Kentucky's Own Hell

Many people have heard about the infamous underground coal mine fire in Centralia, PA, which has been continuously raging since 1962 and necessitated the total evacuation of the city. It is currently considered unstoppable and is burning for miles under the surface. The Centralia underground fire has been the subject of numerous documentaries, news stories, and articles.

But how many know that a very similar subterranean catastrophe is taking place right here in Kentucky?

The Tiptop underground mine fire in Bulan, KY (Breathitt County), also known as the Lost Mountain fire or "the Ruth Mullins fire" for the lady who discovered it, is burning out of control just below the Earth's surface and has been for apparently many years.

But how did this happen? Details are sketchy. An article in Discover doesn't really delve into the fire's origins. According to Earth Magazine, "No one seems to know how long it’s been burning, how much coal it has consumed, how it started or the dangers associated with it."

A report of scientific analysis of the outgassing fumes from the Tiptop fire paints an ecologically troubling picture:

At the time of our visits, concentrations of CO2 peaked at 2.0% and > 6.0% (v/v) and CO at 600 ppm and > 700 ppm during field analysis in May 2008 and January 2009, respectively. For comparison, these concentrations exceed the U.S. Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) eight-hour safe exposure limits (0.5% CO2 and 50 ppm CO), although the site is not currently mined. Mercury, as Hg0, in excess of 500 and 2100 μg/m3, in May and January, respectively, in the field, also exceeded the OSHA eight-hour exposure limit (50 μg/m3). Carbonyl sulfide, dimethyl sulfide, carbon disulfide, and a suite of organic compounds were determined at two vents for the first sampling event. All gases are diluted by air as they exit and migrate away from a gas vent, but temperature inversions and other meteorological conditions could lead to unhealthy concentrations in the nearby towns.

There are at least nine sites with major openings in the ground where the Ruth Mullins fire is venting, extending over a huge area that occupies both Breathitt and Perry counties. Many researchers believe that underground coalmine fires such as this (there are many around the world, especially in China) could be a major culprit in man-made global warming.

On the other hand, such fires can also be a part of mother nature's plan. An enormous mountain in Australia, once thought to be a volcano, has turned out to be a naturally-occuring underground coal-seam fire that has been raging for over six millenia.

And if, as many Native Americans believe, coal has a mind of its own, then the coal spirit may be well pleased by its own blaze of glory.

Man Kills Wife Over Breakfast

According to MSNBC, a Breathitt County man facing eviction proceedings snapped last night, killing his wife, his stepdaughter, and three others who lived nearby in the same trailer park.

Neighbors say Stanley Neace stormed around the trailer park in his pajamas, firing dozens of shots from a 12-gauge shotgun, and then he went back into his own trailer and committed suicide.

Reportedly, what set Neace off was an argument with his wife over how she prepared his morning eggs not to his liking.

Death Row

Fayette County prosecutor Ray Larson keeps tabs on Kentucky's 37 "death row" inmates on his website. Read all about it here, but only if you're extremely strong of stomach; the rogue's gallery of Kentucky's condemned men and women includes such nutcases as:

Floyd County's Donald Johnson, a 22-yr-old who killed a 61-year-old woman in a laundromat and mutilated her private parts with a ball-point pen.

Knox County's John Mills, who clubbed his 79-year-old landlord over the head and stabbed him 29 times, in order to rob him of $4.60.

Jefferson County's Melvin Lee Parrish, who stabbed a pregnant woman and her eight-year-old son to death.

Breathitt County's Karu White, who beat three senior citizens to death so brutally that their bodies were in pieces and had to be buried in bags.

Henry County's Parramore Lee Sanborn, who kidnapped, raped, sodomized, and murdered a mother of three. He ripped out all her hair and dumped her body on a rural road.

Berea College v. Kentucky

It never fails to weird me out just how different a world this was, not so long ago. The story of Berea College v. Kentucky is a reality-check we all need occasionally.

In July 1904, the state of Kentucky passed the mind-bogglingly unconstitutional "Day Law", which prohibited any person, any group of people, or any corporation from teaching black and white students in the same school. Further, it forbade a school running "separate but equal" black and white branches within 25 miles of each other.

The law was specifically cooked up to put a stop to Madison County's Berea College, which was the only racially integrated school in Kentucky. Berea College fought back hard, and took their case to the Kentucky Court of Appeals. They lost. The Court asserted that "the purity of racial blood" was "deeper and more important than the matter of choice".

Then Berea appealed it further, to the U.S. Supreme Court. And that's the really weird part... they lost.

The vast majority of the Supreme Court ruled against Berea College, with only John Marshall Harlan and William R. Day dissenting.

