Third Toxic Spill In Appalachia In a Month: Is It Time to Start Taking This Stuff Seriously?

What coal slurry looks like when it flows into a stream

Yet another coal-related spill in Appalachia. This time it’s coal slurry. More than 100,000 gallons of the black liquid poured into a stream in Kanawha County, West Virginia. Kanawha County is one of the counties that was also affected by the toxic spill of 4-methylcyclohexane methanol in the Elk River just over a month ago. The coal slurry came from a Patriot Coal processing facility.

            Like the Elk River spill, no one is quite certain how toxic coal slurry is. Despite there being thousands of impoundments of coal slurry, one of which in West Virginia is so large the earthen dam that impounds the sludge is as tall as the Eiffel Tower, there have never been sufficient tests as to its toxicity. The EPA says the toxins could originate from the coal, the coal matrix (the other rock and minerals dug up with coal in a mine), the chemicals used to “wash” the coal, such as kerosene and fuel oil, or chemicals like polyacrylamide that used to aide coagulation of the coal slurry.

If these were incidents of schools shootings, the press would be all over these stories. If they happened to be a dozen or so folks burning flags on two or three occasions, then talk radio and Fox News would blanket the airwaves with ceaseless blather on the subject. But these are toxic spills in Appalachia, an industrial sacrifice zone. No talking head on Fox News will mention this.

The Brushy Fork coal slurry impoundment in southern West Virginia shown in relation to the Eiffel Tower

RAMPS Protests Mountaintop Removal at Alpha, But the Local Press Slants the Story to King Coal

Reading some of the posts to United For Coal’s Facebook page, I am sometimes flummoxed by the amount of support that folks in Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky have for the coal companies. Despite the great harm that these companies are doing to the land and people of Appalachia, and despite of the inability or unwillingness of the coal companies to economically benefit the communities of Appalachia where coal is mined, many of the residents voice unwavering support to Arch, Alpha, and other big coal companies.

            True, there are the three important things that the coal companies provide: jobs, jobs, and jobs. But that still doesn’t explain the blind devotion that has Appalachia residents supporting even some of the most egregious mining practices like mountaintop removal.

            Two days ago, five persons associated with the Radical Action for Mountain Peoples' Survival (RAMPS) protested the practice of mountaintop removal coal mining and the building of gargantuan coal slurry impoundments by blocking the entrance driveway to Alpha Natural Resources, a coal company that extracts coal through mountaintop removal. The protesters chained large industrial equipment and themselves to guard railing. They also placed a 250-gallon container of nontoxic black colored water to symbolize the water held in slurry impoundments. All the protesters were freed from the chains by police and arrested. Traffic was restored to the driveway by 10:00 am.

            Now, looking at the reportage of the arrests by a local television station, it’s easy to see the slant that favors the coal companies. Lindsey Price, the journalist for WCYB in Bristol, Virginia, states in her news report:

The five protesters who were strung across the bridge were from a group called Mountain Justice, a group who protests what they refer to as 'mountain top removal' mining.

“What they refer to” designates a word or phrase not used in general parlance but is used by a particular group, such as, “What Catholics refer to as a Holy Day of Obligation.” or “What scientists refer to as a control group.” Some groups will have terms like these to convey a connotation that they want to communicate to the broader populace, such as when the tea party refers to the estate tax as a death tax. Estate tax sounds neutral; death tax sounds bad. You get the idea.

By using this phrase and putting mountain top removal in quotation marks, Price seems to indicate that it is some sort of value-laden bit of rhetoric. This is wrong. The term mountaintop removal has been used by a wide range of folks for years, from those who oppose it to those who favor it, to describe this efficient but destructive mining practice. The term goes back at least to 1997, when Penny Loeb wrote about mountaintop removal in her August 3, 1997 story “Shear Madness” for US News and World Report.

Price failed to mention that the action of civil disobedience by the individuals was additionally to protest the building of coal slurry impoundments. I don’t know why this aspect of the story was left out of her piece of journalism. Slurry impoundments have failed in the past, flooding valleys with toxic slurry to great ecological damage. People have died when coal slurry dams have failed. With that in mind, near the town of Whitesville, federal regulators recently approved the expansion of a slurry dam that would allow it to grow taller than the Hoover Dam. To me, it is a serious omission to her news story.

