On May 13, I made my fourth trip out to Martin County to check out the status of the sludge spill clean up operation. Don Pratt of Lexington and his foster son Chris came along for the day.

It was nice to finally see Martin County on a beautiful warm spring day. The trees are in full bloom, the sky was clear blue, the air was crispy and the mountains looked spectacular. The Coldwater Creek area was especially comfortable and we spent quite a while sitting on Larry Preece’s front porch discussing the latest developments. On our previous trips, we were surrounded by the obnoxious and continual roar of the heavy equipment, and that annoying beeping sound they make when backing up. Sunday we only heard birds singing – quite peaceful for a change.

We walked around Larry’s backyard for a while and went down to the creek. Chris amused himself by throwing rocks in the creek and watching the plume of black that followed the impact. Larry’s backyard still looks like a reclaimed strip mine site, very poor quality rocky soil and a thin cover of grass growing in little bits and pieces. There were still some bald spots in the yard, but of course this spring has been rather dry. The yard is still rippled with the treads of bulldozers and heavy equipment.

We talked to a neighbor a few houses down the road, Mrs. Delbert Moore, who has started a vegetable garden near the area that was formerly covered in sludge. Some visitors to Coldwater Creek may remember seeing the blue tractor that was parked next to the bridge at the turnoff to Mullins Fork. In November it was hooked up to some kind of spraying device that was churning up the water in the creek. This is next to the present location of the vegetable garden, where they are now growing tomatoes and peppers. The Martin County Coal Company brought in some topsoil for the Moore’s garden and it looks pretty good, although I personally would be reluctant to grow anything for a few years.

I guess I wasn’t too surprised to hear that a government agency has finally admitted the presence of toxins in the coal slurry. People in Martin County have been told that "it’s just mud" and "you could eat it" for so long that most residents have just stopped raising the issue. Larry mentioned that he had been feeling a little silly to keep bringing this up.

So when he finally got a copy of a report dated March 28 from the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ASTDR), an agency of the US Dept. of Health and Human Services, listing the presence of heavy metals "above the level of health concern," he made sure that everyone in Martin County knew about it. Both the Martin County Sun and the Mountain Citizen carried the story on the front page. Unfortunately the Sun’s webpage is under construction as they have just joined with the Big Sandy News so I will try and quote the important parts. If anyone would like a copy of the stories please let me know.

According to the ATSDR analysis, "in some samples of the source coal slurry material, copper, vanadium, manganese, barium, arsenic,, and cobalt were above levels of health concern." The report also indicated a slightly elevated level of copper in the raw (untreated) water at the Martin County Water Plant in Inez.

The report also states "in some forms, barium, arsenic, and vanadium can produce health effects by skin contact. In most cases, these effects can occur after prolonged exposure lasting a year or more. Like most heavy metals, all of these compounds effect the digestive system, the kidneys (except manganese), and the liver (except vanadium). Many of these compounds produce effects on the central nervous system and some of them produce effects on the cardiovascular system."

According to the Mountain Citizen, "Arsenic, cobalt and barium can also produce swelling of the eyes. The concentration of arsenic found in the slurry can also cause skin irritation. Exposure to high levels of cobalt can also lead to skin rash."

Larry Preece stated in the article that he "felt betrayed" by the comments of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Region 4 cleanup head, Art Smith, who seems to have downplayed the toxic danger of the sludge material to Martin County residents. In his letter to the Mountain Citizen, Larry Preece wrote "We do not understand why the EPA never told us of the potential danger we were living with. Mr. (Art) Smith of the EPA told residents that everything in the slurry was below the safe limits."

Numerous residents have complained of skin rashes since the slurry spill, and as I reported in my last trip report, there is still a considerable amount of sludge left in the "reclaimed" backyards and the creeks. Larry stated again his overall dissatisfaction with the cleanup operation, and his desire for the cleanup operation to be done right. He feels that the job still is not complete.

We traveled over to Wolf Creek, the other creek that got mostly a watery slurry, and it appears that the cleanup operation there is finally over. The hydromulch and the heavy equipment are mostly gone, and all along the denuded creek banks there is a swath of bright new green grass and a few weeds, but little other plant life in many stretches. There are thousands of new stumps along the creek where the riparian vegetation has been removed for the cleanup operation, and the creek bed is full of silt. Basically Wolf Creek will just be a muddy trench baking in the sun for the next ten or fifteen years until the trees can grow back.

Although the large blobs of sludge are gone, there is still a lot of black silt in the creek bed and along the banks. Martin County Coal has installed black plastic fences about 18 inches high along both sides of Wolf and Coldwater Creeks to reduce the amount of soil erosion, but this seems kind of absurd and ironic in light of the amount of silt already in the creek, and the level of damage that has already been done to the creek by the spill and the cleanup operation.

We followed a gravel road next to Wolf Creek up the mountain farther than we had ever been before (we were stopped at a roadblock during our first visit in October), and were surprised to find ourselves on top of the mountain in the middle of a huge mountaintop removal site. The devastation was incredible on top of this obliterated mountain. Apparently this is a county road and open to the public. It ends up on Highway 3 on the other side of Inez and is a good scenic shortcut home. This might be a good road for mountain biking.

We didn’t see the sludge pond (to Don’s great disappointment), but the road turned away from Wolf Creek about a mile from the top. At this point Wolf Creek was only a few feet wide. The creek has been scraped fairly clean, and once again I am stunned at the enormity of the cleanup operation. A job lasting for at least four months, costing over $40 million, and the time of hundreds of state and federal employees overseeing the operation.

It makes it all the harder to believe that slurry ponds are still under serious consideration in Kentucky and West Virginia. Will we never learn? The Brushy Fork impoundment near Whitesville, West Virginia that was approved a couple months ago is hundreds of feet deep and has thousands of residents living below the dam. And a new slurry pond is being seriously considered by the DSMRE in Perry County, Kentucky (near Hazard), that would be almost 250 acres, or four times the size of the Martin County impoundment, and only 1/3 mile away from the North Fork of the Kentucky River, the drinking water source for hundreds of thousands of people, including Lexington and Frankfort. And of course the proposed Perry County impoundment has underground mines beneath it. I’m not sure about the Whitesville impoundment, but it seems incredible to me that the US Mine Safety and Health Administration, the Kentucky Department of Surface Mine Reclamation, the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection and the National Academy of Science haven’t done more to ban slurry impoundments.

The EPA wouldn’t allow a 250-acre open waste pit near Pittsburgh or Cincinnati or any other major city – why should it be any different in Appalachia?