Nicolas Zegre Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Residents Along Contaminated Creek Just Want Clean Water

In Pineville, West Virginia, a town of 500, residents filled up the front rows of the county courtroom recently. They came to hear the latest legal update on a battle some have been fighting for generations – securing clean water. Bobby Lee Keen and his wife Patsy attended the hearing. “How come they have people living like they’re in a third world country in the United States of America?” asked Bobby Keen.

“How come they have people living like they’re in a third world country in the United States of America?” asked Bobby Keen.

The Keens have lived in their house for 20 years, but they have never had clean drinking water. They say the only way they can drink the orange water that comes out of the faucet is by using it to make coffee.

Keen said the water quality has gotten worse in the last year, and he and his wife have had stomach issues and rashes. Other residents have reported similar symptoms.

And they’re not sure what could be causing it. Regardless, Keen believes one thing to be true.

“There’s something getting in that water,” he said.

One of the three places along the creek where water started coming out, and with it, a white stringy slime.

*Courtesy of David Stover*

A year ago, down the street from the Keens’ house, water started flowing out of the ground in the middle of a field, forming a pool. All that water led to a mold infestation in a nearby property owner’s house. The water had a rotten egg smell and white stringy slime.

Who Is Responsible?

Just below the surface of that pungent pool is an old mine, previously owned by the now-defunct Pinnacle Mining Company.

The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (EPA) tested the water and said that the results indicated that it had been polluted by the abandoned mine.

Nicolas Zegre, a Mountain Hydrologist at West Virginia University (WVU), said holes like the one in Pineville are known as artesian wells. They naturally push water from aquifers to the surface.

“When you start mining, the geologic layers, the below ground layers,” Zegre said. “You’re fundamentally changing how water is going to flow through the earth.”

Now, the pool of smelly, murky water has become a steady stream that flows into Indian Creek.

The DEP ordered Pinnacle to remedy the situation. When Pinnacle failed to act, it took the company to court.

There is one major problem here. Pinnacle Mining Company no longer legally exists. As part of its bankruptcy, the company’s assets and liabilities were sold. But to whom?

“That’s the million dollar question,” Matt Hepler, a scientist with Appalachian Voices, said.

Court documents show Pinnacle was, at least in part, bought by Bluestone Mining Resources and is owned by Gov. Jim Justice. However, Justice said Bluestone is not responsible.

Justice answered this question: “Many people along Indian Creek in Wyoming county are sounding the alarms about water contamination possibly coming from a mine that your company purchased, and now owns. As both the governor and the owner of said company is there anything you are planning on doing for these folks so that they can have clean drinking water?” by saying he is not responsible.

*Photo Credit: WV Governor’s Office*

“I’m all for them having good clean drinking water. But you can’t, you can’t blame me on this one,” Justice said at one of his regular press briefings. “The companies that we have are so distantly involved in this, it’s unbelievable. You know, the DEP is working on the issue.”

Hepler said this fits into a bigger context of the mess that ensues after a coal company goes bankrupt.

“They can’t even figure out, they’re arguing who that new owner is. So they’re not even sure. They’re just pointing fingers at each other,” Hepler said.

Which raises another big picture question.

“Who gets left holding the liability when these coal companies go out?” Hepler asked.

Will The Problem Be Fixed?

In court on April 4, the presiding Wyoming County Judge Derek Swope demanded the companies figure out who is responsible by their next court date in May.

Outside the courthouse, community members said they felt disappointed. Richard Altizer has been delivering water bottles to some of the residents affected by the water crisis. He and others were hoping the courts would have ordered Bluestone and Alpha Metallurgical Resources to cease all operations until they fixed some of the problems associated with Pinnacle’s abandoned mine.

Disappointed residents, some affected by the water crisis, leave the court room.

*Photo Credit: Briana Heaney/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

“If that judge were to order that mines and the gas companies shut down until that is fixed they’d be out there tomorrow fixing it,” Altizer said.

In their lawsuit, the DEP and the man whose house was flooded, are asking for injunctive relief. They don’t want money for the damaged property or the health issues the water has caused, they only want what has been broken to be fixed. But residents are frustrated by what they say is a year of inaction.

