The Register-Herald, Beckley, West Virginia

Today's Front Page

February 23, 2011

Residents seek halt to slurry injections

By Mannix Porterfield Register-Herald Reporter

CHARLESTON — About a month ago, Lucy Chafin says she became trapped in a Wal-Mart restroom, a hostage of severe diarrhea she suspects is linked to coal-contaminated drinking water.

Wal-Mart refused to page her niece while shopping, but a woman in the restroom eavesdropping on Chafin’s dilemma went and fetched the niece.

Chafin says she gave the niece some money to buy towels and fresh clothes, a common practice since inexplicable bowel problems arrived in her life. Colon exams revealed nothing, she said.

A plaintiff in a long-running lawsuit against Massey Energy, Chafin told reporters Tuesday that many in her community of Rawl in Mingo County suffer from a variety of health problems.

“I have to carry clothes everywhere I go,” she said at a news conference directed by the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition.

“Before I get out of Rawl, I have to go home and take another shower. I’m 54 years old and feel like I’m going through childhood. A child does this.”

Chafin and others, such as Junior Walk of Eunice, Raleigh County, are miffed that a House committee removed a ban on underground coal slurry injections.

As she spoke, Chafin pointed to an enlarged photograph of a hot water tank with a pool of black ooze emanating from it.

“People are passing away all the time because of this,” she said. “It’s very scary. Tomorrow, I may be diagnosed with cancer. I wake up every morning and think, ‘Well, am I going to be all right?’”

Scientific studies revealed iron, arsenic and magnesium in her drinking water before a city system began operating in her community in recent years, she said.

“We need to stop the slurry,” Chafin said.

“It may be your community. It may be your family. It may be your brother and sister. It may be your mother and father. I pray that nobody has to go through this any more.”

Walk and Chafin voiced support for the coal industry, pointing out close relatives are employed by it.

Both, however, called for an immediate halt to underground injections of coal wastes, saying they seep into wells and spoil their water sources.

“I have to live with the same thoughts as that lady, whether I’m going to die of cancer,” Walk said.

Acting Senate President Jeffrey Kessler, D-Marshall, took an unannounced swing through rural Boone County hamlets last weekend to learn what he could about the drinking water there.

One man told him of seven people, within a stone’s throw of each other, suffering from brain tumors. Only two have survived.

From one water spigot near Whitesville came buckets of black sludge, Kessler said.

Others showed him pictures of water filters that normally last three months but were brown or black-gray in only three days, the Senate leader said.

“It was clear to me this was unfit for human consumption,” Kessler said.

Two years ago, he said, the Departments of Environmental Protection and Public Health conducted studies but the final report was inconclusive.

“My position is this,” he said of underground injections, “you’ve got to stop it until you can prove to me it is safe, and not keep doing it until I have to prove to you it’s unsafe.”

Kessler said he isn’t sure if he wields sufficient votes to reverse the House decision to remove the ban from an advancing bill.

 “I don’t want to stop mining,” he said.

“There are alternate ways of doing it (dispose of wastes) other than by dumping it underground. There is technology that can do it other than by shoving it underground and hoping against hope that nothing happens.”

— E-mail: mannix@register-herald.com

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