by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jan 10, 2014 | Toxification
By Ashley Southall and Timothy Williams / New York Times
Nearly 200,000 people in Charleston, W.Va., and nine surrounding counties were without drinking water on Friday after a chemical spill contaminated supplies, the West Virginia governor’s office said.
Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin said early Friday in a statement that the federal government had approved a request of assistance in dealing with the chemical spill into the Elk River, which flows into the Kanawha River at Charleston.
“West Virginians in the affected service areas are urged not to use tap water for drinking, cooking, washing or bathing,” Mr. Tomblin said in declaring a state of emergency. The warning affected customers of the West Virginia American Water Company in Boone, Cabell, Clay, Jackson, Kanawha, Lincoln, Logan, Putnam and Roane Counties.
Many stores in the area quickly ran out of bottled water Thursday night as residents rushed to stock up, according to local news media reports. Restaurants and businesses closed, and The Associated Press reported that schools as well as the State Legislature had canceled sessions on Friday.
The spill was discovered Thursday at a storage facility about a mile north of a water treatment plant on the Elk River, where a 48,000-gallon tank began leaking 4-Methylcyclohexane Methanol, or MCHM, a compound used to wash coal of impurities, according to the state’s Department of Environmental Protection.
The chemical leaked from a hole in the bottom of the tank and then filled an overflow container before spilling into the river, said Thomas J. Aluise, a spokesman for the agency.
It is not clear how much of the chemical flowed into the river, which Mr. Aluise said looked like “cooking oil floating on top of the water.”
The chemical, which smells like licorice, is not toxic, but can cause headaches, eye and skin irritation, and difficulty breathing from prolonged exposures at high concentrations, according to the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists.
Freedom Industries, the company that owns the storage tank, has not responded to emails seeking comment.
Liza Cordeiro, a spokeswoman for the State Department of Education, said schools in at least five counties would be closed Friday.
On the Facebook page of the West Virginia American Water Company, dozens of residents expressed concern that they had not been immediately told about the chemical leak or the potential for health risks.
“Yeah, so I’m six months pregnant and drank tap water at a restaurant about an hour before the notice was sent out,” one woman wrote.
From The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/11/us/west-virginia-chemical-spill.html?_r=0
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 24, 2013 | Protests & Symbolic Acts, Toxification
By Mountain Justice
Three residents of Central Appalachia and supporters with Mountain Justice chained themselves to an industrial tank of black water in front of Alpha Natural Resources’ Bristol, Va., headquarters to protest Alpha’s mountaintop removal strip mining and coal slurry operations across the region.
“I’m risking arrest today because mountaintop removal has to end now for the future viability of Appalachia,” says Emily Gillespie of Roanoke, Va., whose work with the Mountain Justice movement is inspired by Appalachian women’s history of non-violent resistance. The tank of water represents coal contamination from affected communities across the Appalachian region.
The group called for Alpha to stop seeking an expansion of the Brushy Fork coal slurry impoundment in Raleigh County, W.Va. “We want Kevin Crutchfield, CEO of Alpha Natural Resources, to produce a signed document expressing that they won’t seek the expansion of the Brushy Fork Impoundment before we leave,” Junior Walk, 23, from the Brushy Fork area said.
“I live downstream from Alpha’s Brushy Fork coal slurry impoundment on Coal River. If that impoundment breaks, my whole family would be killed,” Walk said, “Even if it doesn’t, we’re still being poisoned by Alpha’s mining wastes everyday. I’m here to bring the reality of that destruction to the corporate authorities who are causing it, but who don’t have to suffer its consequences.”
More than 20 peer-reviewed studies since 2010 demonstrate a connection between mountaintop removal coal mining operations and increased cases of kidney, lung, and heart diseases, as well as increased birth defects and early mortality. The ACHE act, currently in sub committee in Washington, calls for a moratorium on new mountaintop removal operations until a definitive, non-partisan study can demonstrate the reason for these community health emergency levels of health impacts.
The impoundment at Brushy Fork holds back almost 5 billion gallons of toxic sludge and is considered the largest earthen dam in the Western hemisphere. Recently leaked records show that coal slurry impoundments in Appalachia failed 59 out of 73 total structural tests performed by the Office of Surface Mining. “Alpha is only profitable because they’re allowed to gamble with our lives—and we’re the ones who pay the cost of their negligence and toxic pollution,” Walk said.
