The Great Flood

The slurry flood taking a swingset along with it. Still from the documentary film Sludge.

ickey: They called it a slurry spill, but I like to call it the slurry flood. A spill is when your daughter reaches across the table to get a cookie and accidentally knocks over her little brother’s glass of milk. That’s a spill. You go in and get some paper towels and handle it. This spill we’re talking about here was 350 million gallons of sludge and slurry. When coal is washed in a processing plant, they pump the wastewater up a hill to what they call an impoundment pond. Well, this particular pond was 72 acres. A pond is something where you let your Boy Scout troop come in and catch all the bluegill because they’re getting real thick and all. This was not a pond. This was 72 fucking acres. It was a lake. 350 million gallons of sludge burst through the bottom of this lake into an old mineshaft below it. Now, the maps showed that there was a 75-feet-thick barrier between the bottom of that lake and these old underground mine works. It was actually like ten feet. It gave way. Oh, one more thing. In 1994, there was another mistake at the “pond” and they were allowed to pump some slurry back into that shaft. So when the pond bottom broke in 2000, what we got was not only the shit from that pond but also the stuff that was already in those mineshafts. A lot of mineshafts are used like dumps. You throw old batteries in there. You throw old barrels of oil in there. Jimmy Hoffa could be at the bottom of one of these slurry ponds. So all this slurry came out. It was moving so slowly that it backed up and burst out another mineshaft too. So it came out of two separate shafts. It popped out of that second part into Wolf Creek, which empties into the Tug Fork. The Tug Fork is where we get our reservoir water. They had all this shit above a reservoir. Nina: Not only that. If the flood hadn’t happened to have bust through that other shaft in addition to the first one, people would have suffocated. It would have come down in full force on people’s homes. Massey’s cleanup effort ended up costing $46 million—and many say it only scratched the surface. Still from Sludge. Mickey: This was bigger than Buffalo Creek. It just didn’t kill anybody. [On February 26, 1972, a coal-company dam burst in Buffalo Creek, West Virginia. 125 people were killed, 1,100 were injured, and over 4,000 were left homeless—Ed.] We as Americans think, “How many people died? None? OK, casualties controlled.” I remember when Buffalo Creek happened. Everybody remembers Buffalo Creek back here. We saw the funerals on the television for weeks. It carried whole damn houses down with it. And this could have been another Buffalo Creek if it hadn’t gone out through two areas. If it had just gone straight down Wolf Creek, those people would have been smothered in their sleep at night. Nina: And in ’94 they knew it was leaking. They were told to seal it. They were told how to seal it. But we never, ever checked to make sure that they did it. So they knew, basically, that it was going to break. Mickey: Massey Coal knew, and Massey didn’t give a shit. When the people came in here from the EPA and the Division of Surface Mining, they all set up there on a hill on Massey Coal property. Massey didn’t even warn people that the slurry had spilled. I had a relative who lived at the last house up in the area it spilled tell me about it. He was one of the first ones hit. People didn’t come by telling him about it. They knew a flood had happened, but they didn’t come by and warn people. Massey Coal does in Appalachia just about what in the hell Massey Coal wants to do. That’s because Massey Coal knows where to put their money. They put it in the pockets of the right congressmen and the right senators—the people who can call off the dogs that are supposed to protect us. Massey can do more than any other coal company here because they are so big and powerful. Massey is one of the grand outlaws of the coal industry. They’re a bunch of sonofabitches located in Richmond, Virginia, with stockholders all over the country. They don’t care how they leave the communities they mine in. Sure, they give pennies to the churches to keep them quiet. Or they fund sports programs to keep the communities quiet. But when the coal is gone and Massey is gone, they won’t give a damn about me, my wife, my kids, or my grandchildren. They done got what they want, and that’s the black gold. Nina: We both went to Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia. One of the professors talked about Massey. He said some things that weren’t flattering. Within 15 minutes, the president of the university called that professor and said, “You don’t ever talk about Massey.” Mickey: This is a university we’re talking about. In a college, you’re supposed to have free thought. Even in Appalachian colleges. [laughs] But here’s one that the coal magnates give so much money to that the university has to limit free thought and limit the truth if it’s going to hurt their contributors. Mountaintop