Bathtub staining from mine water pollution in private home

From a News Report by Gareth Evans, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), February 11, 2019

[Wyoming County, WV] In the shadow of some of America’s most controversial coal mines, where companies use huge amounts of explosives to blow the tops off mountains, isolated communities say their water has been poisoned.

Now, they must decide if they will fight back against an industry they have relied upon for generations.

Casey wears a one-dollar wedding ring now. She bought the blue plastic band after her original ring was ruined by the toxic water that has been pumping into her home for more than a decade. “I just needed something there,” she says, as she holds the replacement ring up to the light. “I felt empty without it.” She places her original wedding band, now discoloured and corroded, in her palm. Her skin, especially on her hands, has become coarse and sore.

The taps in her house have been worn down, her washing machine frequently stops working, and her bathroom and kitchen have been stained a deep, bloody orange by the pollutants – iron, sulphur, even arsenic – that have seeped into her home’s water supply.

This is Appalachia – the heart of America’s coal country. It is home to some of the poorest and most isolated communities in the US and the legacy of mining, be it the abandoned processing plants or the scarred landscape, can be seen dotted alongside its vast highways.

Casey, who asked not to be identified by her real name, lives in a small, double-berth structure with a wooden porch in southern West Virginia. It’s a place where mobile phone reception is yet to reach. She pours a glass of water from her kitchen tap and lets it rest on a table. It has a strange smell and a sticky texture and within minutes begins to turn dark orange. A layer of black sediment soon sinks to the bottom of the glass.

“This is what we have to live with,” she says. “We don’t bathe in the water and we don’t cook with it. It stains our fingernails, our knuckles, and our clothes. It’s really, really difficult living like this.”

Casey and her husband Jack (not his real name), have two young children and drive for more than an hour to stock up on bottled water to drink and cook with. So who do they hold responsible?

“I’ve been here all my life, but when the surface [coal] mine came in that’s when the water started changing,” says Jack, who, despite being a miner himself, believes the industry is accountable for the family’s water problems. “I think if they’ve done wrong they should have to fix it.”

At the sprawling mine in the neighbouring valley, millions of pounds of explosives are being detonated on the mountaintops so that coal, buried deep below the surface, can be excavated.

This process is a type of surface mining known as mountaintop removal, and has drawn the ire not only of nearby residents but of environmental groups who say it devastates the landscape and pollutes the waterways.

One study estimates that an area the size of the state of Delaware has been flattened by this type of coal mining since it was first practised in the 1970s.

Another report by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that more than 2,000 miles of streams – a distance longer than the Mississippi river – have been buried by the excess rock and soil (known as overburden) that is dumped after the explosions.

And in a part of the world where many people rely on their own wells to get water, rather than a conventional, monitored, pipeline, any pollution from mining waste can have devastating consequences.

These private wells are essentially unregulated, so it is up to people like Casey and Jack to determine whether their water has been contaminated. But the complex nature of water pollution means many people are completely unaware of what’s entering their supply.

“When you dump a lot of overburden into the valley, and start covering up streams, you have water sources that end up travelling through the [waste] material,’ says Professor Michael McCawley, an environmental engineer who has spent time researching the health impacts of mountaintop removal.

“It’s kind of like dumping geological trash,” he explains. “It ends up increasing the concentration of acidic ions and metals [in the water], things like arsenic and nickel.” This pollution, according to his research, has taken a catastrophic toll on the health of those whose water supply lies in its path.

“This population is under assault from both water and air,” Professor McCawley says. “What we’re finding in the water is likely to cause inflammation in the body, which can set off a lot of other chronic diseases. “The big [problems] we have found are certainly cancers. Name a cancer and they’re seeing it here.”

When asked about cancer rates, Casey reels off a list of people living nearby who have been diagnosed in recent month. “Oh Lord everybody has been getting it,” she says. “It’s scary.”

Dr Wesley Lafferty, who is based in nearby Boone County, believes a number of health problems are being exacerbated by mining waste. “We get all kinds of symptoms,” he told Human Rights Watch last year. “Rashes, restrictive airway disease, dermatitis, generic skin disease. I definitely feel there is an environmental component to that.”

In a valley not far from Casey’s home, and sitting within earshot of the same mine that she says has caused her water contamination, Jason Walker is describing many of the same problems.

“My water was drinkable and clear before the mountaintop removal started,” he says. “But then it got worse. It smelt like rotten eggs and the colour of my sinks, faucets, all my laundry, turned orange.” He then had his water tested and was warned that it was so toxic that, if he washed his clothes in it, there was a risk that direct sunlight could set them on fire.

Jason now cooks with bottled water, but he has been collecting water from a nearby stream and treating it with swimming pool chemicals to supply his house. Last winter, after a spell of severe cold weather, he was forced to use an axe to cut through more than five inches of ice to access the stream water. But when the pipes he was using to pump it into his home froze solid he had to go without.