Alpha has lost numerous lawsuits relating to pollution from mining wastes in recent years, but they continue to violate safety regulations and expand their hazardous operations.
After refusing to take responsibility for the massive floods caused by the King Coal Highway and their destructive mountaintop removal mining practices, Alpha continues to push forward similar projects, such as the controversial Coalfields Expressway in Virginia.
From Mountain Justice: http://mountainjustice.org/events.php?id=245
You can support the Mountain Justice legal fund here: https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_flow&SESSION=rz2f3BpZzTXerYXJ2w8VcOfrYjnxsKfKZd8OHROTTFFg6xVKjvMCbhb8qh0&dispatch=5885d80a13c0db1f8e263663d3faee8d14f86393d55a810282b64afed84968ec
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 17, 2012 | Lobbying, Mining & Drilling
By Ken Ward, Jr. / West Virginia Gazette Mail
Patriot Coal has agreed to phase out mountaintop removal and other forms of strip mining, in a move Patriot officials say is in the best interests of their company, its employees and the communities where it operates.
In a deal with citizen groups and environmentalists, Patriot said it would never seek new permits for large-scale surface mining operations, according to details of the settlement that were made public in federal court Thursday afternoon.
St. Louis-based Patriot can continue some existing and smaller mining projects, but must also implement a cap on surface production and eventually stop all strip mining when existing coal leases expire.
Ben Hatfield, president and CEO of Patriot, said the plan should help his company emerge from bankruptcy, focus on underground mining, and curb mountaintop removal’s effects on coalfield communities.
“Patriot Coal recognizes that our mining operations impact the communities in which we operate in significant ways,” Hatfield told U.S. District Judge Robert C. Chambers. “We believe the proposed settlement will result in a reduction of our environmental footprint.”
The deal does not require Patriot to immediately close any mines or lay off any workers. The company must cut corporate-wide surface production starting in 2014, and gradually reduce it to no more than 3 million tons annually — less than half of 2011 surface output — by 2018.
Patriot, the second largest producer of surface-mined coal in West Virginia, becomes the first U.S. coal operator to announce plans to abandon mountaintop removal, a controversial practice linked to serious environmental damage and coalfield public health problems.
“Patriot’s decision that mountaintop removal and other large surface mines are not in its best interests is the inevitable conclusion for any mining company that actually has to pay the costs of the environmental harm it creates,” said Joe Lovett, an Appalachian Mountain Advocates lawyer who negotiated the deal with Patriot on behalf of the Sierra Club, the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy and the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition.
Lawyers for both sides unveiled the settlement — which has quietly been in the works for months — during a surprisingly low-key hearing in U.S. District Court in Huntington.
Unlike most developments involving West Virginia’s coal industry, elected officials and other government leaders did not rush Thursday to issue public statements offering their views on the Patriot settlement.
From The West Virginia Gazette Mail
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jul 31, 2012 | Mining & Drilling, Toxification
By Duke University
Water pollution from surface coal mining has degraded more than 22 percent of streams and rivers in southern West Virginia to the point they may now qualify as impaired under state criteria, according to a new study by scientists at Duke and Baylor universities.
The study, published this week in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Science & Technology, documents substantial losses in aquatic insect biodiversity and increases in salinity linked to sulfates and other pollutants in runoff from mines often located miles upstream.
“Our findings offer concrete evidence of the cumulative impacts surface mining is having on a regional scale,” said Emily S. Bernhardt, associate professor of biogeochemistry at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. “The relationship is clear and direct: The more mining you have upstream, the higher the biological loss and salinity levels will be downstream, and the farther they will extend.”
Numerous recent studies have demonstrated the water-quality problems caused at or near the site of individual surface coal mines, Bernhardt noted. So she and her team “set out to understand how the large and growing number of surface mines is affecting water quality throughout Appalachia.”
They used NASA satellite images and computer data to map the extent of surface mining taking place across a 12,000-square-mile area of the southern West Virginia coalfields between 1976 and 2005.
They found that companies had converted more than 5 percent of the land into mine sites and buried 480 miles of streams beneath adjacent valley fills during this period.
By overlaying the map with chemical and biological data from 223 streams the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection sampled in the study area between 1997 and 2007, the researchers determined that pollution runoff from the mines could substantially degrade more than 1,400 miles of streams in the region – four times the length of streams buried below the valley fills.
“It’s important to recognize that surface coal mining pollution doesn’t stop at mine-permit boundaries,” said Brian D. Lutz, a postdoctoral associate in Bernhardt’s lab.
