DEP Misses Massey Messes and Millions in Fines

	This sign is wrong - it needs to say Department for Every Polluter.

Massey to pay $20M to settle water pollution suit

by Ken Ward Jr., from Jan.17, 2008, Charleston Gazette

Federal regulators and Massey Energy officials today praised a $20 million water pollution settlement, but environmental groups said the deal only shows how poorly West Virginia regulates its coal industry

The settlement resolves a lawsuit filed by the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in May 2007.

The suits focused on thousands of water permit violations that Massey self-reported to the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, but which DEP officials didnt recognize because they stopped reviewing coal industry pollution monitoring reports.

Randy Huffman, director of the DEPs Division of Mining and Reclamation, conceded that his agency messed up, but said that he implemented a program to fix the problem.

"I would characterize it as a major hole in the regulatory program that has been filled," Huffman said this morning.

EPA said that Masseys $20 million penalty is the largest civil penalty in agency history for violations of Clean Water Act permit limits

As part of the settlement, Massey has agreed to take measures at all of its operations that EPA said would "prevent an estimated 380 million pounds of sediment and other pollutants from entering the nations waters each year."

EPA and the Department of Justice had sued Massey and more than two dozen subsidiaries, alleging that the companys operations violated water pollution permit limits more than 4,500 times between January 2000 and December 2006 (this) amounted to more than 60,500 days of violations, or 28 violations per day

EPA said that, in many cases, Massey operations discharged pollutants in amounts 40 percent or more than allowed. Federal officials also cited repeated and large slurry spills from Massey operations

Several environmental groups (OVEC, Coal River Mountain Watch, the WV Highlands Conservancy and Sierra Club, represented by Earthjustice and the Appalachian Center for the Economy & the Environment) had sought to intervene in the EPA lawsuit, but U.S. District Judge John T. Copenhaver had never ruled on their request

Much of the federal case against Massey was based on self-reported pollution discharge reports filed with the West Virginia DEP. But DEP officials never caught the violations or cited the company, because for a nearly five-year period, state officials had simply stopped reviewing monitoring reports not only for Massey, but all coal companies statewide.