Mystery surrounds crash which claimed Johnnie Lee “Pete” Bailey’s life

CARBO, Va. – Johnnie Lee “Pete” Bailey died in an overturned car in coal country, while driving through the pre-dawn chill of Jan. 30 to his job as a grocery store manager.

He hit a patch of ice in snowy weather, the Virginia State Police reported, and lost control on a two-lane bend between a rocky outcropping to his right and railroad tracks straddling mounds of coal dust to his left.

The seemingly clear-cut police report is not enough to answer questions posed by older brother Tim Bailey, however. To him, mystery surrounds the crash.

He wants to know why a slick ice patch blanketed the road. Would it have been there had the Virginia Department of Transportation road crews responsible for maintaining the area’s byways cleared the nearby drainage ditch before the crash, instead of hours afterward?

“Everybody, I know, when you lose someone, wants to say ‘why?’ ” Tim Bailey said. “I know it won’t bring him back.”

He also blames coal dust – lots of it. Without it clogging the road’s drainage ditch, he argues, rainwater would not have puddled on the asphalt and frozen. Instead, it would have trickled out of his brother’s path.

The older brother is not alone in this theory, although there are dissenters.

Baby of the bunch

Pete Bailey’s last day came nearly a month after his 45th birthday and two days short of seeing his favorite football team, the Pittsburgh Steelers, win their sixth Super Bowl.

“We buried him in a Steelers shirt ... the day they won the Super Bowl,” Tim Bailey said.

A bachelor with no children, Pete Bailey was the youngest in a band of three brothers and a sister.

“To me, he was just a young kid,” church pastor and computer store owner Mike Rhea said. “He was always the baby of the bunch.”

On any given summer day, Pete Bailey could be seen cruising the country roads atop his passion, a 2006 Road King Harley Davidson motorcycle.

“A lot of his friends kind of razzed him a bit because he’d always drive that bike so slow,” Rhea said.

But the common scene that sticks in Tim Bailey’s mind is the one played out in his little brother’s car every winter morning.

“He’d light up a cigarette, wait for his car to warm up, and then he’d drive off down the road,” Tim Bailey said.

Setting

Carbo is a coal-mining town within equal striking distance of West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee.

The entrance to Appalachian Power’s coal-fired Clinch River Plant lies roughly the length of three football fields west of where Pete Bailey died on Train Station Road.

Two coal mines and a coal-preparation plant are within a two-mile radius of the crash. More can be found farther out. All are prime destinations and starting points for big rigs lugging coal day in and day out through the town and the rest of Russell County.

When it comes to roads, Carbo has few straightaways. Most curve around tree-topped hills and rocky outcroppings. Other asphalt paths curve over rivers or are bordered by steep drop-offs that descend into still-standing water turned black from coal dust.

To see a coal-carrying rig, all you have to do is wait by the side of any road in Carbo on any given day. A truck with a tarpaulin-covered pile of coal jutting from the dumpster rig passes by at a rate of one every minute.

Mention the wreck to Appalachian Power spokesman John Shepelwich, and he will note that the road has a fast-moving sharp curve that “tends to have a lot of wrecks and a lot of fatalities.”

Bring up the coal dust lining the road, and Shepelwich will point out the railroad tracks running along the road shoulder.

“Any time coal is delivered, there could be some dust that comes off those trains,” he said.

But he failed to see how the trucks passing through the Clinch River Plant could be blamed for the coal dust piled on a specific stretch of road.

VDOT officials would not comment on whether road conditions could have played a role.

“This is truly a tragic situation, but I cannot speculate on the factors in this incident,” VDOT spokeswoman Michelle Earl wrote in an e-mail.

The call to 911 for Pete Bailey’s wreck went out at 5:56 a.m. from the Clinch River Plant, dispatch records show, by a plant employee who witnesses said passed the wreck while en route to begin the morning shift.

“Caller advised that the vehicle has overturned and subject is trapped,” the report’s initial statement reads.

Slightly more than an hour later, a dispatcher added to the report: “Advised to contact a chaplain.”

On an overcast and wet day weeks after the crash, Tim Bailey stood on the shoulder of Train Station Road and, with his finger held in the air, traced the path of his little brother’s wreck.

The path started at the base of a rocky outcropping, where coal dust had built up into a thick, wet muck that sucked at each footstep. The muck once stretched from the drainage ditch to the road shoulder and to a wide swath of water puddled on the asphalt, Tim Bailey said.

He turned and pointed to the shoulder on the opposite side of the road, where his brother swerved when he overcorrected the steering wheel. The shoulder is lined with even more black muck, some of it jutting into puddles on the road.

The Carbo residents contacted for this story remembered the swath of water that ran alongside the ditch.

Local U.S. Postal Service worker Michelle Artrip carved through what she described as a small pond the day before Pete Bailey crashed.

“I thought, this has got to be fixed, somebody has got to do something,” Artrip said. “But when I got back to work, I forgot about it and didn’t call anyone.”

Hours after Pete Bailey crashed, however, the muck filling the ditch was gone, witnesses said. The orange trucks of the Virginia Department of Transportation were seen scraping the muck from the ditch, leaving behind a thick, black mound that ran the length of the ditch.

Jean Clark, sister of Pete Bailey, saw the state trucks around lunchtime while on her way home from the hospital where her brother’s body was rushed.

