Posts tagged West Virginia
Stories about America's second-largest waste stream.
Bruce Mansfield’s coal-ash waste has been stored at the 1,300-acre Little Blue Run facility since 1974, when there was no requirement for lining such an impoundment, a fact opponents of the impoundment touted throughout the consent decree process. Bruce Mansfield produces about 550,000 tons of fly ash and 98,000 tons of bottom ash per year.
We are unfortunate enough to have settled and built our homes very close to the Little Blue coal ash unlined impoundment.
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Neighborhoods are being destroyed with water containment construction and littered with empty houses First Energy has bought, while some of us stay and fight the fight. Our soil is contaminated, our property values have significantly dropped, air pollution has significantly increased, and other health issues have increased. We are even told not to eat the vegetables that we grow in our backyards.You might direct us to our State Representative, but in fact Rep. McKinley is one of the biggest beneficiaries of big energy’s political contributions, and has sponsored bills in Congress to help the energy and coal companies by not regulating coal ash as a hazardous waste. When it comes to science and geology, I guess Rep. McKinley knows more than the EPA or his businesses benefit from using coal ash as part of his raw materials.
Letter to the editor by Richard Fineman, The Review
Special report: The new face of black lung -- Coal Tattoo
BY Ken Ward., Jr., The West Virginia Gazette
July 2012
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Across the Appalachian coalfields these days, it’s hard to go anywhere without hearing about what mining lobbyists and political leaders call the Obama administration’s “war on coal.”
Radio ads blare the message of lost jobs and stalled permits. Lawmakers propose measures to block U.S. Environmental Protection Agency air pollution rules. Industry lobby groups and state officials pursue lawsuits to stop new water quality guidance on mountaintop removal mining.
Seldom mentioned by coal industry advocates is a little-noticed move by their allies in Congress to delay — and potentially end altogether — another Obama effort, this one aimed at saving the lives of thousands of coal miners.
It happened in mid-December 2011, in a legislative maneuver that got little media attention. The tactic and its potential impacts certainly avoided the sort of outcry that has come each time the EPA proposed new restrictions on mountaintop removal mining or the disposal of toxic coal ash.
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West Virginia regulators have not adequately examined the risks that coal-slurry impoundments across the state could break into adjacent underground mine workings and cause a disaster like the one more than a decade ago in Martin County, Ky., federal investigators said in a report released Thursday.
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Officials from OSM and DEP both emphasized that the federal review found no evidence of an “imminent threat” of a breakthrough, but the study examined only 15 of the industry’s existing 132 slurry impoundments. OSM said it plans similar studies in six other states: Kentucky, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Virginia.
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While regulators and industry officials say these facilities are safe, coalfield residents have lived in fear of coal-slurry dams since February 1972, when the collapse of a series of dams on Buffalo Creek in Logan County killed 125 people.
A short documentary about Little Blue, America’s largest coal ash pond.
From the film’s YouTube page:
Published on Jan 1, 2013
Hear the stories of citizens in Beaver County, Pennsylvania and Hancock County, West Virginia. They’ve lived around Little Blue Run Dam, one of the larges coal ash impoundments in the U.S., for 35 years. Filmed in 2012.
COAL ASH: Battle lines form as sprawling dump leaks into W.Va. neighborhood -Greenwire
“It’s equivalent to seven fire hoses,” Curt Havens said, describing one outflow. “If you lay seven fire hoses side by side, that’s how much water is coming through there.”
Neighbors blame the 1,700-acre Little Blue Run coal ash dump — an unlined impoundment that straddles the border with Pennsylvania and has for decades been a repository for combustion waste from FirstEnergy Corp.’s Bruce Mansfield coal power plant near Shippingport, Pa. The waste travels several miles through an underground pipe.
Environmental advocates argue the dump — which neighbors say is several hundred feet deep in places and can look light sapphire blue from the sky — is emblematic of the pollution that dozens of such facilities are causing. They want U.S. EPA to force them to close
A woman stands with a coal miner in Holden, West Virginia, 1938, by B. Anthony Stewart
Little Blue Run coal ash lawsuit case files online
Public Justice is co-counsel with the Environmental Integrity Project for Little Blue Regional Action Group, a citizens group in Pennsylvania that is contesting the coal ash disposal practices of FirstEnergy, the owner of the nation’s largest coal ash disposal site, Little Blue Run. The coal ash pond/dump covers 1,700 acres and spans the Pennsylvania-West Virginia border.
(Source: publicjustice.net)
Coal miner (still) lost in a slurry pond in West Virginia
With a driver and his bulldozer missing in a thick, dark lake of coal slurry, a mine safety expert and critic of the coal industry says regulators are ignoring stricter construction standards that could prevent more failures at hundreds of similar dam-like structures around the country.
