Tag: Ken Ward

After 28 Years of 'Sustained Outrage' Ken Ward Jr. Leaves Charleston Gazette-Mail

Award-winning investigative, environmental reporter Ken Ward Jr. announced Monday was his last day at the Charleston Gazette-Mail.

“Some personal news: Today was my last day at @wvgazettemail. After more than 28 years, I’ve decided it’s time for new adventures and different challenges. More on that soon /1,” Ward said via Twitter.

The news comes just days after Greg Moore, the Gazette-Mail’s now-former executive editor, announced his job had been unexpectedly eliminated Thursday. Media trade publication Poynter reached out to newly-hired regional executive editor Lee Wolverton regarding the decision to eliminate Moore’s position. He had no comment.

In 2017, the Gazette-Mail, whose motto is “sustained outrage” won a Pulitzer Prize for its investigation into West Virginia’s opioid crisis. In January 2018, the paper declared bankruptcy. It was purchased by HD Media, a media company based in Huntington. Moore was the paper’s second editor to lose his job in the last two years. Longtime editor Rob Byers was laid off in 2018.

On Monday, reaction to Ward’s announcement poured in on social media from both current and former Gazette-Mail staffers as well as members of the public.

Some expressed anger toward Doug Reynolds, managing partner of HD Media.

When reached by phone, Reynolds praised Ward and his work.

“Ken’s an incredibly accomplished journalist,” he said. “We’re disappointed that he’s going onto other things, and we wish him the best of luck.”

Reynolds said “the timing is the timing at this point” when asked if the departure coincided with the decision to eliminate Moore’s position. He added while the executive management team hasn’t discussed it yet, it is his intention to fill Ward’s role.

Ward is a West Virginia native and graduate of West Virginia University. He has won numerous reporting awards and in 2017 was named a member of the newly launched ProPublica Local Reporting Network. In 2018, Ward was named a MacArthur Fellow, often referred to as the “genius” grant.

Us & Them: Three Tales of Coal

For decades, coal was king in West Virginia. It paid good wages, paid the bills for many local services through taxes, and kept small towns alive. But more of our nation’s electricity is starting to come from other sources like wind and solar power. Coal is losing out.

This Us & Them episode brings us three tales of coal and its future in Appalachia. Two of those tales come from men who grew up in the same neighborhood in Charleston, WV and now hold very different perspectives. Andrew Jordan owns mines. Joe Lovett is an environmental lawyer. Our third tale comes from journalist Ken Ward, who has covered the coal industry for decades. He says West Virginia needs to look at another energy player – natural gas – to determine its future.

You also can listen to this episode of Us & Them on WVPB Radio on Thursday, October 24, 2019 at 8 p..m. Tune in to Us & Them on the fourth Thursday of the month at 8 PM, with an encore presentation on the fourth Saturday at 3 PM.

Coal and Natural Gas Similarities: An Interview With Ken Ward Jr.

The recent rise of oil and gas drilling across West Virginia has raised questions about industry regulation and taxation. Many bear a striking resemblance to similar questions raised about the coal industry in years past. 

Ken Ward Jr. is a reporter for the Charleston Gazette-Mail. He’s been writing about the coal industry his entire career. He sees a number of similarities between the coal and natural gas industries and how those industries are regulated. 

In the 1950s, then Gov. William C. Marland proposed taxing coal with a 10 cent per ton severance tax. “Let’s use this equitable source of revenue, because whether we like it or not, West Virginia’s hills will be stripped, the bowels of the earth will be mined and the refuse strewn across our valleys and our mountains in the form of burning slate dumps,” he said. The move was considered political suicide. 

“I think we see that now,” Ward said. “We see places where coal jobs have vanished were greatly diminished. We see that a lot of these places still don’t have good roads. They don’t have good schools. A series that Caity Coyne from the Gazette-Mail worked on last year, a lot of these places don’t have clean drinking water. Jessica Lilly from [West Virginia] Public Broadcasting has reported tons of stories about those issues in southern West Virginia.” 

Academics often discuss the concept of a “resource curse” where places with large amounts of natural resources do not attempt to diversify and then are stuck when those resources run dry. Ward said he doesn’t think it’s inevitable, but in West Virginia we have to work hard to fight it. 

Ward recalled one public hearing he attended about mountaintop removal coal mining in which a young man from eastern Kentucky testified against a proposed regulation from the U.S. EPA.

“And you know, he’s a young man, he’s like a kid, really, and he said, ‘If you shut down this mining, there’s nothing for me. That’s the only future I possibly have,'” Ward said. “What a sad sort of thing. I mean, who doesn’t want for their kids any possible future they could imagine?” 

Ward said there are other states that have large amounts of natural resources, but they have also planned for downtimes with a “future fund” where money is set aside from the sale of those resources. Alaska is the primary example where everyone in the state gets a check. Most places use the money for infrastructure projects and schools.  

The Legislature passed a bill establishing a future fund in West Virginia, but they never funded it. 

“They set up all of these little requirements. Well, if the state rainy day fund exceeds this, and if tax collections are XX percentage above this, then we’ll put some money into it, but they’ve never actually put any money in. We have this future fund with no funds,” Ward explained. 

