Mountain Valley Pipeline to use 42” diameter pipe

From an Article by Ken Ward Jr., Staff Writer, Charleston Gazette, April 27, 2018

This article was produced in partnership with the ProPublica Local Reporting Network. ProPublica is supporting seven local and regional newsrooms this year, including the Gazette-Mail, as they work on important investigative projects affecting their communities.

More than 26 years ago, I wrote a story about a woman named Dixie Woolum.

I had been at my paper barely six months. At the time, I thought it would be cool that I’d get a dateline from Woolum’s hometown, Cinderella, W.Va. Little did I know then how much that story’s headline — “Broken promises” — really meant in the long history of West Virginia’s relationship with coal.

Woolum’s husband, Jimmy, was a coal miner who had died years earlier.

“Dixie Woolum packed her husband’s dinner bucket every morning,” I wrote. “Jimmy left early to work in the mines outside Williamson, heart of the billion-dollar coalfield.”

I was hoping to illustrate the financial distress faced at the time by Woolum and by thousands of people like her because of the potential collapse of the United Mine Workers of America’s health care plan for retired miners and their families. Miners like Jimmy Woolum thought they were promised health care for life in a long-ago deal between President Harry Truman and legendary UMWA President John L. Lewis.

In reality, protecting that health care has been an almost constant fight, part of the root of the bitter strikes against Pittston Coal and A.T. Massey Coal, the first two in an avalanche of coal operators who tried to stop funding miner benefits and pensions the union had won in its national contract.

Coal miners and coal communities are pretty used to broken promises by now.

Congress promised in 1969 to eliminate black lung disease. But thousands of miners — including Jimmy Woolum — continued to die from it. Today, though the industry knows how to prevent black lung, there’s a resurgence of the disease among miners in Central Appalachia.

Coalfield residents were promised that strip mines would be reclaimed, but most states haven’t required companies to set aside nearly enough money for cleanups, setting the stage for a financial crisis as the industry’s decline puts more and more companies at risk of failing.

Most of all, coalfield communities were promised prosperity — and today some of the places that have produced the most coal are among the region’s poorest.

How can this be?

It’s a crucial question to ask, especially at this critical time in West Virginia, as the state rushes forward with its new relationship with the natural gas industry.

Coal has done a lot for West Virginia. Generations of miners earned a good living, especially after the state’s coalfields were unionized. As Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., likes to remind people in Washington, coal helped win two world wars and built our nation into a global superpower.

The industry’s downsides are, if not always acknowledged by political leaders, well-documented. The great Appalachian historian John Alexander Williams listed coal’s “repetitive cycle of boom and bust, its savage exploitation of men and nature, and its seemingly endless series of disasters,” in an often-cited passage from his seminal history of the state.

And now, in the face of a major decline in the coal industry, families and entire communities that depended on it are hurting.

What will coal leave behind? Many in West Virginia are starting to understand the painful answers to that question: Abandoned mine lands, abandoned pension plans, polluted streams, empty government coffers — giant challenges for local communities in supporting schools and other basic needs.

At the same time, political leaders and business boosters are pointing to natural gas as the way out of West Virginia’s downward spiral, as the answer to our state’s economic problems.

But others worry that the state is headed down the same road with natural gas that it’s been on with coal.

We’ve just published a story detailing those similarities. Earlier this year, for example, Gov. Jim Justice proposed and then quickly backed away from a natural gas tax earlier to help fund our state’s schools. Gov. William Marland did the same thing with a proposed coal tax in the 1950s.

And Marland was far from the first to offer warnings about West Virginia’s wealth being dug from the ground and hauled out of state.

As early as 1884, a state Tax Commission report said, “The question is whether this vast wealth shall belong to persons who live here and who are permanently identified with the future of West Virginia, or whether it shall pass into the hands of persons who do not live here and care nothing for our state except to pocket the treasures which lie buried in our hills.”

In this series of stories, with the help of ProPublica, I hope to bring readers here in West Virginia, and those around the country, a clearer view of how history could be repeating itself.

For example, as my first story illustrates, West Virginia lawmakers and regulators have moved quickly to give gas developers broad latitude to operate, weakening environmental and public safety rules that govern the industry. Over the course of the year, I plan to more fully illustrate the ways the gas boom and what it brings with it are changing our communities and our landscape.

I also plan to look at the impact on workers. Are the jobs from the Marcellus Shale gas boom really going to West Virginians, or are companies bringing in seasoned hands from Texas and Oklahoma? Unlike our experience with coal, is West Virginia using the wealth created during this boom to plan and prepare for some day in the future when the gas is gone and we need a more diverse economy?

Who is in the room when decisions about the gas industry are being made? Are our communities empowered, or are government officials and gas lobbyists working out deals behind closed doors?

Hopefully, the stories about this crossroads in our state will shine some light on how West Virginia can learn from our past and the experience of people like Dixie Woolum. Follow along, and please tell us your stories, about your experience with the coal or the natural gas industry in West Virginia.

You can email us at changingwv@wvgazettemail.com or call 304-348-1702. You can also send us regular mail to Ken Ward Jr., Charleston Gazette-Mail, 1001 Virginia Street, East., Charleston, W.Va., 25301 Plus, we’ll be giving you more information in the days to come about how to take part in this conversation.

Reach Ken Ward Jr. at kward@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-1702, or follow @kenwardjr on Twitter.