removal, simply put, is taking apart a whole damn mountain to get to a two- or three-foot seam of coal. Then you take the unprofitable part of the mountain, what the coal companies call the “overburden,” and you dump it in a holler or you dump it where a stream used to run. You pile the overburden up there and you create a mountain with a plateau on top of it as you dump and dump and dump. You’ve heard of the term “hundred-year flood”? Our hundred-year flood is happening about every 18 months. Harry Caudill, one of the best writers and thinkers ever to come out of Appalachia, said that coal has “always cursed the land it’s torn from.” Nina: There are no studies on the long-term effects of mountaintop removal. I’m sure that the mining engineers are all saying that this is just making level ground and it’s going to make Appalachia prosper because the only thing wrong with this land is the hills—if you level the hills, we’ll be just like Delaware or New Jersey. That’s, I’m sure, why local coal-company owners think they’re doing just a wonderful job for us. We made a citizen’s complaint to check on the work of the Division of Surface Mining. We aren’t allowed to go and see what a private mine is doing, but we can see if the Division of Surface Mining is doing what they should be doing. Mickey: I think it was the first complaint of its sort in Martin County. Nina: According to the law, you can go along with the Division of Surface Mines. Mickey: They police the coal companies—supposedly. Some say they also have new VCRs in their trucks at Christmas time and a turkey in every stocking. I don’t know about that, but I’ve heard tales. Nina: It was an interesting experience going out there. We went with Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, which is our grassroots organization. We took a mining engineer with us. We had to wear hardhats and steel-toed boots and everything. The first people we saw when we got up there were looking kind of nervous. They were like, “Well, come over here to the mine shack.” Mickey: That’s a six-by-eight shack. Nina: We met the little guy from the Division of Surface Mining—bless his heart. He was this scared-looking man. I think I was about as big as he was. Mickey: Yeah, and you’re little. Nina: So we went over to the guard shack and we all went inside. It was tiny. There were four of us and about six of them—big old burly men lining the wall, and then there was that little man. Mickey: But then there was the parting of the seas… Nina: Everything got quiet and in came Jim Booth. He’s the owner of the biggest mine around here. It’s called Czar Coal. You could feel it all around the room, like, “They’ll be sorry now.” Mickey: He goes right up to the guy from the Division of Surface Mining and goes, “Who are you?” Then he goes to another guy and says, “Who are you?” Then he waves his hand around over toward us and says, “I know those two.” Nina: This is the kind of intimidation this Surface Mining guy has to face when he goes up there. If he’s seriously doing his job, this is what he faces. We found out after this visit that Jim Booth’s partner’s brother-in-law told on him for some safety violation. Evidently, they took this guy into that same shack we were in and beat him with a hose. That’s probably what they were thinking about doing to us! [laughs] Mickey: It can get you to worrying about walking from the house to the garage at night. Nina: I don’t think they see us as that kind of a threat. They’ve labeled us tree huggers and liberals and that kind of takes care of it. Whatever we say, they’re just, “There goes Mickey and Nina again.” At the same time, people are coming to us. I had one little girl at the school where I teach come up to me with a little notebook and say, “My dad wants you to have this.” I said, “OK, what is it?” She told me that it was his testimony to the Mine Safety and Health Administration that they didn’t use. He just wanted me to black out his name. He doesn’t work for the coal company anymore. One man told us that he was planning on going hunting on the day of the flood, and he was going to take his four-wheeler. As he came driving by, some guy said, “No, no, you can’t go this way. Something’s happened.” Then he looked through the woods—it was still early and the sun was just coming up—and he could see the black of the coal slurry going by. He thought of his family, downstream from this spill and still asleep. He went down and grabbed them all right out of the bed. Mickey: Massey Coal has no regard for life. I’ll stand on a stack of Bibles and say that. Nina: I figured it out. These spills happen every six years or so. It’s just like living in a landscape that’s dotted with time bombs. Mickey: I do think that strip mining is the work of the devil. I am against all strip mining and all mountaintop removal. Some people here think, “Well, if we don’t let them mine here, they’re gonna go somewhere else and mine.” They can’t go anywhere else to mine! The fucking coal is here! Nina: It’s not like they’re going to outsource this one. INTERVIEWED BY VICE STAFF