From Centralia to Abramoff
One of the scarier characters in the long-running Centralia mine fire tragedy in Pennsylvania was J. Steven Griles.
I met Griles on Jan. 5, 1982, in a conference room in the Fulton Bank Building in Harrisburg, Pa., then the headquarters of the former state Department of Environmental Resources. That's him on the right in my photograph above with Robin Ross, then a lawyer for Gov. Dick Thornburgh. Griles was then an official of the U.S. Office of Surface Mining, but his real job was policy hit man for Secretary of the Interior James Watt, who didn't want to spend federal dollars on the Centralia mine fire.
Congress had just appropriated $850,000 for an exploratory drilling project to determine the boundaries of the underground fire in Centralia, which had burned in the labyrinthe of abandoned coal mines beneath the small town since 1962.
It ignited when five firemen hired by the borough council set fire to the town dump on May 27, 1962, as part of a pre-Memorial Day clean-up project (a cemetery was next to the dump). By 1982, after years of underfunded and failed state and federal projects, including the federal backfilling of a state vent pit to settle a hissy fit between two powerful engineers, the fire had moved under residential areas of Centralia and was sending deadly gases into homes. After much pressure, OSM had finally provided enough carbon monoxide monitors for all the homeowners who wanted them. Until then, families had to share. You got it this month, your neighbor the next. Crazy, I know.
Griles was sent to Harrisburg to bully the state into agreeing to take over all future responsibility for dealing with the Centralia mine fire. The meeting on Jan. 5, 1982, was closed to the public, even to members of Centralia Borough Council, but two members of Concerned Citizens, the citizen group in Centralia fighting for help on the mine fire, decided to attend anyway. Tom Larkin and Dave Lamb found the closed door, and after some nervous hesitation, walked inside. I was with them as a reporter, and I followed them in. Griles was livid, his face full of anger
As I wrote in my book, Unseen Danger:
"Everything stopped. The reporter stated his belief that the Federal Open Meeting Act gave the public the right to attend and listen. Steven Griles...said the meeting was to discuss a contract and the working relationship between two governmental bodies and thus did not have to be open...He denied that anyone at the meeting had anything to hide and demanded the intruders leave. No one else at the table spoke, and Griles refused further comment."
We left, although Griles and the state officials conducted a tepid, we're not saying anything press conference when the meeting concluded. Eleven days later, a memorandum written by David Simpson, head of the Wilkes-Barre office of the U.S. Bureau of Mines, which was feuding with its sister agency OSM over Centralia and other issues, said Griles had threatened to take back the gas monitors from Centralia homes unless the state agreed to fund any future Centralia project with its own tax dollars. The memo was leaked to me, and I wrote a story on what it said after confirming with Simpson that he wrote it. Simpson was in the room in Harrisburg.
OSM backed off its threat. The drilling project went forward, and in the fall of 1983, Congress appropriated $42 million to relocate the people of Centralia, it having been deemed too expensive to stop the fire itself.
Fast forward to a day in the spring of 2001. I am in a hearing room in Washington, D.C., for the confirmation hearing of Nora Mead Brownell, a member of the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission who had been appointed to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. To my astonishment, also up for confirmation that day, for a job as the number two official in the U.S. Department of the Interior, was J. Steven Griles. After years as a lobbyist for the "extraction industries," he was now going to have the opportunity, courtesy of President George W. Bush, to work his magic all over the country. I recall that Griles, who was wearing an outdoorsy sort of shirt that day, testified lovingly about how he liked to spend time in nature.
Griles got the job, but fell in with bad company, namely über-lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Griles pleaded guilty in March to lying to the Senate about his relationship with Abramoff. Federal prosecutors said Griles asked Abramoff for $100,000 from his Indian tribal clients for the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy, which had been organized by Interior Secretary Gale Norton and which was run by Griles' then-girlfriend, Italia Federici.
Yesterday a tearful Griles was sentenced to 10 months in federal prison and a $30,000 fine, double the prison sentence in the plea bargain. Griles had been caught in lies about the extent of his relations with Abramoff even after the plea bargain had been arranged. He isn't cooperating with the continuing investigation of Abramoff, by the way, although Federici is. Griles has since moved on from Federici and is married to Sue Ellen Wooldrige, a former Interior Department lawyer.
Perhaps Griles could serve his sentence at the federal prison off the Route 901 exit of Interstate 81 in Schuylkill County, Pa. It's just a few miles from what's left of Centralia.
J. Steven Griles now. (AP Photo)