China's energy rush shatters village

WP
Updated: 2:13 a.m. ET June 1, 2007
DA ANTOU, China - Chen Xiao'e was home alone and fast asleep, she recalled, when the windows started to shatter for no apparent reason, like a scene out of a horror movie. "I was frightened out of my wits," Chen said.
That scary night was only the beginning. Pretty soon cracks appeared in the walls, some several inches wide. Then the floor buckled. Ultimately, Chen and her family had to move out and seek shelter elsewhere. Their three-year-old brick home became too dangerous to live in.
The house joined a growing list of buildings in Da Antou that have slumped to one side and split apart over the last several years because of what is happening beneath them. The mountain atop which the village was built has been so honeycombed with underground coal mining that the crust of the earth is giving way.
"The earth below us is hollow because of the coal mining," said Li Xiaozhi, the village paramedic, who has been forced to move his family out of three houses since 2003 and now stays in the local clinic. "Almost every house has cracks now. The only difference is how big they are."
Growling hunger for coalDa Antou, located in Shanxi province about 400 miles southwest of Beijing, has become another victim of China's energy rush. The country's booming economy, with growth of nearly 10 percent a year, has produced a growling hunger for coal, which fuels 70 percent of China's energy needs. To meet the demand, coal companies have become willing to go to almost any lengths -- and hamlets such as Da Antou are paying the price.
More than half the houses in Da Antou have developed cracks, and half the 400 residents have moved away.
Across Shanxi province, countless shafts have penetrated the hillsides where farmers live and plant their corn and wheat. The mines produce mountains of coal, and send truckload after truckload to market along roads covered in black dust. Government officials estimated that more than 7,700 square miles have been hollowed out by miners in Shanxi, leaving the earth riddled with empty caverns and causing the crust to sink in more than 1,800 places.
The underground work is dirty and dangerous, attracting migrant men from villages such as Da Antou and much farther afield. The government's Work Safety Administration reported that 4,746 miners were killed in Chinese coal mine accidents last year, an average of 13 a day. That tally marked a sharp improvement over 2005, when 5,986 were killed in coal shafts. But China's mines remain the world's deadliest.
Most of the explosions and floods that kill miners have occurred in small-scale operations, often run by unlicensed wildcat companies that bribe local officials to overlook safety violations. By cracking down on such mines and forcing them to close, officials said, they have reduced the number of miners killed and hope to push the toll lower still in the years ahead.
But the mining group that came to Kele Mountain in 2003, Sihe Coal, was a big, respectable outfit, with foreign technology and total output of 10 million tons a year across the country. Its arrival caused no consternation in Da Antou, farmers here said. They had long since grown used to seeing mines dug into the rugged Shanxi hillsides and loading machinery erected in the narrow ravines that become transport lanes for the coal truck convoys. Besides, they noted, the shafts entered the ground far below the terraced fields where people worked and the mountaintop brick and concrete homes where they lived.
Walls, water system destroyedFor a while, the farmers and the miners coexisted happily. But in late 2003, the cracks started to appear.
One by one, they left lizard tracks across the walls. Tiles tipped up on the floors. Vaulted ceilings rained bricks on the grain stored inside. Rooftops gaped open. At one home, an entire room fell in on itself. Farmers used tree trunks to prop up doorways and prevent them from collapsing.
Of the 200 houses that make up Da Antou, about half were cracked and more than a dozen had been declared unfit to live in by 2005, according to the village Communist Party secretary, Wang Xiaohui, and other residents.
"Now even the clinic is getting dangerous," said Li, the paramedic, as he pointed at cracks zigzagging down the wall.
The unsettled earth has destroyed not only walls but also the water system in Da Antou, forcing farmers and their wives to haul water from a communal pipe installed in the village square. Men and women gathered Monday afternoon with plastic buckets and, balancing two on either end of their yokelike shoulder poles, carried away what their family needed. Even the communal pipe, they complained, sometimes goes dry.
Chen Xiao'e, 41, said she waited alone on the roof until dawn after being awakened by the shattering windows that night when her home first began to sink. When light came, she sought out Wang, the party secretary, for advice on what to do. It was the mines under Kele Mountain, he told her; she should go to the mining company for compensation.
Since then, Wang said, the Sihe company has halted operations and given a total of $346,660 in three payments, in 2004, 2005 and 2006, to compensate the villagers for damage to their homes. So far, most expenditures have been rent subsidies for those forced to evacuate, he said. Small families get $40 a month, and large families, with four or more to house, get $95, he explained.
Relocation plansMore than $100,000 has been set aside to help villagers pay for new homes that are under construction in the nearly town of Runchen, Wang said. For most of them, their traditional life atop Kele Mountain has been written off, he said, and from now on they will have to commute to their fields. In any case, farmers here said, many of their terraced fields have been left unworkable because of sinkholes.
Despite the plans for relocation in Runchen, villagers complain that they are not getting properly compensated. What they want, they explained, is cash in hand for the value of the homes they can no longer live in.
"We want somebody to pay attention to this," said Wang Guozheng, 67, whose three-family home sits empty and forlorn with cracks yawning in almost every room.
Wang Xiaohui, the party secretary, said the villagers have vastly overestimated the value of their homes. The true market value was set by a team of experts sent out last year by the county government, he said, and by the time the villagers pay for new homes in Runchen, the compensation money by and large will have run out.
"Don't believe everything those villagers say," he advised.