Thanks to this ruling, the door became wide open for all states to forbid integrated schooling in all public and even private institutions. It wasn't until 1950 that Kentucky amended the Day Law to allow integration. 19-freakin'-fifty. Unbelievable. And in 1954, Brown v. Board of Education put an end to Government-enforced racial segregation - at least officially, since many refused to accept it for years to come.

And that's precisely when the whole country turned upside down.


In 1957, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent black children from entering the Little Rock High School building. President Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne Division from Fort Campbell, Kentucky to Arkansas to force the National Guard to stand down, essentially creating a momentary literal civil war.

In 1963, Alabama Governor George Wallace stated in his inaugural address, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!" to great applause. He then personally went to the University of Alabama and stopped two black students from enrolling. (Wallace considered Happy Chandler, Governor of Kentucky, as his running mate in his 1968 Presidential campaign, but dropped him when it was realized Chandler had been an ardent supporter of Jackie Robinson.)

Subsequently, civil rights crusaders Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, John F. Kennedy, and Bobby Kennedy were all shot and killed. Wallace himself was also shot in 1972, though he survived confined to a wheelchair until 1998.

And to think the whole mess began because State Representative Carl Day of Breathitt County proposed the Day Law, which passed 73 to 5 in Kentucky's House of Representatives and 28 to 5 in Kentucky's Senate.


Photo above: George Wallace with NASA head James Webb and Operation Paperclip ex-Nazi Wernher Von Braun.

Moonshine

Moonshine, that other legendary Kentucky drink besides Bourbon, is a real Kentucky delicacy and not something that Al Capp just made up for “Li’l Abner.” I’m continually amazed at how many city-folk I encounter who thought moonshine was just a weird urban legend, or simply a colorful euphemism for whiskey.

Here’s how it’s made:

Assemble your ingredients: corn meal, sugar, water, yeast and malt. Freshly stone-ground corn meal is better than crap you find at the supermarket, and course raw cane sugars like turbinado are better than processed-to-death white sugar. For common folk-remedy “spring tonic” variants, you can add various herbs and roots such as ginseng and the psychoactive sassafras root. Some have even used wormwood or mugwort, making moonshine spring tonic truly the “Appalachian Absinthe.”

Combine the ingredients in a large container until thoroughly mixed. This is what is known as your “mash.”

Place the mash into a “Still” (home distillery) and turn on the heat to 175 degrees. The idea is to heat the mash to the vaporization point, and collect the steam vapors rising from it in the still’s copper tubing. This condensation then collects in a separate container, and this, my friend, is moonshine; the mystic elixir that Snuffy Smith called “corn squeezin’s,” the medicinal balm that Pogo Possum called “Aunt Granny’s Bitter Brittle Root,” the holy grail that Grandpa Jones called “Mountain Dew.” The soda pop of the same name, by the way, used to depict cartoon hillbillies on its bottles before the days of political correctness.

(The recipe I provided here is just for your information, mind you. Strictly for sake of argument. Just making conversation. Don’t actually do it. And if you do, research it online first and make sure you know how to build and operate a still. But don’t do that either.)


Poorly produced moonshine can not only be horrible to drink, it can also be toxic. A common practice back in the day was to pillage auto parts for assembling a still, such as the radiators and coils. Needless to say, this was unsafe and led to moonshine that contained traces of lead poisoning. This hazard obviously doesn’t apply to the majority of moonshine being produced, of course, but that didn’t stop the Government “Revenooer men” from exaggerating the risks in their anti-shine literature of the 40s and 50s. Even today, I found a current scare-site on the web that warns “About 80 percent of all adult lead poisoning deaths are related to moonshine consumption”. Personally, I find this claim to be ludicrous, since there’s obviously far more people exposed to lead paint and lead pipes still in public use out there in the world than there are moonshine drinkers.

The confusion with whiskey comes from the fact that Kentucky Bourbon is at least 51 percent corn-based rather than rye-based, and literary references to "corn liquor" might mean either Bourbon or Moonshine. Whiskey and bourbon have a different fermentation process, must be aged in special oak casks, and usually contain a blend of grains.

The most famous portrayal of moonshine in film was probably the 1958 film Thunder Road, in which the great Robert Mitchum played a bootlegger from Harlan County, Kentucky who drove a supercharged Ford with a secret compartment tank for transporting moonshine into Tennessee. The iconoclastic film, presenting Kentuckians flouting laws and eluding cops in high-speed car chases, was the grandfather of all Smokey and the Bandit -type films that followed. For better or for worse.

(top photo: confiscated moonshine stills in Breathitt County.)