Like Erin Brockovich, the legal clerk who forced Pacific Gas and Electric Company to reckon with its role in contaminating a community’s water, and Rob Bilott, the lone lawyer willing to take on DuPont for dumping toxic chemicals in rural West Virginia, Cline was a scrappy outsider who confronted a behemoth.Ĭold-hearted coal barons are easy targets. The miners had a champion in John Cline, a carpenter and community activist turned lawyer late in life. And while company defense attorneys had limitless financial resources and time to appeal, the fragile plaintiffs might be investing the final months of their lives in the fight for justice. The weapons lawyers used when they worked for companies like Massey Coal were unconventional – X-ray readings, CT scans, unreported diagnoses. Photo: Earl Wilsonįocusing on West Virginia communities where mines offered some of the few well-paid jobs, Hamby describes the legal battles disease-stricken miners waged against their wealthy employers for modest monthly payments of $500 to $800. In Soul Full of Coal Dust, journalist Chris Hamby revisits the stories that won him a 2014 Pulitzer Prize, exposing the treacherous tactics hired hands for the coal industry used to deprive Appalachian miners of health benefits for black lung disease.
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