This news story originally provided by WV Metro News

2/18/04

MSHA Whistle Blower Looks for Justice

MetroNews Talkline
Charleston

He's leveling some hefty charges, and it's very likely Jack Spadaro will lose his job over them.

Spadaro blew the whistle on what he says was corruption at the highest levels of federal Mine Safety and Health Administration. Spadaro was a guest Tuesday on MetroNews' "Talkline" in Charleston and detailed his story of blowing the whistle on that corruption.

Spadaro was in charge of the National Mine Safety Training Academy in Beckley when he claims he learned that the MSHA Secretary Dave Laureski and two deputies, John Kaylor and John Correlle, were giving no-bid contracts to long-time friends and former business associates for training services. Spadaro says those contracts were for enormous amounts of money to an individual, identified as Ben Shepherd, who is a long-time friend and former associate of Laureski, and his son, Todd Shepherd.

"He would get a $1,025 for every person he trained, and he'd train as many as 38 people in a week," explained Spadaro. "For nine weeks of work he and his father made roughly $200,000."

Once Spadaro started poking his nose into the matter, he started getting flack. Spadaro says he was told to go along with the contracts or he'd be run out. That, he says, happened while he was en route from a meeting at the agency headquarters in Washington back to Beckley.

"Three people from headquarters had come into my office, taken over and changed the locks on my door, and I wasn't allowed to go back to my office," claimed Spadaro.

Spadaro has never been fired, although it's been threatened, and he remains employed by MSHA. However, he says he's gone public with his story as a matter of conscience. He says it was a personal policy he developed in his early days during the investigation of the Buffalo Creek mine disaster that claimed he lives of 120 people and left 3,000 homeless -- all over negligence.

"I promised myself a long time ago when I first started working in government that I would never stand back and let that happen, even if it meant my job," said Spadaro.

Spadaro has told his story to CBS "60 Minutes" and the story is expected to run in mid-March. An internal investigation is also underway into Laureski and agency heads. Spadaro says he will not feel vindicated until those who he's accused are indicted. He also holds little hope that it will happen under the Bush Administration.

This news story originally provided by WV Metro News

2/24/04

Changes In Campaign Financing Proposed

Staff
State Capitol

Click here to hear Comments With Senators Jon Hunter And Frank Deem (mp3)

A bill calling for major changes in the way campaigns are financed in West Virginia is on its way to the Senate Finance Committee.

The Senate Judiciary Committee passed the bill Monday that would make public financing available to candidates who agree to raise no private money and spend none of their own cash on a campaign.

Monongalia County Senator Jon Hunter says candidates would become eligible for the funding by securing a number of $20 donations from supporters.

Hunter says the public fund would be created through voluntary donations from state residents. One way to donate would be a check-off on the state income tax return. Hunter says no tax dollars would be used to fund the campaigns.

Hunter says candidates could spend more time talking about issues and less time raising money.

Wood County Senator Frank Deem voted against the bill. Deem says the plan is nothing more than an attempt by special interest groups to have their candidates elected in non-traditional ways.

Deem says there are a variety ways to raise money and it takes a lot of hard work. He predicts few state residents would be willing to give up part of their tax return to fund a politician's campaign.

Observers predict the bill will have a tough time in the Senate Finance Committee.

This news story originally provided by The Daily Mail

2/25/04

DEP, coal company begin work on stabilizing mine crack

DOROTHY, W.Va. (AP) -- Environmental regulators and a coal company are attempting to stabilize an old surface mine highwall on Kayford Mountain in Raleigh County after a portion of it cracked and fell.

The crack in the highwall is an extension of a crack in the mountain that was caused by subsidence from an abandoned underground mine. Part of the highwall fell onto the surface mining area Monday, the state Department of Environmental Protection said Tuesday.

The DEP began monitoring cracks in the mountain last year after residents and Coal River Mountain Watch, a citizens' group, reported them.

An investigation of the area's stability by the DEP's Division of Mining and Reclamation, the Office of Explosives and Blasting, the U.S. Office of Surface Mining, and Catenary Coal is continuing, the DEP said.

Catenary Coal is constructing a soft berm barrier to catch any additional material that may fall. The company also has proposed modifying the blasting plan for its surface mine permit to address the subsidence.

This news story originally provided by The Daily Mail

2/26/04

House committee acts to replace water quality board

By GAVIN McCORMICK
Associated Press Writer

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) -- West Virginia's water quality would be overseen by seven state agency heads rather than five scientists under a proposal moving through the House of Delegates.

The House Government Organization Committee on Wednesday night endorsed a plan to eliminate the ability of the 10-year-old Environmental Quality Board to create rules governing the state's surface and ground water.

State law requires the board to be made up of five governor appointees "who by reason of training and experience are knowledgeable in the husbandry of the state's water resources.''