“Now that the mine gets to operate, and the gas wells keep doing what they’re doing, everything’s hunky-dory with the poor people down here. And it’s frustrating,” Altizer said. “But like I said, we still got legal rights.”

The community is considering a class action lawsuit.

Richard Altizer has been delivering water bottles to community members paid for through crowd funding sites and city officials.

*Photo Credit: Briana Heaney/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

Is The Water Toxic?

In the meantime, the question looms, is the water safe?

Grace Denver, an expert on water and its connection to people’s lives, works at WVU’s Center For Resilient Communities. She affirmed what residents have been saying about their everyday use of the water from contaminated wells.

“That can result in huge GI issues, skin rashes,” Denver said. “It can even lead to longer-term things like cancer and things like that.”

Patsy Keen brought photos with her to court in hoping to show someone involved in the legal process what the water was doing to her skin while she was routinely showering in it.

*Photo Credit: Briana Heaney/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

Even though the DEP found the mine was the source of the contamination, it said the water quality passes all mine reclamation standards. But members of the community are skeptical. Terry Fletcher, with the DEP, said the agency is doing everything within its power to take on the issue.

“I know, there’s been kind of a narrative pushed out there that we’re only testing for one to two, three to four things when we’re testing for dozens and dozens of parameters,” Fletcher said.

But Hepler from Appalachian Voices said the tests that the department has done so far might not show the true water condition.

“Now when you test the water column, which is just to say test the water without any of that slime in it,” Hepler said. “The water has been coming back fine, according to West Virginia DEP standards.”

Hapler believes the water does pass mine reclamation standards, as well as Clean Water Act standards, but he said that even still that doesn’t translate to the water being safe.

And there is another set of data that is being ignored, said WVU’s Grace Denver.

“Community members are experts of their own lives,” Denver said. “And so I think like their lived experience of knowing, like recognizing the smell, noticing the color change in their community, and recognizing also if any rashes are appearing, or if they’re feeling funky, I think that is scientific knowledge. And I think that we should be taking these observations from the community a lot more seriously.”

For Bobby Keen, whose faucet still has orange water coming out, he said he isn’t angry at anyone, he just wants his family and community to have access to safe water.

**Editor’s Note: A previous version of this story said even though the DEP found the mine was the source of the contamination, it said the water quality passes all mine reclamation standards. It has been changed to: Even though the DEP found the mine was the source of what residents believe is contaminated water, it says the water quality passes all state water quality standards.

Historic Floods Leave Rural Community With Questions

Moments after she ended the call the river had breached its five-foot banks. She looked up stream and saw waves of turbulent water coming towards her.
“It literally looked like the dam opened,” Anna Goodnight said.

Escaping The Flood

Anna Goodnight’s yellow panel house sits along the Little Creek hollow. Her home, and the other homes on this street, are accessible by a small bridge that crosses a trickling creek. The morning of August 28th she stood along the side road holding her son’s hand, waiting to put him on the bus. It was raining and had been raining on and off for a couple days.

At 6:45 a.m. Anna looked up the road and noticed the small creek was the slightest bit higher than normal.

“I looked up the road and I called their dad. I said, are you sure everything’s still good? Yeah, (he said) sure. I said, Are you sure? Are you sure everything’s gonna be okay? He said yeah, everything’s fine,” Goodnight said.

Moments after she ended the call the river had breached its five-foot banks. She looked up stream and saw waves of turbulent water coming towards her.

“It literally looked like the dam opened and all this just came gushing down,” she said.

The bridge that connects the road to their house was washed away creating a cascade of thunderous sounds as bridge after bridge gave way to the pressure of the raging creek.

Anna ran over the bridge, back to her house to grab her other child and her dogs. Then back over the bridge through a veil of water that was coming up over it, to her car.

“As soon as we got across it wiped the whole thing out. When I got in the car to leave, you can see, it followed us all the way down. Just rushing out,” Goodnight said.

Another one of her neighbors was not able to cross the creek in time. Goodnight says she saw her on the other side of the flooding creek climbing with her four young children up over the mountain to get to high ground away from the waters.

