filmed by Benji Burrell, 2007

Mine safety expert Jack Spadaro addresses WV lawmakers
by Stephen Wussow
West Virginia lawmakers were confronted Monday with hard evidence of harm inflicted upon rural West Virginians by coal sludge. A new scientific study documents dangerously polluted water around coal slurry injection sites in the Rawl area near Williamson. Residents have been saying for years that the coal industry practice of pumping toxic coal sludge into abandoned underground mines as a cheap disposal method has had devastating consequences for the health their community. In light of the new findings, concerned scientists, mining experts, and victims of poisoned water pleaded with the state joint judiciary subcommittee to support a moratorium and comprehensive study on the extent and the health consequences of coal slurry injection in the state.

A subsidiary Massey prep plant had been injecting coal sludge since 1977 into the abandoned underground mines under the Rawl, Sprigg, Merrimac, and Lick Creek communities, according to former Mine Safety and Health Academy superintendent Jack Spadaro. About 1.4 billion gallons of coal sludge have been pumped under the Rawl area, said Spadaro. Residents say the water noticeably worsened when Massey began blasting at a mountaintop removal site nearby around 1990. They’ve been trying to get clean water since.

Dr. Benjamin Stout, the Wheeling Jesuit University biology professor who conducted the new water quality study, found several dangerous metals and chemicals in Rawl’s well water, pollutants also found in coal sludge. Lead, manganese, arsenic, barium, selenium, iron, and beryllium lurked in much of the water area residents have been using to drink and cook. Although most residents now try to avoid the water, even residents who don’t drink the water are exposed when bathing or wearing clothes washed in the water.

Stout fears that hot water heaters may be concentrating heavy metals, exposing residents to “phenomenal” levels of dangerous pollutants. The water in one heater had a high concentration of arsenic and was almost one-half percent iron. “It was a very thick sludge at the bottom of the hot water heater,” he said. “When I talked to residents, they said their hot water heaters only last a few years.” “They have to have plastic water fixtures because the metal fixtures corrode too fast.”

‘‘I think without a doubt there is a connection” between the tainted water and the sludge injections in the area, said Marshall University environmental science professor and engineer Scott Simonton. Mines are not perfectly sealed tubes, they are connected to the water supply and to surface water.

Simonton held up a jar of the blackish water that came out of a faucet in Rawl, putrid globs swirling. “It’s awful,” he exhorted. “It’s the worst I’ve ever seen. I don’t think that anybody should drink it.” Visibly shaken, the lawmakers passed around the jar of acerbic liquid like a hot potato.

Donetta Blankenship (no relation to Don) moved to Rawl five years ago. Her family has been sick ever since. Liver failure has twice brought her to the brink of death. Doctors blame an excess of copper in her body from drinking the water, Donetta told the panel. “I don’t go around eating pennies,” she said, trying to smile. “I never drank. Thank God, I can say that. I never did anything to cause this.”

Someone else who understands is Debbie Sammons of Lick Creek. She described a terrible night when her son began vomiting uncontrollably. He later passed a kidney stone. He was six years old. She also blames the water for her miscarriage. Told to drink plenty of water during her pregnancy, Debbie followed the doctor’s orders. “I thought I was using water that God provided,” she grieved. ‘‘I probably killed my baby.”

Toxicologist Dawn Seeburger, who has been interviewing Rawl residents, laid out a long list of other health problems associated with the pollutants, including chronic diarrhea, thyroid failure, rotting teeth, neurological disorders, miscarriages, and lesions.

The health threat of coal slurry injections is not limited to the Rawl area, argued Jack Spadaro. “There are other Rawls,” an inevitabilty with 400 injection wells all over the state pumping millions of gallons of sludge a day. “The sad part about all of this is … we have an alternate system than pumping slurry blindly into the ground and into drinking water,” said Spadaro. “A dry filter process is economical and can be used in any coal preparation facility.”

Rural communities without access to municipal water supplies remain vulnerable, as sludge has been injected throughout rural southern West Virginia. According to Seeburger, sources of municipal water are also threatened by sludge pollution. Unsettled, the legislators displayed concern about the quality of water in their own districts.

