The Bristol Herald Courier is reporting that Larry Bush, a leader with Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards, one of CCAN’s coalition partners on the fight against the controversial Wise County coal plant, has been receiving threatening phone calls from supporters of the plant.

CCAN would like to send its sympathy out to Larry and his family for being targeted with threats and intimidation by plant supporters. We hope that supporters of the plant will oppose the use of this kind of tactic and engage in democratic debate instead. Read the article after the jump.

Power Plant opponent’s family threatened by phone
By J. Todd Foster, Editor
Bristol Herald Courier

Larry Bush survived a combat tour in Vietnam and a dozen years mining coal underground. Then the Wise County, Va., resident and native spent 14 years as a federal mine inspector before an on-the-job injury forced his medical retirement.

Since then, Bush has spoken out against mountaintop removal and other extreme forms of surface mining. He’s also made himself a target – coal truck drivers, he said, routinely menace him on the highway.

Now, his enemies are taking aim at his family, and that’s where the 59-year-old Bush draws a bold line in the sand.

In late March, two men called the Bush home. The first left a profane message on his answering machine, and the second cursed – and worse – both his grown daughters, one the mother of his grandchildren.

Be forewarned: The messages were profane.

Thursday, 6:58 a.m. March 27: “Yes, I was going to see who your husband thinks he is, like Mr. Larry Bush telling our governor he needs to change his mind about the power plant. He also told the Board of Supervisors to resign. Is this f—ing man stupid or what?”

Two nights earlier, Bush had driven to Wytheville to attend a town hall forum hosted by Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine. Bush, quoted in this newspaper, publicly urged Kaine to stop supporting Dominion Virginia Power’s proposed $1.8 billion coal-fired power plant in Wise County.

Then came two other calls. On March 29, Bush was away when his oldest daughter, Lorri Stidham, 39, answered his telephone to a male stranger’s voice. It was a different caller.

“Hey you tree-planting bitches.”

“What?”

“Hey you tree-planting bitches.”

“Who is this?”

“If it was up your a–, you would know who it is. Where’s your old man?”
The caller repeated that last obscenity twice more before Stidham – an X-ray technician at Lonesome Pine Hospital and the mother of three children – hung up. But he called back 10 minutes later. This time, her sister, Missy Bush, 33, answered.

“I want to talk to your tree-huggin’ old man.”

“He’s not my old man; he happens to be my dad.

“Well, let me talk to your tree-huggin’, son-of-a-bitch daddy, sweetheart.”

“You are big and bad, aren’t you, calling here and won’t tell who you are. You’re some kind of a man.”

“I’ll show you big and bad. Where’s that tree-huggin’ son of a bitch?”

Just then, Larry Bush walked through the front door. Missy, a registered nurse at Lonesome Pine Hospital, handed him the phone, but the caller hung up.

Larry Bush retrieved the cell phone number from his caller ID and got the caller on the second try. They cursed each other. To this day, Bush doesn’t know who the man is.

The first caller, the one who left the message on the answering machine, never returned the family’s calls, although he did mine. More on that later.

Larry’s wife, Marlene, then called the Wise County Sheriff’s Office and reported the calls to a deputy. The deputy advised her to call Alltel and said if she got the callers’ identities, to file a report. Alltel said they’d only talk to law enforcement.

“I think everyone at the Wise County Courthouse supports the power plant, so nobody wants to do anything anyway,” Marlene Bush, 55, said of law enforcement indifference. “I support what Larry is doing, but I haven’t been as active as he’s been. But I’m not going to be bullied or intimidated, and my girls aren’t going to be.”

I called both cell phone numbers left on the Bush family’s caller ID. I left voicemail for both men. The first caller returned my query and identified himself as an A&G Coal Corp. strip miner who works near the Bush home. He defended his use of the f-word and his 6:58 morning call as fair comment on Bush’s position.

“If that’s the only curse word I said, I see no problem with it. We’re working our a—- off to feed our families, and this guy is trying to take our jobs away.”
I applauded his courage in returning my call.

The Bushes say if he has something to say, then say it to them and not to their answering machine.

“I don’t have anything against coal mining because my dad, my whole family were coal miners. Underground coal miners,” Marlene Bush said. “I’ve even been on picket lines for the UMWA [United Mine Workers of America]. I don’t have anything against the men who are working on the strip mines because they have to make a living. I have a problem with the owners and operators who are destroying our mountains with mountaintop removal.”

Larry Bush – an 11th-grade dropout who returned to school and, while working underground, got a two-year business degree from an area community college – said 25 percent of Wise County has been strip mined.

He’s filed with state regulators scores of complaints against A&G Coal for its mining practices. He’s gotten nose to nose with miners he says has harassed him. But his family, he said, is off limits.

Bush fears that one day, a coal truck will finally squeeze him – and the grandson he carries to school every day – off the narrow roads near his home.

He’s told state mining regulators that “if they ever hit me, they better kill me. Or they better know their God well.”

The fight over the Dominion plant, which still needs the approval of the state Air Pollution Control Board, has reached a fever pitch. Neighbors are pitted against neighbors. But Bush has a message for those on the other side of the debate:
“Leave my family out of it. They’re not out doing anything.”

J. Todd Foster is managing editor of the Bristol Herald Courier and can be reached at (276) 645-2513 or jfoster@bristolnews.com.

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