“I’m getting a new well drilled for $4,000 to keep myself from doing that again, even though I don’t know how good the water will be,” he says. “I took a loan out against our property to pay for it. It’s a huge gamble.

“My grandfather was a coal miner, my dad was a coal miner, but if the mines tear something up I think they should replace it. I want more regulations that actually help the little person and not the big person.”

In a telephone interview with the BBC, a spokesman for the company that owns the surface mine in Wyoming County said that it operated under strict state regulations and had a valid permit. “We view ourselves as pretty good neighbours and if somebody has an issue then we would address it,” said the spokesman for CM Energy, which took over the mine in 2017.

But when presented with the complaints of nearby residents, the spokesman declined to take responsibility and said the water contamination could have been caused by a number of different issues. “If we thought we were responsible then we would step up and try and do something about it,” the spokesman said. “If there’s something that our company can do to facilitate working with politicians and the local community then we would participate.”

The mine’s previous owner, Dynamic Energy, is facing a lawsuit from a number of residents – including Casey and Jack – who are seeking compensation for the costs of dealing with their water issues.

It won a similar lawsuit a few years ago, and Jason, who was part of that legal battle, said it left the entire community divided between those who supported the coal industry and those who wanted to fight back.

“There’s a lady down the street here who wouldn’t join the lawsuit,” he says. “She hasn’t spoken to me in almost two years because of it. They were scared it would mean losing jobs.”

Casey understands their concerns. “It’s how people make their living and support their families around here,” she says. “If you don’t work in the coal mines you either flip burgers or you have to move out of state and do something else.”

But her husband Jack says it wasn’t a difficult decision to join the latest legal action – even if he is a coal miner. “The only thing I really care about is getting fresh water the way it was when I was growing up around here,” he says. “I ain’t worried about the money. I just want clean water.”

Fragmented & Over-Developed Landscape

TITLE: Oil and gas development transforms landscapes

From a Report by Brady Allred, et al., The University of Montana, April 29, 2015

Researchers have conducted the first-ever broad-scale scientific assessment of how oil and gas development transforms landscapes across the US and Canada. A landscape transformed by broad-scale vegetation loss and fragmentation from oil and gas development is shown in the photo.

But what are the ecological consequences of this accelerated drilling activity? Researchers at the University of Montana have conducted the first-ever broad-scale scientific assessment of how oil and gas development transforms landscapes across the U.S. and Canada.

Their work was published April 24 in an article titled “Ecosystem services lost to oil and gas in North America” in Science. The article concludes that oil and gas development creates significant vegetation loss of rangelands and croplands across broad swaths of central North America.

Lead author Brady Allred said, “There are two important things here: First, we examine all of central North America, from the south coast of Texas to northern Alberta. When we look at this continental scale picture, we see impacts and degradation that are missed when focusing only at a local scale. Second, we see how present policies may potentially compromise future ecosystem integrity over vast areas.”

Allred and co-authors estimated that from 2000 to 2012 oil and gas development removed large amounts of rangeland vegetation, culminating at a rate per year of more than half of the annual grazing on U.S. public lands. Vegetation removed by this development on croplands is equivalent to 120.2 million bushels of wheat, approximately 13 percent of all wheat exported by the U.S. in 2013.

Fragmentation and loss of habitat also disrupts wildlife migration routes, alters wildlife behavior and assists new disruptive invasive plant species. Co-author Dave Naugle highlights the complexity of the issue: “We’ve known about the impacts of oil and gas development for years, but we now have scientific data from a broad regional scale that tells us we need to act now to balance these competing land uses.”

Furthermore, nearly half of wells drilled are in extreme- or high-water-stress regions. High-volume hydraulic fracturing uses 2 million to 13 million gallons of water per well, intensifying competition among agriculture, aquatic ecosystems and municipalities for water resources.

“We need a policy framework that quantifies and weighs major tradeoffs at large scales because current policy does not address both assessment and future mitigation adequately,” said co-author Julia Haggerty of Montana State University.

“Satellite technologies now can provide annual acre-by-acre information for land managers on oil-and-gas-driven land-use changes,” said Steve Running, a co-author and UM Regents Professor of Ecology. “We must have policies that ensure reclamation of this land after production has ended. Otherwise, by 2050, tens of millions of acres of land will be permanently degraded.”

The authors assessed the ecosystem services lost by using high-resolution satellite measurements of vegetation growth based on methods developed by co-author W. Kolby Smith and previous groundbreaking research by Running. Terrestrial plant production is the foundation of the biospheric carbon cycle and the basis for a multitude of critical ecosystem services.

