Kentucky Community Devastated by Coal Mine Sludge Spill Volume exceeds oil dumped by Exxon Valdez Peter T. Kilborn, New York Times Saturday, December 30, 2000

©2000 San Francisco Chronicle

URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/12/30/MN177766.DTL

Inez, Ky. -- Prentice Maynard was leaving for work before daybreak on Oct. 11 when he noticed that Coldwater Creek was unusually high as it flowed under his bridge to the road.

By 7:40, when his wife, Janice, left their trailer for her job in town, the creek was an eerily still, glistening black goo that could hold a stick upright.

"I thought, 'It's like pudding,' " Maynard said. "It was overflowing the stream bed. At 4:45, when I got home, it was over the driveway."

For three days the goo rose and spread. It swamped gardens and lawns along the six miles of eastern Kentucky's Coldwater Creek, coating its banks and bottom and those of neighboring 15-mile Wolf Creek to thicknesses of up to 6 feet.

Maynard's pudding was 250 million gallons of coal-mining sludge. A slurry of watered-down coal particles, dirt, rock, clay and traces of heavy metals, it had burst through the bottom of A.T. Massey Coal Co.'s lifeless 72-acre, 2. 2 billion-gallon waste lagoon, which sits atop this Appalachian county's struggling -- and now terrified -- hollows.

For five hours starting just before midnight, 10 feet of the 90-foot depth of the lagoon raced through abandoned mines, smashing concrete seals that the company thought strong enough to contain a spill, and then shot out of two mine entries and into the creeks.

The sludge created an environmental disaster, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, suffocating aquatic life -- salamanders, frogs, fish and big snapping turtles -- as it moved downstream. It has also worsened the economic disaster in this backwater pocket of central Appalachia, where, with the din of tank trucks and pumps running constantly, the cleanup is only half finished.

Briefly before the spill, this place had some hope in the pending arrival of two new employers. On high ground six miles away, a casket company is expected to open a shop that might employ 30 or 40 workers, and in two years a maximum security federal prison will open and employ about 200 local people.

Now any future employer will have to weigh the risks of another visit of sludge.

"We were making some progress when this disaster hit," said Garry R. Lafferty, the county's deputy judge executive, its second-highest-ranking administrator. "It really backs you up."

Martin County's torrent of sludge was more than 20 times the volume of the Exxon Valdez's crude-oil spill in Alaska 11 years ago. Among coal-mining spills, it was twice that of its biggest forerunner, 28 years ago in Buffalo Creek, W.Va., which killed 125 people and swallowed 500 homes. This time, though, no one was hurt.

A touchy issue involving industry, jobs and the environment, it drew a few headlines but little national interest.

As the spill rolled into 100 miles of rivers and streams, clogging water- treatment plants and forcing schools, restaurants, laundries and a power plant to close before dispersing at the Ohio River, Gov. Paul E. Patton of Kentucky, a Democrat and former coal-mine operator, declared a 10-county emergency.

Inez, population 470 and sinking, is where President Lyndon B. Johnson announced his War on Poverty in 1964. "I was a college kid then," said John Kirk, a lawyer in town who has filed a class-action suit for 200 homeowners against Massey and its local subsidiary, Martin County Coal Corp. "What Johnson did, more than anything else, was give an injection of optimism to this little place."

In the 1970s, coal companies swooped in, leasing and buying hundreds of square miles of rolling hills and valleys. The land below ground became honeycombed with tunnels and shafts. With strip mining above ground, mountaintops became mesas.

In return, the industry delivered wages, jobs and home-building. According to Ron Crouch, director of the Kentucky State Data Center at the University of Louisville, coal-mine employment leaped nearly tenfold, to 3,156 in 1980 from 364 a decade earlier. The county's population rose to 13,925 from 9,377, before beginning a gradual decline.

