Impact of massive Eastern Kentucky coal-slurry spill is still felt a decade later

On Oct. 11, 2000, an estimated 300 million gallons of coal slurry spilled in Martin County, Kentucky, blackening 100 miles of waterways, polluting the water supply of a dozen communities and killing aquatic life. A decade later, the impact is still being felt in Inez, Dylan Lovan of The Associated Press reports. "The sludge looked like a flow of black lava," Mickey McCoy, an Inez resident whose creek was blackened by the spill, told Lovan. "We're not talking brown water, we're talking black, black lava just rolling."

"The coal company, a subsidiary of Richmond, Va.-based Massey Energy, eventually paid $46 million for the cleanup, along with about $3.5 million in state fines and an undisclosed sum to residents," Lovan writes. Data from the Coal Impoundment Location and Information System, a database kept by Wheeling Jesuit University in West Virginia, reveals there have been 20 slurry spills at Massey-owned sites since the 2000 disaster, but none have approached the size of the Inez one.

The spill occured when a slurry impoundment broke into an old underground coal mine. Massey spokesman Jeff Gillenwater said the spill led the company to study other slurry ponds, or impoundments, and hired outside experts to prevent another release. There are 285 active slurry ponds in 11 states, with over half in Kentucky and West Virginia, Lovan reports. Mine safety advocate Tony Oppegard, a Lexington attorney and former government regulator, told Lovan the Mine Safety and Health Administration "missed the boat" in the wake of the disaster by failing to examine whether slurry ponds should be built above old mines. "It's just a matter of time before you have another failure in one of them," said Oppegard, who was MSHA's lead accident investigator of the calamity until he was replaced when President George W. Bush took office in 2001.

Martin County residents say it's easy to see the spill's effects a decade later. McCoy told Lovan he went looking for leftover sludge at a neighbor's home last week. "I dug at the edge of the bank," he said. "Now this was in the water, and I pulled up a shovelful and threw it upside down on the bank and there was the sludge, under about 3 inches of sand." (Read more)