BREAKING: Pipe Break At Coal Facility Contaminates West Virginia Waterway
By Katie Valentine
A coal preparation facility spilled an unknown quantity of coal slurry into a creek in Kanawha County, W.V. Tuesday morning, according to West Virginia officials.
As the Charleston Gazette reports, the spill occurred at Patriot Coal’s Kanawha Eagle operation, which is located near Fields Creek. The operation is near Winifrede, WV — southeast of Charleston, the state’s capitol and site of last month’s major chemical spill. The amount of coal slurry that spilled is still unknown, but a West Virginia DEP spokesman told the Charleston Gazette that the spill could probably be characterized as “significant.”
According to the county’s emergency services director, the spill was caused by a break in the eight-inch slurry line that ran between the preparation plant and the company’s refuse impoundment, which occurred sometime between midnight and 5:30 in the morning. According to the DEP, the company in charge of the facility reported the spill to the DEP at 7:30 a.m.
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Coal slurry is a mix of solid and liquid waste that’s created from coal preparation, a process that includes washing coal with chemicals like MCHM. The DEP said in a statement that the facility utilizes a frothing chemical called Flomin 110-C that contains MCHM, the same chemical that spilled from a Freedom Industries holding plant and contaminated water for 300,000 West Virginians last month. Lawmakers have been grappling with how to prevent similar spills from happening in the future — West Virginia Sen. John Unger (D), introduced a bill aimed at regulating above-ground storage tanks that was passed unanimously in the Senate...Slurry has spilled before in West Virginia — in 1972, a coal slurry impoundment dam in Logan County burst, spilling 132,000,000 gallons of liquid onto small mining settlements, killing 125 people and injuring 1,121. And in October of 2000, a coal slurry spill in Martin County, Kentucky, spilled 306,000,000 gallons, polluting 100 miles of waterways and killing aquatic life and plants in West Virginia and Kentucky.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/02/11/3277541/west-virginia-coal-slurry-spill/
= new reply since forum marked as read
It has been happening all along. And now their environment is completely collapsing. Take a good look, mainer, cause this is going to be happening in YOUR neighborhood sooner or later. Maybe not collapse by the coal industry, but by some other industry or combination thereof. We have deregulated ourselves out of regulations all together.
This country's headed for an environmental shipwreck. 
"Safety regulations and stuff are a (smirk) commie plot to take your guns away from you and mess up your TV reception. Smirk. Sneer."
- Republicons, Inc. (R)
hate the interwebs.
News travels so fast to so many corners of the country that they can't put the genie back in the bottle anymore.
Now if we could just get the people that are affected by this type of bullshit to realize they are being used, we might
just win a battle to three.
It is hard not to be tragically cynical. 
Our poor friends in WV! 
Well, maybe the Halliburton loophole will save them. Still, those eco-terrorists are probably gonna act like society should put the lives of poor people ahead of profits, poor people stupid enough to live downstream from coal operations. They just don't understand that profit is the sole way of measuring virtue in the corporate belief system. And since corporations are people and have all the first amendment rights of people, they have the right to their own beliefs.
Sigh. 
turn on your tap and see brown brackish fluid coming out. And when you hold a lighter up to it, it will ignite. And your community will have the same problem, no matter where they get their water. And everyone begins to fall ill to all kinds of unexplained illnesses. No one is exempt, taotzu.
Don't blame those poor people in WV. Blame their elected officials for voting yea to legislation that let the coal and chemical corporations and other industries off the hook on regulations in return for political campaign cash.
Republicans and Democrats. Shame on them, not the people. 
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You want jobs or clean water? What's it gonna be? You can't have both. Just get used to it. 
Thanks for hopping on this, PS. When I seen your subject line, I literally had to clean my glasses, as I thought I wasn't seeing straight. It's a total wasteland in Charleston, WV now. I am flabbergasted! 