>>> Brady Allred is assistant professor of rangeland ecology at UM’s College of Forestry and Conservation. Additional co-authors are W. Kolby Smith, a recent UM doctoral student now at the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota; Dirac Twidwell from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; and Samuel Fuhlendorf from Oklahoma State University <<<

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

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

Photo Displays of Mountain Destruction

WV Mountain Party:  “Resolution to Ban Extreme Extraction”

From Tom Rhule, Mountain Party of WV, October 26, 2014

On September 30, 2014, a quorum of the State Executive Council for the Mountain Party of West Virginia passed the following Resolution to ban extreme extraction by unanimous vote*:

WHEREAS in the wake of the West Virginia American Water Crisis the pollution in streams, rivers, and other source waters from the mountain top removal of coal and associated operations, as well as the high pressure high volume hydrofracking of the Marcellus have caused the serious decline of public health and the economies of communities across the State; and

WHEREAS WV Lawmakers continue to allow the injection of coal prep slurry into abandoned coal mines despite the mounting evidence that doing so has poisoned the source waters for a number of our rural communities; and

WHEREAS there is official government documentation that the State of West Virginia has improperly permitted wastewater containing toxic amounts of radium along with other hazardous waste byproducts from horizontally hydrofracking the Marcellus to be injected into Class II underground wells; and,

WHEREAS Class II underground injection wells were never designed for hazardous wastes and therefore are insufficient to properly sequester such wastes from our drinking water sources; and,

WHEREAS there are currently over seven hundred Class II underground injection wells as documented by the EPA within the borders of our State; and,

WHEREAS since 2007, improperly marked tanker trucks are known to have dumped hazardous Marcellus drilling waste fluid onto roadways, into rural streams, rivers, and abandoned coal mines within the borders of our State; and,

WHEREAS in 2011 it was reported to the Joint Legislative Oversight Commission on State Water Resources that many millions of gallons of the waters of the State were being diverted for use to high pressure horizontally hydrofrack the Marcellus, but 62 percent of which is not being properly accounted for by that industry; and,

WHEREAS in Sept. of 2011, when passing into law governor Tomblin’s Horizontal Well Act (H.B. 401), WV Lawmakers wrongfully assigned the WV Department of Environmental Protection to measure, regulate and report on the radioactive waste byproducts produced by high pressure horizontal hydrofracking, and,

Whereas the aforementioned HB 401 remains in direct conflict with West Virginia Code of State Regulations §64-23-16, the proper title being “Radiation Safety Requirements for Technologically Enhanced Radioactive Materials (TENORM),” which mandates all oversight and regulatory authority including measurement, storage, and disposal for such radioactive waste to West Virginia’s Department of Health and Human Resources where that agency’s health experts must be mandated to be properly trained to protect West Virginia’s citizens and their future generations from the ravages caused by the mishandling of TENORM; and,

WHEREAS during the last regular session of year 2013,, WV lawmakers passed Senate Bill 243 to amend governor Tomblin’s Horizontal Well Act which now grants drilling companies the right to keep from public scrutiny the countless proprietary chemicals which are known to be used during the hydraulic fracturing process; and,

Whereas SB 243 now enacted essentially prevents well owners and public water providers from knowing which particular chemicals may be in their source waters thus preventing proper monitoring against contamination; and,

WHEREAS by 2014, numerous water wells both private and publicly owned are now known to have been compromised by the careless mishandling of toxic chemicals and associated waste byproducts of high pressure high volume horizontal hydrofracking operations across the State; and,

WHEREAS the Bill of Rights to the West Virginia Constitution prominently places the health, safety and welfare of the People of the State above all corporate right to profit from the aforementioned fossil fuel industries as they are presently permitted by State and Federal regulators and their respective governments:

BE IT RESOLVED that we, the Citizens of the Great State of West Virginia and members of the Mountain Party call for the ban of all surface mine and high pressure horizontal hydrofracking operations within our borders because every chemical associated with these extraction industries must be safely handled, properly identified, registered, prominently labeled, and regulations enforced. This moratorium resolution shall include every chemical substance, whether used or produced, organic or inorganic, in every phase of each industrial process including mixing. use. storage, transport and disposal.

Be it further resolved that the Mountain Party believes that the long term negative economic and environmental consequences of the aforementioned extreme extraction fossil fuel industry techniques dwarf the short term economic benefits to the Great State of West Virginia, and that all political and legal means must be implemented to protect the health, safety, and welfare of her Citizens.

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*After the above Resolution to ban extreme extraction was passed, the following informational paragraph was proposed to be appropriately inserted in accordance with the timeline of the Resolution:

Whereas, in 2009, tests by the State of New York of 24 samples of Marcellus flowback from West Virginia and Pennsylvania hydrofracked wells revealed the presence in toxic quantities of 4-nitroquinoline 1-oxide, one of the most cancer-causing toxins known to man, for which the State of WV has not, and is not currently testing in any drinking water source; and, …

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Contact:  Tom Rhule,  Communications Director,  at:  mountainpartywv@gmail.com