Personal incomes, once just above half the state average, reached the average by 1980. Middle-class homes and new trailers sprouted near eastern Kentucky hovels along Coldwater and Wolf creeks. The poverty rate, over 50 percent at the start of the War on Poverty, fell by half.

But automation took away mining jobs, and coal prices began to plunge, to just over $20 a ton today from nearly $40 at their peak. The boom began to fizzle, and today mine employment has dropped below 900, while wages have slipped. And with no one yet willing to buy into the path of another spill, home values along the two creeks have collapsed.

Why the October spill happened, in particular why the seals broke, is still being investigated.

By most accounts, a computer operator noticed that a conveyor belt carrying coal had stopped. Workers who were sent to check it found sludge from the lagoon pouring into a cavity, like water through a bathtub drain, near the shore on one side.

From there, said Fred Stroud, the Environmental Protection Agency official at the scene who leads the federal cleanup, the sludge roared through the Swiss cheese of underground mines near the lagoon walls, breaking through the two sets of seals.

Stroud said one stream then poured out of one mine entrance, over a ravine and into the headwaters of Coldwater Creek. He said the other appeared to have run a longer course through the mines, slowing down as it spilled into Wolf Creek.

The man on the hot seat here is Dennis Hatfield, president of Martin County Coal and the son of a retired local miner. He lives nearby with his wife and two children and teaches Sunday school. It is rare to hear an unkind word about him, if not about the company he runs. "He frogged and fished in the creeks," Lafferty said.

Hatfield has been deeply apologetic. Partly under orders from the state, which has cited the company for engaging in unsafe practices, Martin County Coal is picking up the cost of a cleanup, estimated at $40 million to $60 million. "We've got 500 people and 300 pieces of equipment working on this cleanup," Hatfield said.

Within hours of the spill, he was on the phone to homeowners in its path, offering motel rooms, groceries, driveway clearing, topsoil for the ruined gardens, and new bridges.

The company attributes the spill to an act of God, a claim that stirs derision in this heavily Baptist community. Hatfield is less certain. "I don't know what happened," he said. "I don't think anybody else does." With lawsuits building against it, the company has taken some extra measures, like installing a Massey public relations man.

The company bought a used four-wheel-drive vehicle so Prentice Maynard can reach his trailer and the red barn where he keeps 20 beagles; and it leased an apartment for Janice Maynard, who says she is too frightened to return home. But she calls the gestures meaningless. "I want them to buy me out," she said. "I want my life back."

Up Coldwater Road from the Maynards, closer to the mining site, Glenn Cornette, a 66-year-old retired strip miner, and his wife, Shirley, 60, feel the same. Their trailer is next to that of their daughter and son-in-law, Patty and Edward McGinnis, and near the crumbling little house where Edward McGinnis was born.

Around 3 that October morning, Edward McGinnis was getting ready to give his wife a ride to Grandad's Diner, where she would begin preparing breakfast for early-rising miners. On the road outside his trailer, Edward McGinnis said he saw a company guard watching the rising creek.

"I asked him," McGinnis said, "'Have you got a pond break?' He said: 'We got one seeping a little bit. It's just a seep. It will be all right.' " Later,

when Glenn Cornette arose, he said he told his wife that it looked like mud to him. "Steam was coming off of it," he said.

As the daylight broke, the sludge kept rising and flooding the land where he raises vegetables. "I caught a big turtle that was going for high ground," Glenn Cornette said. It was a foot-long snapper, caked with mud, he said. "I took him in and washed him off," and then put him in an unaffected stream nearby, Cornette said.

This was not the lagoon's first big leak. Six years ago, more than 100 million gallons, mostly water, escaped, doing little damage. The Mine Safety and Health Administration, a Labor Department agency, found inadequate sealing around the lagoon. The state fined the company $1,600. A plan was prepared with the federal agency to reinforce the lagoon, and the company agreed to adopt it.

©2000 San Francisco Chronicle Page A20

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), December 30, 2000