Residents of southern Appalachia regard coal slurry dams as looming threats

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Residents of southern Appalachia regard coal slurry dams as looming threats
May 28, 2014 · in News Segment

(excerpt)
...A report released earlier this month details the public health and environmental impacts from coal ash, where a spill in North Carolina in February sent 27 million gallons of toxic wastewater connected to a coal ash spill into a nearby river.

Another danger related to coal mining lurks high above residents who live in small towns and hollers in southern Appalachia coal country. Thousands of people live daily with the fear of a possible breach in coal slurry dams above their homes, where the waste from cleaning coal is stored. Two recent reports investigated the threats that exist, but some who would be most at risk are skeptical of the process. Melinda Tuhus reports from Charleston, West Virginia.

The mining, production and industrial use of coal creates a number of byproducts that can be hazardous to the envirnoment and human health. Byproducts like coal ash and slurry are often stored in pits, ponds and dams. And those containments aren’t always up to established safety standards. A recent study by the federal Office of Surface Mining, Reclamation and Enforcement, or OSM, showed an 80 percent failure rate of safety tests done on several coal slurry impoundments in southern Appalachia, where coal is king.

Following a coal slurry sludge spill in Martin County, Kentucky in 2000, the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection and OSM jointly conducted a different study of 15 of the 132 impoundment dams in West Virginia. They were looking for weaknesses such as what occurred in Martin County, where the bottom of a coal sludge impoundment broke into an abandoned underground mine below, releasing 300 million gallons of sludge into local waterways....

MORE at http://fsrn.org/2014/05/residents-of-southern-appalachia-regard-coal-slurry-dams-as-looming-threats/