Also Price limits the narrative of the protest, the bigger picture of the conflict, to one in which a the spokesperson for RAMPS, Emily Keppler makes a statement about the water pollution or the health consequences due to mountaintop mining, only to be answered by the vice president of Alpha, Ted Pile.

"This exact action was to bring, symbolic of course, the impacts of mountain top coal mining to the headquarters to the people who are causing it, but don't have to suffer the consequences of it," said Mountain Justice supporter Emily Keeppler.

Protesters filled a barrel full of concrete, then put a pipe through it and connected themselves all the way across the bridge with chains. When firefighters cut the protesters free it left piles of concrete on the bridge. "They locked themselves to a giant barrel of dirty water to symbolize how Alpha coal is locking Appalachian to dirty water," said Keppler.

Pile told me last year Alpha had a 99.7 percent compliance rate with the water, and they are constantly monitored at the state and federal level. "We're also a highly-regulated industry, probably one of the most regulated industries in the country," said Pile.

The five protesters were arrested, but Keppler says it was worth it because this protest was personal for those who were arrested. "Their health is being compromised, their communities are being compromised, so they're absolutely willing to risk arrest in order to engage in non-violent action to stop this," said Keppler.

Pile tells us they have not received any complaints or science to prove there are health issues. "Out of about 86 million tons of coal we expect to mine this year, only 22, tons come from the type of mining they're objecting to. That'll probably be close to zero next year," said Pile.

This boils the conflict down to a “he said, she said” scenario, in which the truth of the matter—the science being done points to irreparable damage to Appalachian waterways and dire health consequences for those who live in proximity to mountaintop mining— is left out of the picture. Watching the video that was broadcast for this story, the reporter gives a bit of an upper hand to the coal company. After each statement by Keppler, Price begins the retorts by the coal company vice president with “But Price said…” This gives the impression that the vice president is correcting a misstatement or misunderstanding by the RAMPS spokesperson.

So is this why there is so much support for the coal companies in Appalachia? Folks there turn on their televisions and get new reports like this one?

Why I Rant So Much: A Primer on Mountaintop Removal

Just a couple days ago I talked to a friend who reads this blog. She said that she appreciated the post about locavores and why I am not among the geographically restricted dieters, but she confessed that she doesn’t always “get” what I write about, specifically why I so oppose mountaintop removal coal mining.
          I grew up around coal mining. I remember seeing strip mining and am familiar with the effects that surface mining can have on the land and streams. I’ve written about my memories of passing over Simpson Creek, the one whose pollution was made infamous in song, on my school bus. I have read and researched a great deal about the development of surface mining into mountaintop removal and seen the films such as On Coal River that describe the suffering of people who live around mountaintop mining. I guess I forget that other folks aren’t as obsessed with this as I am and may not know some basic stuff about mountaintop mining. So here is a quick primer on some of the practices of mountaintop mining and their effects on land, streams, and people.

Mountaintop Removal is Big

Mountaintop removal is so big that people have a hard time imagining it. The Hobart Mine in West Virginia stretches for about ten miles from one end to the other. To get an idea of the scale of the mines, images below from Google Earth, show the footprint of the mine compared to the cities of New York and San Diego.

The Hobart Mine would dominate Manhattan

The Hobart Mine would swallow up all of downtown San Diego, a portion of Balboa Park, and stretch into National City

The Hobart Mine is just one of the more than 500 mountaintop removal mines across Appalachia. Below are Google Maps satellite images of southern West Virginia and Kentucky. The mines are so large that they can be seen from space. There are towns and cities among the hills in these images, but they are unnoticeable compared to the images of the mines. The Environmental Protection Agency estimated years ago that by now, 2013, the total area to be deforested and destroyed by mountaintop mining would be as large as the state of Delaware.

