Even the Dead Can't Rest in Peace When There Are Mountaintop Mines

The struggles of a family to visit and maintain the integrity of their loved ones’ graves continue in West Virginia. The story was big news last year, and the family has been struggling with the coal company since 2008.

The "Graveyard in the Sky" photo Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, Maria Gunnoe/Associated Press

 As you can see from the photo, the mountaintop removal mining operation completely encircles what remains of a community’s graveyard. Members of the Jarrell family, as well as environmental activists, claim that Alpha Natural Resources and its subsidiary Independence Coal Company, which operates the mountaintop removal coal mine, violated state law and an agreement reached between the coal company and the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection to preserve access to the graves and keep mining at least 100 feet away from the graveyard. The plaintiffs also claim that mining has toppled gravestones in the cemetery.

            The family members can visit their loved ones’ graves, but before they are allowed to do so they must first give notice to Alpha 10 days ahead of their planned visit, endure a 30-minute safety course, surrender their cell phones and cameras to the coal company, and be escorted by Alpha employees up a dirt road that is only accessible by four-wheel drive.

            The family claims that these requirements of the coal company in essence deprives them of their ability to visit the graves of their loved ones and to bury their dead at this cemetery in the future. Lest you think that this is a unique situation, there are plenty more “mine bound” cemeteries in the Mountain State.

            Can you imagine visiting your parents' or grandparents' graves under such conditions? And what’s this thing about cell phones and cameras?

Hope and Change Not Coming to West Virginia Any Time Soon

There may be little hope that things will actually change for the folks living in southern West Virginia. Despite the inconvenience and health risks that the chemical spill of 4-methylcyclohexane methanol brought to their homes, businesses, and schools for the last seven weeks, it looks like effective legislation to regulate the types of storage tanks that hold MCHM and similar dangerous substances will not be forthcoming. Stalled in committee, a chemical regulation bill looks unlikely to pass before the West Virginia legislative session closes in a week.

            By the way, I did not get this story from the usual domestic news sources that I rely upon, the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, etc. I didn’t even see the story in the Charleston Gazette, which has done some fine reporting on the poisonous spill. I got the news from Al Jazeera, a news source that has been a bombing target of the U.S. and British governments.

            I’m feeling especially cynical right now.

The tank that leaked thousands of gallons of MCHM into West Virginia's Elk River, poisoning the drinking water for 300,000 residents. Note the evidence of corrosion streaming down the side of the aged tank. photo Tom Hindman Getty Images

Maybe West Virginians Really Aren't Happy With King Coal After All

I’ve been blogging about my apparent dismay that there doesn’t seem to be that much of a sense of outrage in West Virginia when those folks have been denied basic drinking water for weeks on end. Well, this recent poll by the Sierra Club may indicate that, though they are not carrying signs and marching down the street, West Virginians are not happy with the situation in their state.

            Across party lines in this poll of 504 West Virginia voters a great majority favor more regulation of the coal industry, with an overwhelming 68 percent, including 57 percent of Republican respondents, saying that greater regulation would have prevented last month’s toxic spill in the Elk River that poisoned the drinking water for 300,000 West Virginia residents. Another 65 percent of respondents thought that the coal industry bore “some” or “a lot” of responsibility for air and water pollution in their state. And 61 percent believe that coal companies have too much influence in their state’s politics.

            These people are voters. Let’s hope that their beliefs and convictions accompany them to the polls in the next election.

When the river looks like this, maybe it's time to call in the regulators.

West Virginia Governor Tomblin Meets With EPA Administrator McCarthy, Maddening Irony Ensues

Gov. Tomblin criticizes ‘unreasonable’ EPA rules

The above link takes you to Ken Ward’s Coal Tattoo blog in which he reports on the meeting between West Virginia governor Earl Ray Tomblin and EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy. In the same meeting in which the two discussed the poison water crisis in southern West Virginia, Tomblin complained about the Environmental Protection Agency’s “unreasonable” rules.

            Tomblin’s comments about unreasonableness concerned the agency’s greenhouse gas regulations and not regulations on chemical containers and toxic spills in rivers, but even still the irony meter must have gone off the charts while the governor spoke to the Washington official.

D.C. Court Throws Out Bush Gutting of Mountaintop Mining 100-Foot Buffer Zone Protection

This is some good news. The eleventh hour rewrite that the George W. Bush administration gave to the 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act that stripped the 100-foot buffer zone for streams and rivers has been struck down by the Washington, D.C. district court.

            The Obama administration has been unsuccessful in its efforts to reinstate the buffer zone. So this ruling is some progress. The court, in its ruling in this case that was filed by the Southern Environmental Law Center, said that in doing away with the buffer zone, the Office of Surface Mining did not adequately consult with the Fish and Wildlife Service as to the effects the rule change would have on endangered species. The court ruling is here.

            The buffer zone rule applies to the disposal of what is called ‘overburden,” the soil and rock that lays atop the seams of Appalachian coal. In mountaintop mining this overburden is blasted away to get at the coal underneath. As the rock and soil are removed from the mountain, it is dumped into adjacent valleys. The buffer zone protects the streams in these valley from being covered over with the overburden.

