Over Spring Break I went to West Virginia with SEEDS (Students Engaging and Enacting a Dialogue on Service). I can say without a doubt that SEEDS has been the single most impactful thing I’ve been involved with since coming to college.
Through my involvement with GreenUR and Green Peace last year, I became interested in the effects of coal mining on communities; in particular, the effects of mountain top removal strip mining (MTR). I jumped at the chance of witnessing these effects firsthand, and was stunned to imagine myself actually standing at the base of a MTR site.
As we wound our way through the rugged Appalachian Mountains, the empyrean scenery of the New River Gorge was maculated with the collapsing skeletons of a once humbly prosperous society. I had never seen such visible poverty; the garbage poured out of houses, across lawns, and into the rivers. Almost every house is along a river or stream, yet you’re not supposed to swim in them. We stayed at Big Creek People in Action, a community center that was formed in 1990 as headquarters for a community-led campaign to get the city of War clean drinking water. Although they now have clean drinking water (a privilege that many cities in McDowell County do not share), their sewage run directly into their rivers. It is largely because of this point-source pollution that their rivers are unswimmable.
Similarly, one of the major forms of recreation in McDowell County is fishing, yet you’re advised to eat a maximum of 2 fish a year. We ate lunch at a beautiful lake by our worksite one day. We talked to an old fisherman for an hour or so, about coal mining and stories from the war. We asked him what he does with the fish and he laughed, “I give ‘em to the kids driving the busses down the holler or whoever needs ‘em. Don’t eat ‘em though, feels like you’ve takin’ an Aspirin – Like pins in all you fingers all tingly”. It was unbelievable to see how detrimental the effects of point source pollution and surface runoff are on the environment, and how quickly environmental injustices become social injustices.
This couldn’t have been more apparent than our trip to a Mountain Top Removal site… The debris blasted, scooped, and bulldozed off the coal seams is called “spoil” or “overburden”; this waste is typically pushed into adjacent valleys. MTR overburden in WV alone has buried over 1000 miles of streams and severely harmed over twice as many. Headwater streams are crucial for wildlife, healthy fisheries, and the water quality downstream. Every ton of coal is washed of its impurities using 90 gallons of water – the remaining water, coal dust and chemical agents are called “coal sludge” or “slurry”. This waste is often injected into abandoned underground mines, a process that can lead to groundwater contamination. We went to an old mine entrance downhill from the site, and from the entrance freely ran an iron-rust colored stream; the stone entrance was decorated with aluminum stalagmites. The even more common practice is to simply store this slurry in unlined pits near the sites.
Upon visiting the MTR site it was undeniable that the coal companies were committing serious injustices to their local environments and people. Nonetheless it was interesting to see how directly water pollution affects the watershed and its inhabitants.