Coal Country

(Page 3 of 5)

An EPA official called the Big Branch spill "one of the worst environmental disasters in the southeastern United States." On the scale of spills, it was about thirty times the size of the 10 million gallons from the wreck of the Exxon Valdez. Aside from good local reporting, especially by Ken Ward Jr. in the Charleston (W. V.) Gazette, coverage of the spill had been sparse. Trying to make sense of it from a distance, I wondered mainly about the place: What could it possibly look like after suffering a wastewater-and-coal-slurry spill of 300 million gallons? Last fall, about two years after the event, I drove 600 miles from my house in New Jersey to eastern Kentucky to see.

I stopped first in Inez, the town the spill hit hardest. Visually, an Appalachian town gives an over-full, cubistic impression, concentrated as it is in its narrow valley among the hills. In quick succession, Inez reveals an abandoned house trailer leaking sooty pink insulation at sprung corners, campaign posters for the people running for district attorney and county jailer, well-kept one-story houses with big cars on asphalt aprons, dog pens, boat trailers, American flags, and a religio-patriotic sign or two ("jesUSAves," in red-white-and-blue embroidery, displayed in a front window), all passing in a rush of traffic that soon deposits the motorist back on a rural two-lane road again.

For years and years, Inez's city-limits sign said the town had a population of 600. Today that estimate is considered optimistic. Inez is the Martin County seat, and a distinguished sandstone courthouse from the 1930s stands in the middle of town. Check-cashing places, pawnshops, small businesses, and empty storefronts along Inez's principal street suggest in various ways the challenge of making a living here. A job notice on the bulletin board of the local ShopRite advertises for telephone solicitors: "Can you set on your butt and talk on the phone?" Most of its tear-off phone number tags are gone.

The land the spill once covered is now easy to see. Wherever the slurry smothered and killed, a smoothly spread, uniform grassy green now smiles. The spill came through town via Rockcastle Creek, whose shoreline is now green. The formerly slurry-blackened flats alongside Coldwater Creek, west of town, are also green, green, green, with a few wisps of straw here and there, and occasional black plastic soil barriers peeking up along the creek bank. The green is one we know and recognize. It's the same green as is found on the top of covered-over landfills and reclaimed strip mines, and on the shoulders of big highways, and around shopping malls, and by suburban office complexes and development of any kind: the familiar modern collaborator green that colors every place we decide, after bulldozing, to leave unpaved.

As a sign of a restored environment, the green doesn't impress Greg Preece. The Preece family has lived on Coldwater Creek for generations. "Spray enough hydroseed and mulch, the way they did here, and you can grow grass on a parking lot," Preece says. He and his wife and young son were in their trailer by the creek when the slurry came. Hard as it was to watch the ruin of the creek where he had caught minnows as a child, enduring the months of restoration work was perhaps even harder. Heavy equipment swarmed, "guzzler trucks" sucked up the slurry (to re-inter it in smaller pits called "slurry cells," up the hill and unfortunately not very far away), septic systems and sewage pipes were shattered, stench rose. Preece feared that he or his wife would get in a car wreck from skidding in the slurry that cleanup vehicles slopped all over the road. Eventually, at grudging coal company expense, the Preeces relocated to temporary housing. They have since sold their trailer and moved to another part of the county.

Like many of the local residents, Preece is mad at the coal company, but madder still at EPA. In the opinion of many, EPA worked not on behalf of the public, but for Martin County Coal. The coal company often said that the cleanup was costing them $40 million -- "I don't care if it's 40 million or 400 million, they made this disaster and they should fix it," Preece says -- and as part of the expense, the company paid EPA's operational costs. This meant that during the cleanup EPA seemed to be just another contractor hired by the coal company. Particularly aggravating to local residents was the fact that EPA established its headquarters on company property, behind security gates, accessible to no one but mine employees. At a hearing in March 2001, a resident told Art Smith, the EPA official in charge of monitoring the cleanup, that backhoe operators were merely turning over the earth and burying the sludge underneath. Smith said he wasn't aware of that. Preece told Smith that he had seen similar cover-up work himself. He added that Smith would have known about it if he were on site and doing his job. (Smith now says that the Martin County cleanup followed usual EPA procedures intended for efficiency and for saving taxpayer dollars. He calls the EPA failure to talk more with local residents a mistake, but one difficult to avoid in emergency circumstances. He does not believe that any cleanup workers deliberately buried slurry.)

Despite questions and objections from locals, the cleanup progressed according to coal company plans. About six months after the spill, most of the visible slurry was gone. Occasional touch-ups and stream bank maintenance continue today.

Greg Preece said that many of those affected by the spill were burned out on talking about it. Also, he said, the people around Inez are often shy. Rather than pursue them for interviews, I drove aimlessly around the county for a while. A turn up a side road put me suddenly face to face with a new 1,800-inmate federal prison rising Alcatraz-like on a base of landfill over a reclaimed strip mine. Just completed, the prison was still empty; when I rolled down the window its tan-and-gray walls behind terraced rows of razor wire gave off a hopeful, fresh-paint smell.

Just past the prison, on another part of the covered-over strip mine, I came upon the Big Sandy Regional Airport. Outside the small terminal building a flagpole flew several flags, including the American, and the black-and-red corporate banner of A. T. Massey Coal. I went in and met the airport manager, an affable man named Gary Cox. Before taking the airport job Cox had worked twenty-six years for Martin County Coal. That company had saved the county from poverty when this was one of the poorest places in the U.S., he said. He praised the decency of his former co-workers and spoke of Massey's president as a public-spirited man who had helped keep the airport open by directing his corporate aircraft to buy their gas there. Cox deplored the spill but did not seem to hold it against anybody at all. "I don't know where we'd be in this part of Kentucky without the A. T. Massey Company," he said.

Continued...