This is what happens when no one cares

If you followed the stories about Newburg’s water troubles and found yourself wondering, “How does this happen?” here’s the simple answer:

No one cares.

The coal companies dumping pollutants don’t care. The politicians don’t care. The environmental protection agencies don’t care.

Even we, as citizens and residents of West Virginia, don’t usually care until something happens to impact us directly. How many of us have passed a creek or a stream that was orange and murky and didn’t give it a second thought? How many “reclaimed” strip mines where the land is nothing but miles of barren dust have we seen and done nothing more than frown and shrug?

That’s because we have become so desensitized to the environmental trauma inflicted on the Mountain State that we don’t even flinch anymore.

The only reason an average Joe looked twice at what was happening in Newburg was because four households lost their drinking water when their wells were contaminated by polluted mine water.

If people had cared — not just us regular people, but the coal companies, the government entities who are paid to care, our politicians — the whole situation could have been prevented years ago.

Whitetail K-mine has been closed since 2009. Alpha Natural Resources — parent company of Kingwood Mining Co., which operated Whitetail — declared bankruptcy in 2015 to save the last vestiges of itself after settling a massive fine. But before that, there was the failed “Phase 1 bond release.” The bond release process lets coal companies prove they have satisfactorily “reclaimed” the mine, then get their bond money back. The fact that owners of the Whitetail mine — first Alpha/Kingwood Mining in 2014 and then Lexington Coal Co. in 2017 — submitted and then withdrew two applications for Phase 1 bond release tells us it would cost more to actually reclaim the mine than the bond is worth.

But wait — there’s more. WVDEP records show Lexington owned Whitetail K-mine from at least September 2017 onward. According to EPA records, the Whitetail mine was out of compliance from October 2017 to Sept. 30, 2019, for not submitting discharge monitoring reports (DMRs). DMRs are supposed to have data related to what pollutants and non-pollutants are coming out of a mine into a waterway.

No actions were taken against Lexington for this non-compliance. It was allowed to hide what it was dumping into our streams from the EPA for two years, and there were zero consequences.

From October 2019 to January 2020, there were no violations identified, which should mean the DMR reports for that quarter are available. Well, there’s a place where you can download the data. Except there is no data. The file is just blank beyond the category listings. Webpages that should show the same information? Big blocks of “compliance status unknown” and “no DMR data available.”

For this quarter, which ran Jan. 1 to May 1? Facility status is undetermined.

This is why we said no one cares. The coal companies don’t care. The environmental regulatory groups don’t care enough to hold coal companies accountable. Politicians don’t care enough to hold either entity accountable. And, right now, we don’t care enough to hold any of the above accountable. That has to change. And the change starts with us.