If the West Virginia legislature is truly concerned with the quality of its drinking water and the health of its citizens, it will pass the moratorium on slurry injections and fund a full study of the impact this mordant practice has already had. The subcommittee will be hearing from industry and the WV Dept of Environmental Protection next month, but with word getting out about the tragedies perpetrated upon Rawl and other communities, Big Coal is feeling the heat.

Anna Santo, AV Staff

For millions of years pristine streams have trickled down the sides of the mountains surrounding Rawl, West Virginia. Wildflowers bloomed, animals came to drink, people bathed and diverse aquatic life thrived along the shores of the Tug River in the unnamed mountains of Mingo County.

Since Massey Energy began mountaintop removal coal mining operations 5 years ago, the same immaculate creeks and rivers have flowed thick with toxic sludge and sediment. They have ravaged surrounding ecosystems and gathered chemicals that leave bumpy red rashes and cause human hair to fall out. For the first time, sicknesses such as cancer, kidney and liver failure, and respiratory problems plague families in Rawl who have lived in the same house, bathed in the same creeks, and drank the same water for generations.

These mountains are missed by the thousands of people who are now forced to drink, cook and bathe in toxic water. It is missed not only for the water that it once provided, but also as a home, as a refuge, as a protected habitat for wildlife, and as a source of livelihood for the people of Rawl and surrounding communities.

Rawl, West Virginia

In 2005, scientists at Wheeling Jesuit University released a study indicating that water tested in private wells in Rawl, West Virginia exceeded federal drinking water standards for arsenic, lead, iron, aluminum, beryllium, barium, manganese and selenium. Though Massey Energy denied any correlation between nearby mountaintop removal mining operations and the elevated toxin levels, those found in the water were all toxins commonly found in coal sludge.

A branch of Massey energy admitted to having pumped millions of gallons of coal sludge into underground reservoirs near Rawl in the 1980s. Considering that ten years ago, a blast powerful enough to shatter windows in a nearby church and homes resonated throughout the Rawl area and that ten years ago, water in the same place started to go bad, it seems plausible that the same blast that destroyed the foundations of dozens of homes may have cracked the barrier between the buried sludge and the aquifer that provides Rawl’s city water .

Unfortunately, Massey Energy not only refuses to provide the city with clean water, leaving the city with rust-colored, opaque water flowing from their faucets- but they refuse to investigate the possibility that their mining activities may have contributed to the water that “runs out of the pipe like tomato soup: thick with orange sediment.”

Over 300 residents of Rawl have filed a lawsuit against the branch of Massey Energy that pumped the sludge underground, but to date have not received any compensation or easement.

Compiled by Lauren Benningfield, AV Staff

Donetta lives in Rawl, West Virginia. Mining has gone on there since before her husband’s family arrived in 1978. Coal sludge has gotten into the water and leaked into her well. Five years ago, before she and her family moved out to where they live now, they had no health problems. Donetta doesn’t drink or do drugs, but last year she was hospitalized for liver failure. Her mother-in-law suffers from pancreatis. Everyone in this house has headaches due to the nitrogen sulfate—when anyone takes a shower, the whole house smells like rotten eggs.

She has two children, a thirteen-year-old girl and a fourteen-year-old boy, and two stepchildren. Her stepdaughter, at the age of 19, had to have her gallbladder removed. Since they’ve moved to Rawl, both her children have developed asthma. Her daughter has stomach problems; her son has bumps all over his back and refuses to bathe in the contaminated water that makes it worse. Both wait until they can get to their grandparents’ home that has city water, and that can be nearly a week between visits.

Buying all bottled water is much too expensive. They take bottles and jugs to her parents’ place and fill them up for drinking water. With six people at home, Donetta can’t take her laundry elsewhere. She says sometimes she doesn’t know why she adds detergent to the water, since it doesn’t seem to do any good. On one occasion, she got a clean rag and sprayed a cleaning product on it. The product started to bubble and actually heat up.

Her son has trouble sleeping at night, due to the fear that the sludge impoundment above their home will give way. Donetta stays because she can’t afford to move her family elsewhere. They’re currently involved with a number of other community members in a lawsuit against the coal company; her husband says if they win, they’ll use the money to move. Finally, though, the city has been convinced to start building pipelines to get city water out to the people with contaminated well water. But it’s slow going.

