Excerpted from an article by Ken Ward Jr., Charleston Gazette, April 27, 2008

	Young fish affected by selenium pollution. What about people?

Selenium pollution from one of West Virginia’s largest mountaintop removal mines is dangerously poisoning Mud River fish, leaving some with serious deformities, according to one of the nation’s leading experts on the issue.

Fish samples showed some specimens with two eyes on one side of the head, and others with curved spines, fisheries biologist A. Dennis Lemly reported.

He blamed high concentrations of selenium in discharges from the Hobet 21 mountaintop removal complex upstream from the Mud and from the Mud River Reservoir.

"The Mud River ecosystem is on the brink of a major toxic event," Lemly said in a report, filed April 18 in U.S. District Court in Huntington.

"If waterborne selenium concentrations are not reduced, reproductive toxicity will spiral out of control and fish populations will collapse," Lemly wrote in a report for environmental group lawyers who filed a federal court case to try to force Hobet 21 operator Hobet Mining Inc. to stop violations of its selenium discharge limits.

The court action is the latest effort by the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition and the WV Highlands Conservancy to try to crack down on coal industry selenium pollution.

Selenium, a naturally occurring element found in many rocks and soils, is an antioxidant that is needed in very small amounts for good health. But in slightly larger amounts, selenium can be highly toxic. In aquatic life, very small amounts of selenium have been found to cause reproductive problems.

In 2003, a broad federal government study of mountaintop removal coal mining found repeated violations of water quality limits for selenium in water downstream from mining operations. The following year, a report from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found troubling levels of selenium in fish downstream from large surface mines.

Coal industry lobbyists tried - so far unsuccessfully - to persuade lawmakers and the Department of Environmental Protection to relax West Virginia’s water quality rules for selenium.

The Manchin administration moved instead to give nearly 100 coal operations three more years to fix violations of their selenium permit limits.

Environmental groups are challenging about two dozen of those DEP compliance orders before the state Environmental Quality Board.

Since the federal report in 2003, environmentalists have discovered that the DEP has not taken enforcement action against mine operators with selenium violations.

Citizen groups sought to file their own lawsuits in federal court. DEP lawyers responded by filing agency lawsuits, which would block the citizen court actions. However, since filing its cases, the DEP has not sought court orders to force compliance.

"Plaintiffs have not located a case where a state has so brazenly attempted to exploit the preclusion provisions by simply commencing an action to preclude a citizen suit and then doing nothing," wrote citizen group lawyers Joe Lovett and Derek Teaney. "DEP’s Boone County action is part of its larger effort to immunize the coal industry from compliance with the selenium water quality standard."