Four current members have doctoral degrees in engineering, geology or food science.

The bill (HB2717) would replace them with seven state agency heads, six appointed by the governor, along with the agriculture commissioner, an elected position. The secretary of environmental protection would chair the committee.

"I know science is important and all that,'' said Delegate Greg Butcher, D-Logan. "But we're talking about bright minds that would be a plus compared to the quality of the board we have now.''

Other members would include the director of natural resources, the secretary of transportation, the director of forestry, the director of economic and community development and the director of tourism.

Business and industry lobbyists, who have been pushing to weaken water quality rules, back the bid to replace the board.

The new board would be unable to create standards stricter than those in the federal Clean Water Act unless backed by "scientifically supportable evidence ... reflecting factors unique to West Virginia.''

"I don't even know what that means, and I defy anyone to define it,'' protested Delegate Tim Manchin, D-Marion.

The current quality board would continue to hear appeals of decisions by the Department of Environmental Protection's water resources division.

Committee members beat back several attempts to amend the bill, including adding current members to provide the board with more scientific expertise.

"It's always been helpful to have people with scientific backgrounds,'' Libby Chatfield, the board's technical adviser, told the committee. "They're more capable of understanding the complex numeric criteria used in the development of standards.''

As part of a three-year review the quality board last year created rules that would strengthen several state water standards.

Lawmakers, who must approve the rules, have been frustrated by the board's apolitical nature and what several legislators say has been a failure to communicate.

Instead, lawmakers are poised to approve a bill that would block the quality board's suggestions and allow the state to operate under existing standards while studying industry proposals to weaken the rules.

"One of the problems we've had with the present board is the absence of balance,'' said Delegate Don Caruth, R-Mercer. "These people will bring balance.''

"This is the worst bill I've ever seen,'' Delegate Dale Martin, D-Putnam, told other committee members. "There's so much special interest in there it makes me sick.''

The bill now moves to the House Judiciary Committee.

This news story originally provided by The Courier-Journal

2/29/04

Coal recovery causes optimism

Company's effort converting slurry watched closely

By JAMES R. CARROLL
jcarroll@courier-journal.com
The Courier-Journal

CADIZ, Ohio — At an old coal slurry pond known as Dickinson No. 3, muck is money.

Dickinson is a 6,000-foot-long impoundment at a former mine in eastern Ohio where the pond's deposits of black coal waste — in places as deep as 80 feet — are being turned into burnable fuel.

The new project is the first of what are expected to be many such operations in the coalfields of Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Virginia, where mined coal is washed and the leftover residue is stored in huge holes in the ground.

Recovering slurry not only could be a potential source of new revenue and new jobs, but also could mean that many potentially dangerous slurry ponds disappear, reducing the number of environmental and safety threats that dot the Appalachian landscape.

In October 2000, a slurry pond in Martin County collapsed, pouring 300 million gallons of the black goo onto Eastern Kentucky property and into nearby creeks and streams in one of the worst environmental disasters in the Southeast.

"Waste is the Achilles' heel of the mining business," said J. Davitt McAteer, former head of the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration. "If they don't deal with waste here and abroad, mining is going to go out of business."

But at Dickinson, "there's a tremendous amount of coal in there," said Steven Jolliffe, director of business development at Detroit-based DTE Energy, one of the nation's largest natural gas distributors and a major buyer and marketer of coal.

Previous attempts to recover usable coal from impoundment waste have fallen short of expectations. Because slurry includes clay, which prevents the coal from burning cleanly and leaves too much ash, it has either proven unburnable or had such low heat-producing potential to be not worth the effort.

But DTE believes that it has found a way to make the content useable, and its proof is the two ever-growing piles of fine coal, which streams from two chutes just 100 yards from the pond.

THE COMPANY has recovered as much as 1,000 tons of coal per day and its goal — as a sign inside one of its noisy buildings reads — is 1,700 tons a day. There are about 5 million tons of slurry in Dickinson No. 3, and the recoverable coal in it is estimated at 2.5million to 3 million tons, Jolliffe said.

He said DTE has developed a way to reduce the ash content to 7 percent, down from 30 percent. The company won't disclose the technology, but Jolliffe said it involves a combination of chemical and mechanical processing.

Jolliffe said the Dickinson effort represents a "multimillion-dollar" project, but he wouldn't say how much the company has invested or expects to make.

Mining industry officials and environmentalists are watching the project with interest.

"You reduce the size of these ... old fills, sell the coal and reclaim (the land) where sometimes it wasn't reclaimed and didn't grow vegetation. ...Something that can be done ... economically is a win-win for the environment and whoever is doing it," said Bill Caylor, president of the Kentucky Coal Association.