Watching DEP Sec. Randy Huffman

WV-DEP’s Huffman: Strip-mine health studies deserve ‘closer look’

From an Article by Ken Ward Jr., Charleston Gazette, March 12, 2015

West Virginia’s top environmental regulator says studies that have found residents near mountaintop removal coal-mining operations face increased risks of serious illnesses and premature death deserve to be carefully examined by state and federal officials. “I think it is something that is worthy of a closer look,” said Randy Huffman, secretary of the state’s Department of Environmental Protection. “It is something that is worthy of consideration. The evidence that is being stated in some of the studies, that needs to be considered.”

He said a variety of agencies on the state and federal levels would need to be involved in any such project. He mentioned the state Bureau for Public Health, the federal Office of Surface Mining and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as logical participants.

“I can’t take a study that someone hands me and make a policy call to stop a particular practice just in one state,” Huffman added. “If you really want something changed, you’re not going to get that by just picking on [the] DEP.” These comments, made by Huffman during an interview earlier this week, come just days before an anti-mountaintop removal protest that citizen groups have scheduled for Monday outside the DEP’s Kanawha City headquarters, in Charleston.

Calling themselves “The People’s Foot” and the 11 a.m. event “No More MTR Permits Day,” the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition and other groups are promoting the protest as an effort to demand that the DEP stop approving mountaintop removal permits and to encourage Congress to pass legislation to address the issue. Billboards around the area say, “Stop the Poisoning.”

In a news advisory, the citizen groups said the DEP “continues to ignore the studies that show mountaintop removal is drastically harming our health and cutting our lives short.” “Time to put your foot down,” the advisory states. “No more mountaintop removal permits.” Bo Webb, a longtime mountaintop removal opponent and one of the protest organizers, said he was pleased to hear of Huffman’s comments.

While Huffman was already scheduled to be out of town the day of the protest, Webb and other citizen group leaders are expected to meet later in the day with DEP Deputy Secretary Lisa McClung, agency environmental advocate Wendy Radcliff and several other staffers, said DEP spokeswoman Kelley Gillenwater.

Former West Virginia University researcher Michael Hendryx and other scientists have, over the past few years, published more than two dozen peer-reviewed journal articles that examined the relationship between large-scale strip-mining operations in West Virginia and the health of residents who live near these mines.

The work has linked health and coal-mining data to show, among other things, that residents living near mountaintop removal mines face a greater risk of cancer, birth defects and premature death. Continuing research has tried to examine actual pollution levels near mining sites and in mining communities, to provide more answers about the potential impacts. The U.S. Geological Survey, though, has pulled funding for work its scientists were doing on mountaintop removal’s health effects.

Even as the studies have continued, though, state elected officials and other leaders have tried to dismiss or ignore the findings. Coal companies put together a $15 million research project, based at Virginia Tech, aimed at least partly at countering the health studies.

Coal industry lawyers have fought to keep the studies out of court cases over mining permits, and they are continuing an effort to investigate Hendryx’s work through a public-records lawsuit against WVU. In a Supreme Court filing, Alpha Natural Resources lawyers said the company needs the information “in order to evaluate the validity of the studies themselves and the conclusions reached in the Hendryx articles.”

Huffman noted that the DEP did commission a $250,000 report that examined some aspects of air pollution from blasting associated with mountaintop removal.  “It’s not the last word on it or anything, but it adds to the body of knowledge out there,” Huffman said.

Gillenwater said the DEP report “showed that air quality near a Raleigh County operation was within a normal, safe range, even during blasting.” She said the DEP “has reviewed and will continue to look at several studies” on the issue, but that, “there is currently no conclusive data that would result in changes to the permit application review process.”

Hendryx, who now works at Indiana University, said the state’s report took samples in the wrong locations and also did not focus on the very tiny particles of rock and dust from strip-mine blasting that recent research has said creates “elevated risks to humans.”

Also, Hendryx noted that, since the state report was written, peer-reviewed journal articles have tied living near mountaintop removal operations to lung cancer and to blood inflammation that is predictive of cardiovascular disease.

“An analogy of a partially completed jigsaw puzzle may serve as illustration of the overall state of evidence in this area,” Hendryx wrote in the blood inflammation paper, published just last month. “Some of the puzzle pieces represent environmental evidence for impaired air and water quality caused by mining and present in mining communities. Some represent epidemiological evidence from mortality and morbidity data. Some represent laboratory evidence of biological harm caused by particulate matter from mining communities.

“The newly discovered piece presented in this paper shows evidence for biological impact among people living in mining communities,” he wrote. “All of these pieces are not yet put together into a single picture. The missing connectors will measure environmental exposure, dose, and biological impact all among the same persons who live in mining communities versus controls who do not.”

See also:  www.FrackCheckWV.net and  www.Marcellus-Shale.us

The Charleston Gazette reported on July 26 that the governor’s office has refused a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from that newspaper to release records of correspondence between Acting Governor Earl Ray Tomblin and the oil and gas industry relating to Marcellus shale gas regulation.

Letters from individuals and environmental groups were shared with The Charleston Gazette, but correspondence between the Governor’s office and representatives of the oil and gas industry and related trade groups were withheld.  Per the Gazette, “(Kurt)Dettinger, (Tomblin’s General Counsel), said the Governor’s Office “consulted with members of the industry seeking their opinions and advice and we believe the opinions and advice on a regulatory proposal are exempt under West Virginia’s FOIA statute.”   Dettinger stated that withheld correspondence was part of the “deliberative process” and as such exempt from FOIA.

Full story in Charleston Gazette by Ken Ward, Jr.