Seven homes were washed away in the floods in late August. Credit/Anna Goodnight

Mountains Of Water

The residents in this area are used to floods because these hollows, or areas low in a valley lined up with creeks, are vulnerable to flash floods. However, residents that live along Little Creek all said this flood was different.

“Never have I witnessed anything like that,” Goodnight said.

A flood warning was not issued until 7 a.m. — 15 minutes after Goodnight said the flood started.

“A statement was made from somebody, ‘When you get an alert, that you need to leave your home.’ Well, there was no alert. There was no warning. There was not a flood warning. There was nothing,” Goodnight said.

Most residents say as quickly as the water went up, it went down. That’s characteristic of a watershed area that has been impacted by surface mines, said Nicolas Zegre, a professor of forest hydrology at WVU’s mountain hydrology laboratory.

“When we get into surface mine systems, because of all the impervious surfaces and the lack of vegetation and lack of soils, we see a very flashy flow response where the stream rises very quickly. It peaks very quickly, and then it falls very quickly. And that shape of the hydrograph does say a lot about what’s going on in that watershed,” Zegre said.

In an undisturbed watershed, different things happen to the precipitation, Zegre said. Some of it is absorbed by the ground and stored for later use, some of it absorbed by trees and used in a process called transpiration, some of it is held in the ground or puddles and eventually evaporates. He said even if that water does eventually find its way into the creek, it typically releases the water over a longer period of time, having less intense peaks.

“The biological system that normally would attenuate that rainfall is no longer there. So, we would expect increases in runoff on landscapes,” he said.

Moving Mountains

Reclaimed mines don’t do much better.

“The big question as to whether reclamation ever restores the function of the watershed: The answer is no,” Zegre said.

That’s because those mines, even when complying with state and federal law, usually just plant exotic grasses on top of the minded areas.

“So this requires, you know, built infrastructure to kind of manage the runoff that’s coming off of these impervious surfaces that are associated with the mine. So even when it’s recreated, it’s still a disturbed landscape that is largely dominated by minerals and rocks, as opposed to soils and trees,” Zegre said.

The areas that were flooded are wrapped with older spiraling contour mines and dotted with newer mountaintop removal mines. Mountaintop removal mines are the most common form of modern coal mining.

“It’s really efficient. And so what this does is it starts at the top of the mountain, it removes the trees, it removes the soils, and then it uses explosives to remove the geologic overburden on top of those coal seams,” Zegre said.

Geological overburden is an industry word for a million pieces of blown-up rock that once formed the top of a mountain. That rock is then placed in the valleys to create another industry word, “Valley Fills.”

Some experts, like Zegre, say valley fills store water.

“Research that we’ve done on this has shown, at least for the Coal River watershed in the southern coalfields in West Virginia, maximum flows have been decreasing in that watershed,” he said. “And it was our belief that that was associated with the valley fills.”

However, Zegre says that it is hard to say if those valley fills help absorb torrential rainfall — like the 11 inches of rain that eastern Kanawha County saw in late August.

Other experts like whistleblower, expert witness, activist, and mine and health safety expert Jack Spadaro say valley fills make floods worse.

“All the studies that have been done by hydrology engineers with knowledge about how runoff happens on a slope or a mountain top have proven beyond a question that valley fills do not reduce the flow of water what-so-ever,” Spadaro said. “That’s a myth that was created by the industry to justify what they are doing.”

It’s important to emphasize that with the amount of rainfall that eastern Kanawha County had there would have been a flood regardless, Zegre said.

“Whether it’s an old growth forest, a surface mine, or a parking lot, when you drop 8 to10 inches over a couple of hours, there’s going to be a flood that comes off that landscape,” Zegre said.

Spadaro said while that is true, surface mines make floods worse, whatever the scenario.

“There have been many studies that show there’s an increase of peak discharge during a storm period. It can range between a 150 percent increase to as high as a 1,000 percent increase in the flow of water that’s coming off those watersheds. And that’s what’s been causing these floods,” Spadaro said.

Rising Water, Climbing Temps

As temperatures rise due to climate change, the air holds more water making heavy rainfalls happen more often.

