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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Freda Williams of Coal River Mountain Watch stands in front of the Independence Coal Company, near Whitesville, West Virginia.
If you don't live in a state that produces coal it may be easy not to notice that fully 50 percent of all electricity generated in the United States comes from coal-fired power plants. But if you're in coal country the presence of the black rock is unmistakable. Take northeastern Kentucky as an example. Drive down Route 23 -- the Country Music Highway with signs that pay tribute to the likes of Loretta Lynn, Dwight Yoakam and other hometown stars -- and not a minute goes by without seeing a big rig hauling what miners call a "coal bucket," a long, gray-stained trailer covered with a tarp to hold in its payload. Flecks of coal click and crack against car windshields as fleets of these trucks make their way to railroad lines, shipping docks and power plants. Thick white exhaust, like a cumulonimbus cloud, billows into the sky at the American Electrical Power plant; a mountain of coal, as big as a professional football stadium, charging the network of electric cables and transformers.
If you live in the coal fields, your life is intimately linked to the coal industry. For decades there was almost a symbiotic relationship between coal field residents and coal companies. Jobs glued them together. Nowadays the coal industry is less dependent on vast numbers of workers. It's highly mechanized. Instead, the relationship, as one coal field resident put it, is more like that of a husband and his battered wife who keeps coming back for more. Large-scale mining operations have literally flattened whole mountains, filled entire valleys with rubble, and rattled homes with high-powered explosives. In some areas, piles of rubble as high as a modest skyscraper entomb whole valleys from mouth to crest. Many valleys, or what are called hollows in the Appalachians, have been filled with coal slurry.
Machines aren't as selective as human hands with picks, so when coal is stripped out of the ground a lot of rock and dirt comes with it. That extra material needs to be separated from the coal. Mine operators have what's called a preparation plant where the raw coal goes through a series of chemical processes. When it's through, the coal is as fine as baby powder -- no more lumps. The excess liquid, dirt, rock and chemicals -- the slurry -- is then pumped into an impoundment.
In the aftermath of the Martin County Coal accident investigation, the big question lingering in Kentucky is this: If there was obstruction of justice and a subsequent coverup, why would Bush administration officials get behind it? The new team in Washington could have let the previous administration take the blame. Both Martin County Coal slurry accidents in 1994 and 2000 occurred on Davitt McAteer's watch. The newly anointed Bush administration could have easily made the case that Clinton and his team fell asleep at the stick, scoring a few easy points with environmentalists.
But those familiar with the coal industry and federal politics say there's a much larger picture. One MSHA investigator told Salon, "The investigation didn't have to do with just Martin County Coal. The bigger question is 'Should slurry impoundments be allowed over old mines?' That would have been addressed in our report." With an estimated 200 such impoundments, the coal industry had a lot riding on MSHA's report.
Hundreds of coal field communities near slurry impoundments had a lot riding on the report as well.
The fear of catastrophic slurry spills animates the dark recesses of mountain life for many a coal field resident. On one chilly fall evening, Abraham Lincoln Chapman -- his friends call him Link -- and his 13-year-old daughter Paige stand outside their home on the edge of Coldwater Creek, one of the waterways most severely affected by the October 2000 slurry spill. They hear something splash in the water. It's a welcomed sound. Paige is pretty sure it's a muskrat, a creature they haven't seen much since the accident three years ago. Link says the water used to be crystal clear. Now it's murky brown, and if you poke a stick into the bottom, black clouds of fine slurry rise to the surface.
"It used to be full of fish, full of ducks, turtles, muskrats," Link laments. "We basically have nothing now. I've seen some minnows in it lately. I don't know if they've been released in it, or if they're minnows from up in the hollow that have come down from where it wasn't directly affected."
"We used to catch sand dabs, bass, creek chubs, anything," says Paige. "It was really full. When the sludge came, it washed away the bank we used to stand on. Everything is gone." She really misses walking up the creek and catching bullfrogs; their legs are a local delicacy. Now, the bullfrogs are all gone, and Paige says she wouldn't get in the creek even if she had to.
Her father worked in the coal industry most of his life. His jobs included being a safety director and a purchasing agent. From those vantage points he's seen the types of chemicals used to process coal. There are conflicting reports on how toxic the slurry is. A study from Eastern Kentucky University found that there are reasons for residents to be concerned. But a government study says there's no need for alarm. Link doesn't buy it. He says dryly, "According to what we've been told [by the government] as of lately, the slurry's probably good for you, if you'd eat you a handful of it every day. You ain't going to grow horns or nothing."
