

One lawyer’s grinding, seven-year effort to extract justice for residents of an Appalachian mining region.

In 2004, a New Orleans lawyer named Kevin Thompson had scored some successes against polluting corporations when he took on the cases of the “Forgotten Communities” of southern West Virginia. Over decades, the residents’ water had been undrinkable and poisonous; they reported disproportionate cases of kidney stones, diarrhea, and cancer. The obvious culprit seemed to be Rawl Sales, a coal-processing company that had been dumping toxic slurry into abandoned mines that then leached into groundwater. The trick was to prove it—and to do it against the army of well-paid and patient lawyers pitted against Thompson. As Maher, a veteran Wall Street Journal reporter, makes clear, Thompson was battling not just a company, but an all-pervasive culture that treated mining as sacred. The region's godlike figure was Don Blankenship, head of Rawl Sales' parent company, Massey Energy. He prided himself on living next to his coal workers, but his own gated home, dubbed Crystal Acres, was served by a water line that didn’t branch out to other residents, and he was overly cozy with a state Supreme Court justice. Maher is fastidious with the facts and careful not to oversell Thompson-vs.-Blankenship as a simplistic David-and-Goliath tale. The economics of West Virginia are more complicated than that, and many of Thompson’s victories were Pyrrhic. Even though the text is dense with legal motions and depositions, the author maintains forward momentum and nicely balances case details with more intimate portraits of Thompson, who neared financial ruin over the seven years he pursued Massey; area residents; and Blankenship, who disgraced himself in 2010 when one of his mines exploded, killing 29 workers. It’s both a case study in exploitation of the little guy and a playbook for confronting it.

A rigorous accounting of a remarkably hard-fought battle for clean water.