"The method they are using in Ohio seems to hold promise for reducing the damage from coal slurry impoundments," said Diane Badey of Proctorville, Ohio, co-director of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition.

DTE'S WORK also is drawing the attention of a new organization in West Virginia that is seeking to improve monitoring of coal impoundments and develop better ways to deal with waste.

The Coal Impoundment Location and Warning System, based at Wheeling Jesuit University, wants to highlight the Ohio project, a similar venture in Australia and any others it can find as examples of recycling old slurry ponds.

The DTE technology "does seem to have great promise," said McAteer, the former MSHA head who is now director of the Wheeling Jesuit impoundment tracking system. "As one who's typically fairly skeptical about technology that promises the world, I felt that this one (in Ohio) was far and away much more developed and advanced than other technologies."

McAteer said the coal industry must confront the waste issue because it's getting more difficult to find places where people will accept new slurry facilities, and neighbors of older ponds want them removed.

In addition to the safety and environmental problems, impoundments need to be continuously maintained at considerable cost, including barrier monitoring to watch for leaks and keeping water filtering systems operating, said Benjamin Stout III, associate professor of biology and director of environmental studies at Wheeling Jesuit.

"They're a liability," he said, noting that many impoundments were abandoned after the mining ended.

The university's impoundment tracking has no formal relationship with the DTE site, but the company has been receptive to McAteer's group visiting and watching the operations — except for the technology secrets used to recover the coal.

THE FACILITY is located on land where coal was mined from 1951 until 1989. As at hundreds of other mines, coal that couldn't be separated from clay and tiny fragments of coal called fines was left behind in storage pits, along with the water used to wash the coal during processing.

By the time DTE came to Dickinson, the water had soaked into the ground or evaporated, leaving a huge pit full of slurry. At least one other nearby pond of similar size, called the Purple Whale because of its shape, is nearly dry and is likely to be the site of another coal recovery operation, Jolliffe said.

The Michigan company began building its recovery plant in January 2003 and started production in September. The operation employs 18 people.

Once the slurry is processed and the newly recovered coal piles up, it is taken by truck to barges on the nearby Ohio River and sent to power plants. The recovered coal is mixed with other coal on the barges, Jolliffe said.

Stout said DTE has convinced him that its process works because "they don't want any kind of special program" from the government to help with the cost. "They have an economically viable product," he said.

THE RECOVERED COAL burns as well as other coal — between 11,800 and 12,000 BTUs — according to DTE. And the price for recovered coal is competitive with regular Ohio coal, which is running between $25 and $30 per ton, Jolliffe said.

DTE expects to be recovering coal from Dickinson for about five years. After that, the leftover waste will be returned to the site and the area will be regraded, returning it to the rolling terrain that's characteristic of that part of Ohio. With the carbon removed, the reclaimed land should be able to support vegetation, Jolliffe said. "When all is said and done, there'll be no ponds left, just grassy fields," he said.

If DTE's project goes as planned, it could mean saving millions of dollars spent to repair impoundments when they fail and the mess has to be cleaned up, Badey said.

West Virginia last year spent $7.5million to repair a slurry pond near Gary, in the southern part of the state, after engineers determined that it was in danger of collapsing. Getting rid of impoundments by means such as the DTE project "would be a much better alternative," Badey said.

Two chutes located near the old slurry pond pour burnable fine coal into piles. DTE has recovered as much as 1,000 tons of coal per day at its facility in eastern Ohio and says its goal is 1,700 tons.

SLURRY FACTS

BY ALEX KOZLOWSKI,
SPECIAL TO THE COURIER-JOURNAL

Two chutes located near the old slurry pond pour burnable fine coal into piles. DTE has recovered as much as 1,000 tons of coal per day at its facility in eastern Ohio and says its goal is 1,700 tons. 

Slurry is the waste produced during the processing of coal, usually consisting of fine coal and tiny pieces of rock and clay suspended in water.

Slurry is pumped into a pond, called an impoundment, where the coal and mineral particles eventually settle. The coal industry says impoundments, if properly built and maintained, pose no safety or environmental problems. But environmentalists and community groups complain that many impoundments aren't properly built or maintained.

Leaks of slurry have polluted streams and rivers, and some major failures have killed people. The 1972 Buffalo Creek disaster in West Virginia killed 125 people, injured 1,100 and left more than 4,000 homeless. The Oct. 11, 2000, collapse of the Big Branch Slurry Impoundment near Inez, Ky., spilled 300 million gallons of slurry into creeks and streams, killed wildlife and damaged property.

Eastern Kentucky has about a quarter of the approximately 700 slurry and sediment impoundments nationwide. According to a 1997 survey by the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration, 241 ponds — including 21 in Kentucky — were classified as having a high risk of failure.