Donetta works to get her story out there. She is also a member of OVEC. Donetta wants to give back to the volunteers that have helped get the city to work on piping in water. Now her children are starting to get involved. Her son wants to participate in the Sludge Safety Project’s march on Washington D.C. in September!

Lauren Benningfield, AV Staff

These entries are based on research or interviews conducted by Appalachian Voices staff and volunteers- we’d love for you to add another story or eulogy, and let us know if you’d like to request a change.

The Big Sandy River lies across parts of three states: Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia. The area is mostly sparsely populated, forested land. Economically, the area compares poorly to state and national averages. In 1996, unemployment rates within the Basin ranged from 7.1% in Boyd County, Kentucky to 20.4% in Dickenson County, Virginia. The national average at the same time was 5.4%; the state averages in Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia were 5.6%, 7.5%, and 5.4%. Coal mining is tied with the retail trade as the largest employers in the Basin, employing 17% of the workforce each.

Before the study began, the locals attributed the water pollution to coal mining and poor septic lines. Subsidence, “the sinking of a large area of the earth’s crust resulting from past mining activity,” occurs when the level of water flow is drastically reduced, leaving wells dry. Water loss in the area began in the late 1980’s. The quality of life for the people in the area changed dramatically; a great deal of time and inconvenience goes into obtaining and hauling in water. Property values dropped, and obtaining water can be prohibitively expensive.

The mining that has occurred in the area has thrown off the chemical balances in the water, increasing acidity and raising the concentration of metals. The water in the basin ranges from hard (Tug Fork) to very hard (Upper Levisa). Water hardness is found in areas with limestone rock, like the Big Sandy River Basin. Hard water itself is not a comment on the water quality, but it does increase the ease that metals dissolve in it, making it easier for levels to reach harmful or toxic levels to human and aquatic life.

Water hardness is a measure of the calcium and magnesium present in the water. Copper, a metal whose concentration in water depends on the hardness of the water, was found to be above the safe levels for aquatic life, but considerably below the safe level for humans.

Manganese, another metal, was found to be well above the federally recommended level. Drainage from coal mines can contribute to manganese contamination. Manganese is naturally found in the sandstone rocks that make up the Big Sandy River Basin, and erosion will raise the level of manganese in water. High levels of manganese will affect the taste of water, and may form a black coating that stains clothing and eating utensils.

Tug Fork and Upper Levisa were found to have very high concentrations of iron. Though the Environmental Protection Agency does not place a high priority on iron pollution, high levels of iron will affect the taste of water and contribute to the corrosion of metals and cause reddish stains on clothes and eating utensils.

Sulfates, released from several different metals and minerals occurring in the area (including manganese and iron) from coal mining operations, react in water to form sulfates and sulfuric acid. Sulfuric acid increases the acidification of waterways and can kill all aquatic life. The presence of sulfates in water will give off an odor similar to rotten eggs.

While the area, with deposits of iron, coal, and limestone, is predisposed to water with high acidity and concentrations of metals, the nearby mining operations have drastically increased these contaminants, making it harder for aquatic life to thrive and humans to readily obtain clean water.

By Stephen Wussow; originally printed in the Appalachian Voice, April 2006

As our caravan wound northward from our homes in peaceful Boone, North Carolina, through the back roads toward the twisted hollows of southern West Virginia, we were reminded of why we love these mountains. But this wasn’t a sight-seeing trip. We were a group of Appalachian Voices volunteers were going to a part of Appalachia that Americans rarely think about, much less think about as a vacation destination.

Driving into the coalfields of West Virginia felt different, as though we had crossed a border more significant than a state line. The rules had changed. We had grown accustomed to thinking of our mountains as a peaceful, safe place, naively assuming they possess a sacred permanence, some majestic immutability. We soon became painfully aware of their vulnerability, left naked in shame where strip mining proved too malignant to be hidden from the road by a thin line of trees. Our ancient, graceful giants had met a reckless, violent foe in King Coal.

The people in these hills suffer this violence too. To think of the destructive force necessary to break a mountain is one thing, but as we crisscrossed this forgotten corner of West Virginia, it became starkly clear that people live right in the middle of this titanic battle. Hearing their stories, we couldn’t believe these things were happening in America.