His children aren't assured that there won't be another catastrophe. Link spent his life savings to add a top floor to his house so he could get their bedrooms off the ground level because they were so scared the slurry would come down through the hollow again. "That's the kind of mental thing it's done to the residents that live here," said Link. "I know what's in the old mines up there and when my little girl would get ready to go to bed at night and she'd say, 'Dad, the slurry won't come out tonight will it?' And, I had to look her in the eye and say, 'No, it won't come out. You sleep.' It was really, really hard to do that, knowing what was still up there."
People familiar with the mines say there could be anywhere between 50 and 100 miles of abandoned mines near the tops of the mountains filled with water and slurry.
The question of safety seems very real when you stand below a slurry dam. A typical rock and earth structure, about 250 feet tall, stretches to the top of a valley mouth to hold back slurry in the Sun Dial impoundment at Independence Coal, another Massey subsidiary based near Whitesville, W.V. A truck driving across the top of the dam looks the size of a toy Hot Wheels vehicle. Below the slurry dam, which is grown over with grass, is the preparation plant, a series of buildings and conveyer belts painted baby blue. Vertical white lines accent the bigger buildings at regular intervals, like yard lines. The plant is situated next to Marfork Creek and draws water from it to process the coal. There's a coal silo, and piles of coal around the property.
Directly across the creek from Independence Coal is the Marsh Fork Elementary School where 200 students are enrolled. There's a green-and-yellow play structure with slides, a small bridge and a cupola amidst a grassy play yard. There's a sports field behind the school with a scoreboard adorned with a Pepsi logo. Night lights are available for evening games. Freda Williams, an organizer with the advocacy group Coal River Mountain Watch, shudders at the thought of a slurry accident here. "I would really hesitate to say what would happen to all those school children," she says.
It's hard for her to come out and say that if anything like what happened at Buffalo Creek in 1972 or Martin County Coal in 2000 occurred here, the school would be buried within seconds. It's late in the afternoon, and no one's at the school now. But I ask Williams what school officials think about being so close to an impoundment.
"The coal companies can come into the school and distribute their T-shirts and literature, but those of us who are trying to educate the people on the conditions that surround the school and the area, we're not welcome," she replies. It's then that I notice a chain link fence topped with barbed wire that goes around the perimeter of the school grounds, an out-of-place security precaution for a small mountain town where most people leave their homes and cars unlocked.
The Independence Coal impoundment is just one concern for communities in and around Whitesville. What looms most ominously for them are plans to make the largest impoundment in the country at Brushy Fork. It now holds 5 billion gallons of slurry, and, according to Coal River Mountain Watch, it's scheduled to hold up to 9 billion gallons. Its dam is 950 feet tall. The Brushy Fork impoundment sits on top of underground mines, and it's engineered by the same firm that designed the 2 billion-gallon Martin County Coal slurry impoundment.
Williams is the daughter of a coal miner, a union man who was run out of so many coal companies that by the time Freda was 16 she'd attended 16 different schools. At her home in Whitesville, she proudly displays a picture of her father with a group of determined, hardworking men in suits. It was 1921, and they were the victorious defendants in the historic trial of the Blair Mountain Mine War, a labor struggle that pitted thousands of miners against federal troops. Freda sadly notes in the picture that four black men are segregated to the background, also in suits, allowed to partially share the historic moment with their white counterparts. Coal has always been a part of her life.
The mountainside near her home is one side of the hollow that makes up the natural basin of the Brushy Fork impoundment. She noticed the other day that mud was trickling down the slope. It could mean that slurry is pushing on an underground mine. Earlier in the day, as we drove down a two-lane road, she noticed gray water coming down a hillside, a telltale sign that slurry is leaking. She reported both sightings to MSHA.
Her perspective on the coal industry is very clear: "We're not against coal mining. We just want the coal mining to be done legally and responsibly."
Meanwhile, Jack Spadaro's fate sits in the hands of MSHA's deputy assistant secretary Correll, who's weighing the superintendent's appeal of his termination notice. Spadaro doesn't expect any sympathy from Correll, the target of one of his whistle-blowing activities.
Spadaro is just a few years from retirement and he stands to lose his pension. "I've been in federal government for 27 years, and this is the most lawless administration I have ever seen," he said. "They care nothing for the rights of their employees. They certainly care nothing about enforcing the laws they are charged with enforcing, and they run roughshod over anyone who might try to get them to obey the laws."
