Sludge Slinging

Coal mining is a nasty business, especially in water-rich West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania. Precipitation, running off the stumps of mountains hacked down by coal companies or up from deep mines, picks up sulfuric acid, coal dust, and heavy metals that magnify through the food chain. But that's just what flows unimpeded into streams. Because Appalachian coal is associated with all manner of impurities, it must be washed with chemical flocculants before it can be burned. The rinse water is even worse than the runoff—blacker, more viscous, more toxic. “Sludge” it's called.

Like “overburden,” the industry's word for everything that isn't coal, sludge is dumped on streams—except usually not on purpose and never legally. Coal companies attempt to contain it by damming up valleys. Sometimes the dams fail; more often the impounded sludge blows out through old mine shafts. Almost all of the 653 active sludge reservoirs in the United States are in Appalachia, and 230 of them are built over underground mines.

The danger to fish, wildlife, and people is enormous, but lessons aren't being learned, precautions aren't being taken, and federal culpability is being denied. Meanwhile, the Bush administration is trying to do away with the few rules that control sludge production and “mountaintop mining,” as the administration and industry like to call it, or “mountaintop removal,” as everyone else calls it. But thanks to a smart, tough mining engineer named Jack Spadaro, the White House appears to be learning one important lesson about the dangers of uncontrolled coal extraction: Few political messes are harder to cover up than sludge spills.

But first some history. On February 26, 1972, a dam owned by Pittston Coal Company failed, sending a tidal wave of sludge through 17 communities along Buffalo Creek in Logan County, West Virginia. One survivor—Patty Adkins, now of Barboursville—told me this: “The water kept getting higher. And we saw all this debris—heaters and furniture and car parts. Then we heard this loud noise, and all this water came rushing around the bend, breaking loose houses and carrying them off. We saw an old couple in their truck get washed away. The McCoys' house had washed down and lodged at the train trestle, and these two men pulled out a woman's body. They put her beside the tracks, and one of the men took his raincoat off and covered her up. My sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Ramey, and her husband died.” In all, 125 people were killed and 4,000 left homeless. Pittston blamed God, claiming it was His “act.” Although the company settled with the victims for $25 million, it settled with the state for just $1 million in a deal accepted by then governor Arch Moore, later convicted for taking a bribe from another coal company.

Spadaro, at this writing employed by the U.S. Department of Labor's Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA, pronounced “EM-sha”), is among the leading experts on sludge spills. At the time of the Buffalo Creek tragedy, he was a 23-year-old instructor at West Virginia University's School of Mines, one of the world's top institutions for training mining engineers. “Right then,” he says, “I made a pledge to dedicate my life to doing whatever I could to prevent this type of thing from happening again.” There had been all sorts of warnings, such as failures at this and every other sludge dam along the creek. For at least four years valley residents had been warning officials the dam was unsafe. As staff engineer for the commission assigned by the governor to investigate the disaster, Spadaro wrote the report. But during the process he got crosswise with the commission chair, Jay Kelley, who, according to Spadaro, wanted to take it easy on Pittston and who, as dean of the School of Mines, was also Spadaro's boss. So in order to protect his voice on the commission, Spadaro resigned from the university. No one except the governor could fire him from the commission, and he stayed on, not equivocating, not excusing, not retreating. Eventually eight commissioners agreed with Spadaro that the fault lay with Pittston, not God. Kelley wrote the one-man minority report.

Spadaro never bought into the notion that environmental regulators shouldn't also be environmental advocates. Two years later, on his own time, he helped found Save Our Mountains, one of the first groups to oppose mountaintop removal.

In 1981 he offended another bureaucrat—J. Steven Griles, then in charge of the Interior Department's Office of Surface Mining (who went on to become George W. Bush's Deputy Secretary of the Interior, after working as a mining lobbyist). Spadaro, who had transferred to the OSM, signed off on a decision to close a coal-preparation plant. “There were serious environmental problems there,” says Spadaro. “But I was told by the regional director to vacate the closure order. I refused.” Spadaro and his lawyer, Hope Babcock (who went on to become Audubon's general counsel), met with Griles. “He was so angry he was almost spitting,” Spadaro recalls, “but he couldn't fire me.” Instead Spadaro was suspended for 30 days sans pay. But he made agency brass even madder by winning an appeal through the Merit Systems Protection Board and making the OSM cough up his back pay.

"I really think in 20 years eastern Kentucky and souther West Virginia are going to be humanly uninhabitable. Humans are not going to be able to live in this region where there's no potable water. You kill rivers by cutting off their fingers."