DECAF Takes on Proposed Massive Delbarton Slurry Impoundment that Threatens Residents

The day after OVEC’s Summit for the Mountains, Erin, Paul and I went to Delbarton in Mingo County to meet with Larry and Alisa Maynard.

Larry has founded DECAF, Delbarton Environmental Community Action Foundation. We arrived at his home to find that he plans to convert his house into the DECAF headquarters. Larry, Alisa, and the other DECAF members are certainly committed!  Larry, Walter Young and Leroy Runyon are the primary movers and shakers.

DECAF’s main concern is the slurry impoundment above Delbarton, which is under expansion. When (if ???) the Delbarton Coal impoundment is completed, it will be 250 feet high, sitting directly over the 474 residents who live within 1,000 feet of the mine entrance.  The number of residents doesn’t even include all of the people who live 5 miles downstream and 1 mile upstream – the "inundation area" should this impoundment, built by yet another Massey Energy subsidiary, ever fail. The current emergency evacuation plan calls for downstream residents to travel upstream into oncoming sludge in case of a break!

After our trip to Delbarton, Erin and I felt strongly that we wanted to visit the site of a slurry spill to better understand the potential consequences of a break in Delbarton. So we headed down to meet Monroe Cassady for the sludge tour of Inez, Ky. We stayed with Glen Cornett and his family. The Cornetts were the first residents to be submerged in sludge from the spill.

On October 11, 2000, Inez was the site of a slurry spill twice that of Buffalo Creek and around 20 times as big as that of the Exxon Valdez. Over 300 million gallons of sludge broke into an abandoned mine below the Big Hollow impoundment and flowed into two watersheds, then into the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River. Sludge inched its way down Coldwater Creek like lava, forming its own layer of fog as it traveled. One-hundred and eleven million gallons of black water rushed into Wolf Creek. In both watersheds, residents lay sleeping. They received no warning from Martin County Coal nor its owner – again, Massey Energy. MCC said the breakthrough occurred at 12:15 a.m., but state officials said it wasn’t reported until 3:45 a.m.

Ten days after the spill, black water reached the Ohio River. For 20 miles, all aquatic life died in what was termed a "total kill." Responding to the crisis, a representative for Martin County Coal stated that the slurry spill was "the direct, sole and proximate result of an act of God, the occurrence of which was not within the control of Martin County Coal." Sound familiar? After a moment of silence, Erin said aptly, "The only act of God I see is that no one was killed."

The truth is that MCC had plenty of warning. So did the Mine Safety and Health Administration. In May of 1994, millions of gallons of sludge escaped into the mine shaft and thence into Wolf Creek.

Larry Wilson, an MSHA engineer, recommended that a mine shaft be completely filled in to avoid a possible loss of life if a cave-in did occur. MCC did not fill in the mine shaft.

There are a number of frightening similarities between the spill in Inez and a potential spill in Delbarton. In addition to the obvious Massey connection, both impoundments are located very close to abandoned underground mine shafts. In both cases, a Massey representative, and not a third party, is in charge of notifying residents if their lives are in danger. In Inez, if both the sludge and the water had broken out into the same watershed, people could have died.

Glen Cornett’s son-in-law, Greg Porter, was a contractor who was hired by Martin County Coal to work on the Big Branch impoundment after the 1994 break. "They should have shut it down right then," he said angrily.

For 6 months he worked double shifts to haul strip rock to reinforce the dam. "Slurry Lake is what they ought to call it. It’d kill any living thing it touched. I know. I’ve worked around it, been around it."

When Greg heard about proposed enlargement of the slurry impoundment in Delbarton, he had a message he wanted to share with DECAF and other activists:

"Put the word out – Don’t let them put a slurry pond in if there’s a deep mine already there. Because it will break. It will leak. And they might not be as lucky as we were."