Sludge Slinging

Although Spadaro continued to anger certain of his superiors by doing his job and by exercising his First Amendment rights, he managed to get performance evaluations that basically alternated between “outstanding” and “exceeding standards.” In 1992 he won Interior's highest honor, the Merit Service Award. In 1993 Interior named him Engineer of the Year. In 1997, his first year as superintendent of MSHA's National Mine Health and Safety Academy, in Beckley, West Virginia, he won the prestigious Bravo Award. The person who hired Spadaro—Davitt McAteer, MSHA's former director (officially known as “assistant secretary of mine safety and health”)—calls him “a good man.” Celeste Monforton, who served as special assistant to the director, calls Spadaro “a great guy [who] did a tremendous job.” She told me that “he really brought the academy into the 21st century.”

When I met Spadaro, at the West Virginia capitol building on February 17, 2004, he was receiving yet another award—for “public service” from the West Virginia Environmental Council. Over the phone he'd spoken as softly as Mister Rogers, so I was surprised to encounter a big, square-shouldered, former football star with a Paul Bunyan beard. That evening, at a reception for award winners, Spadaro complained about the lack of regulations for sludge impoundments. And he condemned mountaintop removal. “There's no need for it,” he said. “It's just cheaper for the companies.”

Patty Sebok of Coal River Mountain Watch, who had just received the Environmental Council's award for “environmental courage,” who lives beside a sludge-polluted stream, and who is married to an underground miner put out of work by mountaintop removal, presented Spadaro with a whistle, saying: “We want you to keep blowing this long, hard, and loud.” Then the crowd broke into a chant of “Bring back Jack. Bring back Jack.” But from what?

Well, on June 4, 2003, Spadaro was placed on “administrative leave”—a prelude to termination. Then, on October 1, he was informed that he would presently be fired for “abusing his authority,” taking “unauthorized” cash advances, and generally failing to follow “instructions” and “procedures.” He gave me his two-inch-thick response to the charges so I could read his side of the story.

Meanwhile, he would show me some sludge reservoirs, but no one can see them from the ground. Like the people who permit and encourage them, they're all in high places, and the companies gate access roads. So I turned to SouthWings, a group of volunteer pilots who show journalists and others the tracks of industry as they exist on the landscape instead of glossy promos. Our pilot, Sue Lapis, had flown me over these same coalfields in 2001. With us in the Cessna 182 was the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition's Janet Fout—perceived as Freddy Krueger by mountaintop removers everywhere—who had stepped to the podium after Spadaro to receive the Environmental Council's Mother Jones Award. Fout and her outfit are only just beginning to realize how many allies they have across America. Recently a woman from Ohio called the council's office to complain about flooding caused by the removal of overburden from coal seams. She'd been referred by the Department of the Interior.

Five minutes out of Yeager Airport I was again reminded that mountaintop removal is itself a euphemism for mountain-range removal. “Almost level, West Virginia,” proclaim the bumper stickers. I noticed major progress toward that end just in the past three years. As far as we could see and in all directions, the mountains of the Cumberland Plateau were being clear-cut, along with the most diverse and productive temperate forest on earth, home to 1.5 million life-forms per acre, not counting microbes. Four thousand feet below us, draglines, bulldozers, trucks, drills, and detonation crews chipped away at mountains like Mr. Tooth Decay and his henchmen in the old Colgate Dental Cream ads. “We're wiping out whole ecosystems,” said Spadaro. “Everything from I-64 south to Kentucky will be gone.”

Spadaro pointed out failing valley fills sloughing off the sides of Kayford Mountain, where I'd righted Patricia Fraker's gravestone, knocked off its base by shrapnel from what is thought to be mankind's single biggest nonnuclear explosion—just one of many by which this mountain is being converted to a 70-square-mile stump. “These fills start failing as soon as they're created,” said Spadaro. “The companies riprap water channels, but the rocks are always too small and they wash out.” During the Carter administration, valley fills had to be compacted every four vertical feet as they filled up, and they were limited to 250,000 cubic yards. Spadaro wrote those rules; but when Ronald Reagan came in, Griles and his colleagues virtually did away with them. Today some valley fills contain 500 million cubic yards of mountain rubble, and there's no compacting. Two thousand miles of streams have been obliterated. And rule reduction continues under George W. Bush, whose OSM, again under Griles, proposes to do away with the last major impediment to mountaintop removal: the regulation that prevents valley fills and other mining activity within 100 feet of perennial streams.

“This is just outrageous,” declares Ben Stout of Wheeling Jesuit University in Wheeling, West Virginia, who studies sludge reservoirs and mine runoff. “The administration is pulling the rug out from under the Clean Water Act. I really think in 20 years eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia are going to be humanly uninhabitable. That's even without considering the ecosystem component. Humans are not going to be able to live in this region where there's no potable water. . . . Insects are indicators of stream health. With valley fills, which obliterate streams, insect mortality is 100 percent. And in watersheds with longwall mining, we've found a 50 percent reduction in both numbers and species. You kill rivers by cutting off their fingers. Headwater streams provide linkage with the forest. Insects convert leaves and sticks to fats and proteins—very scarce commodities in the woods. These fats and proteins are available to almost everything—salamanders, frogs, birds—and at a time in the spring when these neotropical migrants are coming back. It's a mass emergence. Lose the insects and you lose the linkage.”

Impressing Fout and me as much as the valley fills were the sludge reservoirs, enormous deltas of coal dust spreading from intake pipes into black stews of grime, grit, toxic flocculants, and heavy metals. All perched directly over communities, one over an elementary school. At 143 mph, it took us 10 minutes to fly around Massey Energy Company's Brushy Fork sludge reservoir above Whitesville. The dam, made by blowing up a mountain for fill, is 950 feet high. The only evacuation route is the road toward the dam.

Brushy Fork is a Buffalo Creek blowout waiting to happen. The rock formations under the dam have not been checked for fractures. And Massey has been cited by the state at least 37 times for permit violations, such as failure to monitor the reservoir, failure to control erosion, failure to control sediment, and failure to control pollution.