“Our analysis suggests that mining only 5 percent of the land surface is degrading between 22 percent and 32 percent of the region’s rivers,” he said.
Substantial declines in insect diversity began to occur when companies had mined as little as 1 percent of upstream land, the analysis showed. In areas where companies had converted about 5 percent of the land into mines, sensitive species such as mayflies and stoneflies had vanished or declined to an extent that the streams would qualify as biologically impaired under criteria set by the state of West Virginia.
The designation means the streams could be placed on a list of waterways that the state must take steps to rehabilitate.
“What is so compelling is that we found many different types of organisms are lost downstream of surface coal mines, and most of them begin to disappear at similar levels of mining,” said Ryan S. King, associate professor of biology at Baylor. “Our analysis shows that coal mining is leading to widespread declines in aquatic biodiversity in Appalachian streams.”
Lutz and King co-authored the paper with Bernhardt. Other coauthors were John P. Fay, instructor of geospatial analysis at the Nicholas School; Catherine E. Carter, a 2010 master’s graduate of the Nicholas School, now at TetraTech; Ashley M. Helton, postdoctoral associate in Duke’s Department of Biology; John Amos of SkyTruth; and David Campagna, of Campagna & Associates.
The study was supported by unrestricted gifts in support of research from The Foundation for the Carolinas and the Sierra Club, and through a contract to Amos and Campagna from Appalachian Voices.
From Duke University
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jul 29, 2012 | Mining & Drilling, Obstruction & Occupation, Worker Exploitation
By Charles Suggs, RAMPS organizer
More than 50 protesters affiliated with the R.A.M.P.S. Campaign have walked onto Patriot Coal’s Hobet mine and shut it down. Ten people locked to a rock truck, boarded it and dropped banners: ”Coal Leaves, Cancer Stays.” At least three have been arrested, with another in a tree being threatened by miners with a chain saw. Earlier in the day, two people were arrested at Kanawha State Forest before a group of protesters headed to the state capitol.
“The government has aided and abetted the coal industry in evading environmental and mine safety regulations. We are here today to demand that the government and coal industry end strip mining, repay their debt to Appalachia, and secure a just transition for this region,” Dustin Steele of Matewan, W.Va. said. Steele was one of the people locked to the rock truck.
Mounting scientific evidence shows that strip mining negatively impacts community health and miner health. Recent studies have found a 42 percent increase in risk of birth defects around strip mines, and miners who spend at least 20 years as strip-mine drillers have a 61 percent chance of contracting silicosis, a virulent form of black lung. “The coal companies are poisoning our water and air, and they’re treating the workers no better than the land – fighting workplace health and safety protections to get the most out of labor as they can,” said Junior Walk of Whitesville, W.Va.
As coal production declines, protesters are concerned that the region will be left with only illness and environmental devastation as the industry pulls out of the region and companies file for bankruptcy to shed legacy costs.
Patriot Coal is currently going through Chapter 11 bankruptcy, in which union contracts and pensions could be on the chopping block. Both UMWA pensions and the state’s Special Reclamation Fund are funded through a per-ton tax on coal. With Central Appalachian coal production in the middle of a projected six-year, 50 percent decline, this funding stream is increasingly unsustainable. Protesters are calling on the coal industry and government to ensure that funding is available both to honor commitments to retired workers and to restore the land.
“Coal companies must employ their surface mine workers in reclaiming all disturbed land to the highest standards. Instead of arguing about the ‘war on coal,’ political leaders should immediately allocate funds to retrain and re-employ laid off miners to secure a healthy future for the families of this region,” said R.A.M.P.S. spokesperson Mathew Louis-Rosenberg.
Appalachian communities, from union miners to the anti-strip mining activists of the 1960s, have a proud history of confronting the coal industry and demanding an end to its exploitive practices with direct civil disobedience. R.A.M.P.S. and other campaigns have returned to this tradition to eliminate strip mining once and for all. Since its founding in 2011, R.A.M.P.S. has organized a range of actions, from tree-sits to blockades of coal trucks.
Today’s protesters are among the hundreds of people across the country who are joining this summer’s National Uprising Against Extraction, using radical tactics to fight oppressive extractive industries and demand a transition to a sustainable economy.
From We Are Power Shift:
You can help support RAMPS by making a donation here: https://www.wepay.com/donate/57022?ref=widget&utm_medium=widget&utm_campaign=donation