Just 100 feet to protect the stream, that's all.

This ruling give us hope, but mountaintop mining will continue. And in many ways the 100-foot rule had been merely symbolic, due to the history of its lax enforcement. Even with the buffer zone regulation, 2,400 miles of Appalachian streams, the length of the Mississippi River, have been destroyed by mountaintop removal. And since the ruling, some Washington lawmakers are voicing support for H.R. 2824, the Preventing Government Waste and Protecting Coal Mining Jobs in America Act, which would turn the 100-foot buffer zone regulation over to state regulators, essentially gutting the federal law.

            Hat tip to Andy for notifying me of this news.

United For Coal? What About United For People and Safe Drinking Water?

Just one to three more weeks, and we might know if the water in southern West Virginia is safe to drink. Not one to three weeks till it’s safe to drink, but one to three weeks before we can determine if it MIGHT be safe.

            The poisonous spill of 4-methylcyclohexane methanol in the Elk River occurred on the ninth of January, over six weeks ago, and we might have to wait another three weeks before we can determine any amount of safety of this water. In the meantime we’ve had school closings and businesses straining to stay open.

            Back in 2012 an organization called United For Coal got turnout in the hundreds, perhaps thousands to “take a stand for coal” against an imaginary “war on coal” that was to be blamed on Barack Obama as he ran for reelection. Where are those people now? Do they not have any concern for themselves, their neighbors, and their children as they are denied basic drinkable water? Those folks lined highways carrying signs and wearing bright yellow T-shirts. A United For Coal website claims that our government, is committing, “Regional Genocide” in relation to Appalachia and the coal region. The site goes on to say, “They have summarily executed the entire coal industry thru (sic) overreaching environmental regulation.”

Line up, wear T-shirts, and wave flags for coal and Mitt Romney while your water gets poisoned

I try to avoid similar over-the-top rhetoric—like using the word genocide when I’m not talking about historical situations in Rwanda and Nazi Germany—as the United For Coal site does. But think about it for a while, what comes closer to genocide than poisoning drinking water for 300,000 people? Where are these protesters? Where are their signs and T-shirts? If you’re going to line up along highways and freeways and wave to supporters as they drive by and honk their horns, what does it take to motivate you? A 100-foot stream buffer rule as part of surface mining regulations, or not being able to bath for weeks on end and having to pick up plastic containers of water down at the shopping mall?

West Virginia, Ever More Unequal and Not a Nice Place to Live, Either

It seems that ripping up all their mountains for the coal that lies underneath doesn’t do West Virginians much good at all. A quick look at the news today reveals that only a few benefit from the commerce and resources of the Mountain State, and for most of the West Virginia’s residents life remains just as crappy as ever.

            A report from the Economic Analysis and Research Network, a nonprofit research center in Washington, D.C., found that more than half of West Virginia’s income growth over the past three decades went to the state’s top one percent of taxpayers. The report is titled “The Increasingly Unequal States of America: Income Inequality by State, 1917 to2011” and was released this past Wednesday.

            In some ways it could be worse. In four states, Nevada, Wyoming, Michigan, and Alaska, it was only the one percent to experience any increase in income. Average folks in West Virginia received at least some increase in their incomes. The top one percent nonetheless took home the lion’s share, 53 percent, of the income gains in the Mountain State in the past 30 years.

The folks over at Gallup have been tracking the overall well-being of Americans since 2008. For the fifth year in a row West Virginia has ranked dead last. The survey looks at things like personal life evaluation, emotional health, work environment quality, physical health, the practice of healthy behaviors, and access to basic necessities. Except for work environment quality, West Virginia ranked last on all indices used in the survey. On a scale of 0 to 100, 100 being the absolute highest quality possible, the highest state ranking was that of North Dakota, with a score of 70.4. West Virginia scored a 61.4. The next lowest ranking state was Kentucky, with a score of 63.0.

So things are crappy in West Virginia. But there are still people who want to put a positive spin on a revealing study like this. This piece from WCHS, an ABC affiliate in the Charleston-Huntington, West Virginia area, portrays the study’s findings in the context of a “controversy” that is caused by “an out of state report knocking West Virginia.” Instead of examining the findings of the study and explaining them to the audience, the reporter, Stefano DiPietrantonio, sums up, “Despite our troubles, critics don’t know what they’re missing. And everywhere you look there are reasons to love West Virginia.” He conducts a few man-on-the-street interviews and reads a few twitter comments in which folks offer words of praise for West Virginia.

OK, I love West Virginia, too. That’s why I blog about it so much. But love should not blind you to some obvious problems. And, after the portrayal of the science linking smoking to lung cancer as a “controversy” and the science of global warming being a “controversy,” haven’t we wised up to this canard? Did they explain to DiPietrantonio in journalism school that a small collection of opinions and data are two different things?

Maybe it’s because they watch news programs like this in West Virginia that folks there are not marching in the streets demanding that their water be suitable for drinking.