It’s Bad When Coal Waste Gets in the Water

by Debbie Sammons

I am a Christian woman. I am a wife, a mother, and a homemaker who has raised her children in water contaminated with coal slurry. My entire family stays sick.

When I was carrying my son, I followed my doctor’s directions and drank plenty of water – well water. I was wrong.

My 9-year-old son has been admitted to the hospital with kidney infections and has passed kidney stones. The second time he was admitted for this problem the doctor

said he had “environmental toxic poisoning.”

I have an 18-year-old daughter who has had sinus problems, allergies, throat infections – the same as my son.

She has found another lump in her breast and has been plagued with female infections her entire life. All the things that Brittany has experienced I too have experienced as a woman living in this water.

We all keep skin infections. Skin sores all over our bodies. Our hair is falling out and it feels like straw.

We, like everybody else in this community, didn’t know we were living with contaminated water. Toxic water.

We inhale the vapors every time we take a shower. If it is corroding the inside of our house and our plumbing, what is it doing to our lungs?

The people of our community, as well as other communities in the state of West Virginia are working diligently to see that the sludge safety bill is passed in the state of West Virginia. We need to make sure that no one else’s children are contaminated the way our children and the way the children of our communities have been contaminated.

The mining industry needs to be more accountable for the way they dispose of their waste and this bill’s purpose is to do that – to make them more accountable and to see that they dispose of their waste in a more humane way instead of putting it into our children’s bodies.