Our first stop was the town of Rawl where five area residents died the week before. A Mingo County lawsuit alleges that coal slurry has for many years been injected, without permits, into abandoned underground mines that surrounding the community. A witch’s brew of heavy metals— including lead, manganese, and arsenic— started leaching into the water table that fed the community wells, a problem compounded when the strata cracked due to illegal blasting. People started getting really sick, but weren’t being told why. Afraid of getting involved in a lawsuit with the coal companies, many of whom have reputations for vengeful retaliation, the local government, even doctors, turned a blind eye to the residents’ symptoms of toxic exposure, and didn’t treat them.

Kenny Stroud, a Rawl resident who recently appeared with his sons in National Geographic Magazine, wants the world to know what is happening and how he is suffering from environmental violence. Stroud has deterioration of his muscles, soft bones, stomach swelling, gallbladder problems, severe depression. He has the liver of an alcoholic, though he doesn’t drink. Now unemployed, he can’t even afford the medicines he needs. Recently while taking a bath, Stroud’s son started screaming: the tap started running black. Stroud rushed him out, desperately trying to wipe off the sticky black film on his son’s skin, but not before the boy’s eyes started swelling.

Eventually recognizing similar symptoms, residents demanded answers and justice. Rawl residents like Pastor Larry Brown and former sheriff Billy Sammons organized to demand clean water. They began by registering everyone to vote. Though the coal companies have made threats on them for their ‘trouble-making’, they figure that coal is killing them either way. We witnessed the rewards of their courage as they unloaded the first shipments of bottled water, delivered by the state after 12 years of struggle. A water line from a safe source may finally be in the works, although it has been delayed because of the cost to the abandoned mine land fund. Stroud and 350 other residents are also suing Massey Energy to pay for damage to the water supply. They also want an apology and restitution, but, Stroud says “I don’t know what that could be”.

Another Rawl resident, Donetta Blankenship, will be among those traveling to the United Nations with complaints about their treatment as human rights violations.
We also traveled to Island Creek and met members of the Island Creek Watershed Association and other Logan residents. They get nervous whenever it rains, living under the constant threat of their lives washing away in a flood. Strip mining began nearby in 1996. A “100 year flood” struck in 1997, and others hit in 2001 and 2003. It’s not a coincidence. The deforestation and loss of topsoil that come with strip mining have left the community vulnerable to rain waters that have nothing to absorb them.

Things get worse with each flood. “Insurance prices go up and property values go down,” said one resident. Each flood leaves silt and debris which raise the creek bed and the flood plain. Despite promises from the state, the creek running through town has yet to be dredged. Some $2.4 million had been secured for the creek’s restoration, but the association says they can’t track down where the money went.

One member, Walter, took us back to his home, and showed us a video of coal trucks barreling past his home, several each minute. He told us of his struggle to get a mere warning system installed at the coal sludge impoundment above his home in the event it fails.

The next day Kenny King gave us a tour of Blair mountain and the historic labor battle site along its ridge. King is trying to protect the site from the encroaching mountain top removal. By documenting remnants of the battle he hopes the area, along with a buffer, will be set aside for preservation.

As we approached the site, Kenny pointed out dying neighborhoods full of empty lots, where people had been forced out of the areas the company wants to mine. He said he believes that the end goal is to “depopulate (the mountains) so there will be no one to complain or sue.”

Our last stop was the memorial service for Ellery Hatfield and Donald Bragg, miners who died in a belt line fire caused by safety violations in the Massey Energy Co.’s Alma mine earlier this year. With the future of the industry in the balance, the most powerful politicians of West Virginia were in attendance not so much to mourn as to celebrate the “sacred way of life” that is coal mining.

West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin heaped praise on those in the mining industry for taking risks to supply a nation that “desperately needs it,” providing the energy that makes this country the great military and industrial power it is. “We will continue to mine coal in West Virginia and the world,” he declared, that the deaths of these miners are “not in vain.”

While speaker after speaker stressed the importance of every individual in our democracy, we couldn’t help but think of the victims of the rest of the tragedies we saw in our brief visit. Tragedies that don’t kill instantly might not make headlines, but the crimes against the West Virginians we met were just as real.

Courtesy of upcoming documentary:Coal Fired

www.fireflypix.com