“It was like a plow truck … and I knew it was there to take care of that” accident, she said.

Said brother Tim Bailey: “I think it was a little late ... for them to come in after it happened.”

Wreck

Pete Bailey might have died before rescuers ever arrived, said Lelia Bowman, the passerby and former nurse who reached into the overturned Isuzu Rodeo hoping to find a pulse.

She found no signs of life.

“He was not awake,” she said. “He probably didn’t feel anything, I’m sure.”

Bowman was chauffeuring her construction-worker husband, James, to work when they crept up on the wreck. A tire on the upturned vehicle still spun and girls’ clothing was strewn across the road.

Usually, cars cruise through the bend at 30 mph. On this day, a sheet of ice covering both the west- and east-bound lanes slowed the Bowmans to about 15 mph.

“My car just about turned around by itself before I realized it was ice,” James Bowman said.

With a flashlight pulled from their car, the Bowmans peered into the Isuzu and saw an immobile Pete Bailey. The man’s head was awkwardly positioned, and away from the door, which meant that Lelia Bowman could not easily check to see if he was breathing.

“You feel helpless,” she said. “I’m certified in CPR and everything, and I couldn’t touch him because of the [odd] way his head was laying.”

Observations

Pete Bailey was alone when he crashed. But the scattered children’s clothes – meant for a family friend – left the Bowmans fearing that more people were involved.

James Bowman, searching for more victims, raced to the side of the car that was crumpled against the rocky outcropping.

That’s when he noticed the drainage ditch.

“There were rocks and stuff in it,” he said. “I guess it keeps the ditch filled up so it can’t drain like it should.”

Minutes later, volunteer firefighter and local construction worker Les Rhea arrived. He was the first rescuer there.

A line of cars from both directions lined the road. Some drivers stopped to help. Others parked to wait until more rescuers arrived to direct motorists across the dangerous stretch of road.

Rhea first noticed the ice covering what he estimated to be 300 feet of road. He then eyed the ditch while walking around Pete Bailey’s car.

“There wasn’t no ditch there, it was just ... coal dust,” Les Rhea said. “They hadn’t cleared the ditch in a while.”

Bowman, after spotting the ditch, concluded that the wreck could have been avoided.

“They need to keep those ditch lines cleaned,” he said. “If they did ... the water wouldn’t stand like that.”

Official conclusions

Glen Besa, president of the Virginia chapter of the environmental protection group Sierra Club, will not hesitate to explain how coal dust can destroy roads, communities and lives.

Its connection to a fatal car crash is a novel one, he admitted.

And Besa, like Appalachian Power’s Shepelwich, is hard-pressed to say how a pile of coal dust could be attributed to any one facility, especially in a place like Carbo.

Still, Besa said the accident is proof enough that Carbo, just like some other Southwest Virginia communities, has a serious problem.

Coal dust is “a really hot issue right now,” he said.

The job of keeping roads clean falls to the Virginia Department of Transportation. And inspecting roads that run past coal mines and coal-fired power plants is done the same way as with any other Virginia road. Simply put, there is no special inspection process, VDOT spokeswoman Earl said.

“When debris is found, such as coal dust or rocks, [area superintendents] will have the debris removed as quickly as possible,” she wrote in an e-mail. “Also, when complaints regarding such issues are brought to VDOT, superintendents will review the issue and schedule any necessary clean-ups or repairs.”

There are no records of a cleaning detail plowing the ditch the day Pete Bailey died, said VDOT Superintendent John Watson, who oversees the Carbo area.

“No work was done after the wreck and no work was done that day,” he said.

There were high-water signs and work done that week on other sections of Train Station Road, however.

It’s possible that a crew from one of those sections decided to clear the wreck site, Watson added.

In fact, there are no complaints on record at all for the section of road that claimed Pete Bailey’s life, officials note.

Virginia Department of Environmental Quality records show that the only coal-dust pollution call for that area focused on the entrance just inside the Clinch River Power plant.

On May 5, 2008, an anonymous caller told DEQ that there was “excessive fugitive dust from the roadways at this facility.”

In response, AEP sprayed more water on trucks to keep the coal dust from flying through the air, the report adds. Water and a tarp over the tops of rigs are the standard method of keeping coal dust off the roads, officials said.

Trucks that leave a facility do not have to be sprayed, Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy spokeswoman Jackie Davis said in an e-mail.

Her agency polices roads for mud and debris spread by coal trucks. It did not field any complaints on Train Station Road in 2008, she wrote.

And local DEQ official Dallas Sizemore said he was not aware of any complaints about Train Station Road.

“We have never responded to anything like [coal dust on the road] because, generally, VDOT responds to that and cleans out the ditches before there is a problem,” he said.

Tim Bailey said he is not surprised by the lack of complaints. Carbo residents are jaded by years of frustration when it comes to seeking help from government agencies, he said.

“People won’t call about the dust around here because you know [VDOT] won’t do anything about it,” he said.

Even Virginia State Trooper Mike O’Quinn, who covered the wreck, doubts anything more than a little morning ice caused the tragedy.

“I’ve been here seven years, and that’s the first time I ever worked a wreck there,” he said.

Still, Carbo motorists said Train Station Road seems to have become a much safer route since Pete Bailey died.

“Whatever they did this time, it works,” postal worker Artrip said. “It’s much better now.”

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