Mountaintop Removal in Mingo County - Without a Permit!

by Barbara Chafin

	Even before all the new valley fills are in, Barb’s hollow suffered another round of flooding last May. Here, her husband Robey examines the damage.

“The King Coal highway is a planned four-lane, partially controlled access highway that extends from Williamson, WV, to Bluefield, WV. This approximately 94 mile long roadway is intended to improve the transportation system in Southern WV while enhancing opportunities for economic development.” (Environmental Reevaluation, Red Jacket Project, May 2004).

At the last public meeting for the King Coal Highway, in fall 2000, residents of Red Jacket and other Mingo County towns were told the mountaintop highway would change the area’s elevation by 80 feet. Full funding for the highway wouldn’t be available for 20-25 years, area residents were told.

In Dec. 2003, Nicewonder Contracting filed a legal notice in the Williamson newspaper, stating that the company would be preparing the road bed for the highway. This ad said the road would create 14 valley fills with associated sediment ponds. Seeing Nicewonder raised my eyebrows, because they’re the ones who own White Flame Energy.

In 1989, that company stripped 400 feet off a mountain above my hollow, Straight Fork Hollow, and one of their ponds broke, causing flooding. Now this same company would be putting in 14 more valley fills, under the guise of road bed preparation, without even the small protection that a mining permit offers! That’s right – this is going on not under the permitting process of the so-called Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), but instead under the state Department of Highways (DOH).

Through research and phone calls (by now, I’ve probably spoken with 70 different people at the DOH) I found out there were two fills proposed to go into the hollow above my home. I obtained a copy of the highway’s Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) from the DOH. The EIS said there were no known subsurface mines in the build area. This floored me. This is the heart of the “Billion Dollar Coal Fields;” do they not know why? Though Ben Hark at the engineering department denied it, there are underground mines in the area.

DOH maps showed that there were going to be two valley fills in the hollow, the largest one of the 14 about ¼ of a mile away from my home, and another about 1 ½ miles away. Though not identified on the maps, there are abandoned mines on each side of these proposed valley fills and there are abandoned mines underneath them as well. This is the makings of a major disaster!

For our protection, before a flood washes away our homes, and maybe our lives, I want to get bought out. I wish our neighbors would listen and speak up.

Mike Whit, who is in charge of the Mingo County Redevelopment Authority, told DOH the community is in no danger. Whit is not in any position to make such a judgment on the safety of the hollow!

DOH officials are talking to me like I’m a complete lunatic. Since Mike Whit has said that we are not in any danger, they are taking it as gospel truth.

After I called them over and over, the DEP finally gathered all the maps together, and should assemble a report on the underground, abandoned mines. I am going to turn that report over to the DOH so those mines get on their maps. “Should previously unidentified subsurface mines be found during construction, mitigation measures could include bridging, sealing, subsurface reinforcement, backfilling, or capping the deep mine area.” (King Coal Highway Final EIS). Before they could seal and stabilize all of these mines they could probably build a road from here to China. Just in this area behind us, there are at least 10 underground mine openings.

A new consolidated high school, proposed as part of this project, would be built on a site where several seams of coal have been mined. The Kanawha County Circuit Court ordered a cease to the school building until a public hearing this May. Nicewonder is offering to pass the deed on to the school board in October if the remaining coal is mined. But Nicewonder doesn’t even own the land; the company is leasing the land from the Thompson heirs.

I do not understand how the DOH entered into an agreement with a coal company where state and federal money can be used to mine coal without a permit.

This is not just incidental extraction of coal. They are going down 200 feet and removing four seams of coal and then they will backfill 120 feet so that the elevation change will only be 80 feet! There is anywhere from 1.5 million to 5 million tons of coal. This corrupt agreement has now provoked a lawsuit from a construction union because the DOH did not put the job up for bid!

In apparent retaliation for my husband and myself raising cane about this corrupt and dangerous deal, Pocahontas Land Company has now locked us out of our family cemetery.

I feel that, in order to distract us, Pocahontas is also trying to force us to give up a piece of property that my husband Roby inherited from his grandfather. Two weeks after I started calling to find out what was going on with the highway they showed up saying that they had rights to the property which had been in the family since 1945!

I’ve got a problem with a company coming in and doing something illegal and taking away millions of dollars out of state. In the process we are going to lose our home. We are going to lose everything that we have worked for.

They claim that they are going to build developments and hotels, but it’s going to be all on top of valley fills that are above underground mines. If the road falls in and there is a major accident and people are killed, who is going to be responsible for that? Who is responsible now? The DOH will not even say who actually signed the dotted line to allow Nicewonder Contracting to strip mine four seams of coal and build 14 valley fills without a permit.

Nobody is willing to take responsibility for this.