The grey splotches among the trees are the mountaintop mines. More than 500 of these stretch across Appalachia

When the coal miners blow up a mountain, removing the topmost portion to get to the coal beneath, they take all that was once a mountain and dump it into adjacent valleys in what is appropriately called valley fills. A mountaintop removal mine might have a permit to fill five, six, or seven miles of streams with these valley fills. In the last 35 years valley fills have destroyed 2,400 miles of Appalachian streams. If you were to take all those streams and lay them end-to-end, they would stretch almost the full length of the Mississippi. Of all the practices of mountaintop mining, scientists think that valley fills are the most destructive, because they destroy headwater streams and the surrounding forests, severely affecting the mountain ecosystems.

A valley filled with rock from a mountaintop removal mine in Appalachia image from biologicaldiversity.org

Valley fills may be hundreds of feet deep image from windpub.com 

Before coal is shipped off to power stations it is first “washed” to remove impurities, some of the material that is washed from the coal, a combination of clay, silt, water, and bits of coal is called slurry and is stored in impoundment ponds and reservoirs. Impoundments contain toxic residue, some from the constituents of the rock and coal that has been mined and some from the mixture of chemicals that are used when coal is washed. Slurry and impoundments have been around for about as long as folks have mined coal. There are at least six in Harrison County, West Virginia, where I grew up, with plenty more across this country’s coal mining region.

The impoundments can be dangerous. After heavy rains an impoundment dam at Buffalo Creek, West Virginia failed releasing a 15 to 20 foot black wave of water and slurry into the hollow below. More than 1,400 houses and mobile homes were damaged or destroyed. There were 125 residents killed and more than a thousand were injured. In 2000 an even larger impoundment failure occurred in Martin County, Kentucky, releasing 306,000,000 gallons of slurry, more than 30 times the volume of the oil released by the Exxon Valdez, into the valley below, making it the worst environmental disaster ever to occur in the South.

The increased size and volume of the mining operations increases the size, volume, and risk from the impoundments, increasing their risk. Below is an image of the Brushy Fork impoundment, made infamous in On Coal River.

Image from ilovemountains.org

Just to give you an idea of the size of the impoundment, If France decided to bring a little savoir faire to the Mountain State and build an Eiffel Tower next to the Brushy Fork impoundment, the dam and the slurry behind it would dwarf the Parisian structure.

Mountaintop Removal Relies on a Bad Interpretation of the Law

Mountaintop removal relies on a legal fiction created by a court ruling in Kentuckians for the Commonwealth v. Rivenburgh in 2002. Clearly, filling up valleys with the rock permanently destroys the valley, its ecosystem, and stream at its bottom. Mining companies are allowed to get permits to fill up valleys with rock from their mines under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act. The original purpose of the 404 permits was to allow for the placement of fill or dredge for the construction of bridges and other construction in and around rivers and lakes. The valley where the mining companies in Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia are thus allowed the fiction of considering the filling of a valley with debris as being like that of a construction site, as though a bridge or levee were being built next to their mountaintop mine.

            Another fiction of mountaintop mining is that one of the original rationales for the practice was that is would create flatland for Appalachia and provide areas where there could be civic and industrial development. But places where mining operations have ceased have not seen the development of towns or industrial parks on the former mine sites.

Mountaintop Removal Does Not Help People

Appalachians have not benefited from mountaintop removal. Southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, where mountaintop removal is most prevalent, has some of this nation’s highest rates of poverty.

Image from the Appalachian Regional Commission arc.gov

Mountaintop Removal is Harmful

Besides not benefiting financially from the mines, Appalachians suffer when mining afflicts their towns and homes. As depicted in the documentary, On Coal River, mountaintop mines despoil the wells that Appalachian residents rely on for drinking and bathing. Recent scientific research has found that mountaintop mining severely affects the health of the people who live around the mines, with increased incidences of cancers, birth defects, and other health problems. Science also indicates that creatures that live downstream from mountaintop mines are adversely affected by the runoff from the mines. Bird populations also decrease around these huge mines.

OK, there are plenty more details, but that's the primer. I hope that it makes a little clearer the enormity of mountaintop mining and the effects that it has on the people and land of Appalachia.