Ward said one of the biggest mistakes West Virginia is making right now is attempting to carry out new projects and new developments with the natural gas industry in secret. 

“I think it’s really difficult to know if it’s the direction West Virginia should go, when anybody — whether it’s a newspaper reporter, or an environmental activist or a housewife —anybody who tries to just say, ‘Hey, wait a second, let me ask some questions about that’ immediately the reaction [is] ‘Oh, you’re just against jobs’ or “You’re just negative. You’re driving people from West Virginia,'” he said. “I mean, if all of these things are so fantastic for West Virginia, then they will withstand scrutiny.”

Ken Ward on NPR's Fresh Air: Overregulation Is 'Wildly Exaggerated'

Fresh Air recently interviewed Charleston Gazette investigative reporter Ken Ward about the Freedom Industries chemical spill. Here are the highlights:

On how the chemical leak was discovered

Some people who live in that part of town called in both to the metro 911 — the county emergency operation center — and to the state Department of Environmental Protection complaints of an odor, that they smelled some sort of a strong licorice odor in the air.

The Department of Environmental Protection sent a couple of air quality inspectors out and … when they first went there they were told by company officials, “No, we’re not having any problems. What are you talking about?” They asked to tour the site. The inspectors went out and they noticed there was a problem at one of the tanks. They described to me a 400-square-foot, 3- to 4-inch-deep pool of this chemical that had leaked out of a hole in the tank, and a 4-foot-wide stream of this stuff that was pouring across the containment area … and it was kind of disappearing … into the river. … Much of the Elk River was frozen over so you couldn’t immediately see that it was in the river.

The problem that arises from that is that Freedom Industries [the company that owns the chemical storage tanks] had a permit from the state Department of Environmental Protection — a storm water permit, a permit to govern runoff from its facility. One of the requirements of that permit is that they immediately report any spills. The Department of Environmental Protection says they didn’t report this spill to the state and the fact that they didn’t report it immediately delayed some efforts at containing the spill and certainly affected the size of it and made the situation worse than it necessarily had to be.

On the ambiguity around the health risks of the chemical spill

Eastman Chemical, which makes it, puts out what’s called a Material Safety Data Sheet [MSDS]. An MSDS is something that’s required under the Occupational Safety and Health Act. It’s supposed to be kept on site for workers to look at and it’s supposed to be filed with emergency responders and local environmental authorities. It’s supposed to list the properties of the chemical, its flashpoint and what’s the toxicity of it.

And the problem with this particular substance is that if you read the MSDS for it, where it lists toxicological effects: Is it a carcinogen? No data. Does it cause developmental problems? No data. Most of the basic health effects that you’d want to know about, there’s no data available listed on the MSDS for this material.

On what citizens are doing in response

My family and I, we’re not drinking this water. I know a lot of people that aren’t. When you go to the grocery stores here you still see people buying pretty significant quantities of bottled water, filling up their carts. When you go to restaurants you hear people asking, “Are you using bottled water? Are you using tap water?” And restaurants are putting out press releases and they have signs that say, “We’re using only bottled water.”

On the U.S. Chemical Safety Board’s recommendations for stricter oversight of industrial chemicals in West Virginia

The Chemical Safety Board has been to West Virginia quite a few times and they came here in 2008 after an explosion at a Bayer CropScience chemical plant. … The Chemical Safety Board came in and investigated that and found a lot of problems at the plant and found a dearth of regulation of that sort of a plant. And one of the things the Chemical Safety Board said was that our state … should work with the Kanawha-Charleston Health Department to create a new chemical accident prevention program through which government inspectors would more frequently go into these plants, would ensure they’re being operated safely.

The Chemical Safety Board came back again after a series of accidents at a DuPont chemical plant … in West Virginia — [a series of] accidents there in January of 2010 ended up with one worker being killed. And the Chemical Safety Board repeated its recommendation after that incident.

… The state has really done absolutely nothing to implement that recommendation. The Kanawha County officials have encouraged the state to work with them … and the state has just basically ignored the recommendation.

On misconceptions about federal regulation of dangerous industrial chemicals

The industry officials didn’t like the Chemical Safety Board recommendations. They insisted there’s enough regulation already and that agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration do enough already.

And I think there seems to be this idea that … agencies like EPA and OSHA are these jack-booted thugs that are kicking down the gates of manufacturing facilities and stomping out jobs. When in fact, a lot of these facilities will go for years and years without ever seeing an OSHA inspector coming in and checking on the workplace conditions; without ever seeing an EPA inspector who is looking at their environmental conditions. The notion that these places are just terribly overregulated is wildly exaggerated.

On what authority the Obama administration has to regulate industrial chemicals

[The Obama administration] certainly ha[s] broad rule-making authority at EPA, and the Environmental Protection Agency can make rules about all sorts of things about this; the Occupational Safety and Health Administration can make rules about these things.

One example is [that] the coal industry here likes to complain about how tough the Obama administration is on them, but a few years ago we had a major spill of toxic coal ash from an impoundment in east Tennessee, and the Obama administration promised after that, “We’re going to write new rules to govern toxic coal ash and ensure that it’s handled and disposed of safely.”

Well, they still haven’t done that. OSHA knows that combustible dust is a big problem. They haven’t written rules about that.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Exit mobile version