West Virginia Highlands Voice

State Regulators Fail to Protect Streams and Communities

The West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, the Sierra Club, Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, Coal River Mountain Watch, have taken legal action to hold three coal mining companies accountable for dumping harmful amounts of toxic selenium into local waterways.

The companies, including Massey Energy, Arch Coal, and Patriot Coal, through their subsidiaries, are dumping unlawfully high amounts of toxic selenium into waterways from more than 20 coal mines and associated facilities in West Virginia. Selenium is a toxic heavy metal that causes deformities and reproductive problems in fish and amphibians. At very high levels, selenium can pose a risk to human health, causing hair and fingernail loss, kidney and liver damage, and damage to the nervous and circulatory systems.

Although the Clean Water Act permits held by the mine operators all include limits on the amount of selenium the mines can discharge, the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has consistently given the operators extensions on the amount of time they have to bring their discharges below those limits. As a result, the operators continue to discharge selenium at levels above the limits considered safe by DEP and the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

The most recent extensions all expired by April5,2010. Rather than lower their pollution, the operators have tried a variety of legal tactics to avoid compliance, such that they are continuing to dump excess amounts of toxic pollution into West Virginia waterways.

Although DEP filed actions against several coal mine operators over the last week for the operators’ violations of selenium limits, these actions do not seek immediate compliance but again provide the operators with even more time to continue dumping pollutants.

The groups filed their three legal challenges in the United States District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia. They are represented by attorneys with the Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment