This article originally provided by The Register-Herald

October 16, 2006

Residents want study on coal slurry runoff

Mannix Porterfield
Register-Herald Reporter

CHARLESTON — Scott Simonton shook the small jar of water so that a black residue in the bottom mixed thoroughly with the liquid, producing thick, brackish water.

“It’s awful,” the assistant professor of environmental science at Marshall University told a panel of lawmakers Monday.

“It’s bad. It’s the worst I’ve ever seen. I don’t think that anybody should drink it. They shouldn’t.”

The problem is, many do ingest that kind of water, contaminated by runoff from coal slurry when it reaches wells or other sources of water.

Scientists teamed with coalfield residents at a two-hour hearing to ask lawmakers for a special study on the effects of coal slurry in drinking water with an eye toward rectifying the so-called “gob piles,” common in coal-producing counties for decades.

There are some 150 coal waste sites in West Virginia.

“The sad part about all of this is ... we have an alternate system than pumping slurry blindly into the ground and into drinking water,” Jack Spadaro, former superintendent of the Mine Safety and Health Academy in Beckley, advised lawmakers.

Spadaro said a dry filter process can be used by coal firms to reverse the existing contamination.

“They are economical and can be used in any coal preparation facility,” he said.

For some coaltown residents, who eschew such water for drinking, the problem doesn’t end there, explained Dawn Seeburger, owner of Environmental Resources and Consultants in Elkview, since it is used for cooking purposes.

Consequently, the water is assimilated by the food, such as when potatoes are boiled and the liquid must be replenished, and even higher concentrations result as the food is ingested, Seeburger explained.

Already, she told Judiciary Subcommittee B, there is evidence of ruined tooth enamel, thyroid difficulties, fatigue and a host of other maladies caused by “heavy metal” concentrations in water.

“I find that totally objectionable,” she said.

For some Mingo County residents, the health setbacks attributed to slurry injections has run far more serious than trips to the dentist.

Donetta Blankenship of Rawl told legislators she has been diagnosed with liver complications linked to a high level of copper in her body from drinking water.

“I don’t go around eating pennies,” she said, trying to muster a laugh at her problems.

“I never drank. Thank God, I can say that. I never did anything to cause this.”

Another resident of the region, Debbie Sammons, who lives in Lick Creek, said her 6-year-old son was beset with unstoppable vomiting one evening, and the initial diagnosis was a virus. A second such episode led to a different medical conclusion — toxic environmental poison.

In fact, all in her household have been struggling with kidney stones.

“Every house you go to, you’re going to find the same thing,” she said of the soiled water supply.

Not only are health hazards in evidence from coal impoundments, but danger is another factor, suggested Davitt McAteer, former assistant secretary of Mine Health and Safety Administration.

McAteer said West Virginia “took the lead” in protecting coal mine impoundments against collapse after the Feb. 26, 1972, disaster in Buffalo Creek, where a dam failed and unleashed a tidal wave that wiped out an 18-mile string of mining towns, leaving a known 125 people dead.

Although an impoundment above a grade school in Marsh Fork, Raleigh County, meets Department of Environmental Protection standards, McAteer called for another safeguard — moving the school a safe distance away.

“You shouldn’t have a schoolhouse below an impoundment,” said McAteer, now director of a coal impoundment project and vice president for government affairs at Wheeling Jesuit University.

“It just doesn’t make good sense. If you can’t move the impoundment, move the schoolhouse.”

A slide show run by another Wheeling Jesuit official, biology professor Ben Stout III, showed high levels of arsenic, barium, selenium, iron and maganese in wells sampled for his research. A high concentration of arsenic was discovered in one man’s water heater.

Blankenship used her time to zero in on a political campaign vehicle run by a man with her same last name — Massey Energy chief Don Blankenship — known as “And For The Sake Of The Kids.”

“If it’s for the sake of them,” she asked lawmakers, “why are they having to worry about is their Mommy going to die?”

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mannix@register-herald.com