“For every one-degree temperature change in the atmosphere, the atmosphere can actually hold 4 percent more water,” Zegre said. “A study by Climate Central actually showed in Huntington, West Virginia, hourly rainfall has increased by about 28 percent Since the 1970s. And so in an hour, when it’s raining, there’s 28 percent more moisture in the air that’s falling.”

That could account for some of the relentless rain that fell on the watersheds of Fields, Little, and Slaughter Creek Sunday night through Monday morning.

The Hollow Way

Just a few miles beyond those communities devastated by flash floods, upstream of the creeks that washed out the land, near their headwaters, sits a sprawling active coal mine.

“I think it would be hard to exclude that surface mine from playing a role in the stream flow that was experienced downstream. I would expect that the surface mine played a role in stream flows downstream,” said Zegre. “Now, whether that was enough to create the floods that were experienced, hard to say, but I wouldn’t be surprised.”

Downstream from that mine, sandwiched between two steep green slopes is the Little Creek Hollow where Anna Goodnight and her family live. The effort to clean up the destruction those raging waters left behind has begun. The street is lined with piles of soggy personal belongings waiting to be picked up by debris clean-up crews.

“We lost pretty much everything in the garage. I don’t even know how many feet of mud are probably under the house – around 18 inches,” Goodnight said. “We hooked up our own water yesterday to finally get water because we have had no resources up here whatsoever. No resources. There have been NO resources here.”

Goodnight said she called the Department of Environmental Protection, the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, FEMA, and the Governor’s office to no avail.

“The state and local government have completely let us down on this,” she said.

Frustration in this hollow is balanced with helping each other pick up the pieces. Many who lost their homes are at other neighbors’ houses helping them. Every house had a neighbor or church group there helping gut the water saturated walls, carrying groceries down through the steep creek, baby sitting, lending equipment, or just lending an ear.

That was the case for John Chambers and his sister. They had just put their childhood home on the market when the flood came through.

The kitchen with tile floors is now an empty room with bare sheetrock, water marked plywood, and exposed pipes. Chambers said he had just started working on his own house because he had been helping others

“I got mud and water there. They got 14-15 inches of mud. Got their doors pinned and blown open and can’t walk in the house,” said Chambers. “What are you gonna do? You’re just gonna stand there and watch them with a shovel? No, you’re gonna get out and you’re gonna help! You’re gonna do what’s right!”

The creek bed, the streets, everyone’s yard’s and most people’s homes are filled with this deep yellow, sandy, silty mud — and lots of coal scattered around the area.

Goodnight walked around her house picking up little pieces of coal.

“There’s coal in my garage, coal in the backyard, I mean it’s everywhere,” Goodnight said.

Little pieces giving way to more questions. his reason, or that reason.

“Not to say blame needs to be placed, but I need a little peace of mind,” Goodnight said.

Community members and leaders are urging for an investigation into surface mines in and around eastern Kanawha County. And this community is searching for answers – how did this happen? Why was it so bad this time? Was it surfacing mining? Climate change? Timbering? A sediment pond? And an act of God?

“I wouldn’t say it’s an act of God. God wouldn’t do this to people,” Chambers said.

WVU Professor Discusses West Virginia's Climate Future

Hotter, wetter and drier — this is what the climate of West Virginia could look like in the future. That’s according to new research by Nicolas Zegre, a professor at West Virginia University and director of the Mountain Hydrology Laboratory.

The peer-reviewed study, published in the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, used a robust dataset and 17 climate models to map how the climate of the 11-state, 420 county Appalachia region could change by 2100. The models examined a range of different climate change scenarios based on future emissions, including scenarios in which action is taken to curb greenhouse gas emissions and some in which no action is taken.

In West Virginia, Zegre and co-author Rodrigo Fernandez, found temperatures could be up to 10 degrees warmer if action isn’t taken to curb greenhouse gas emissions. That would mean more frequent droughts.

The study found there are different variables that could collectively affect future climate conditions, but generally, the research found, with action taken to curb greenhouse gas emissions, the northern region of Appalachia is generally projected to get wetter by the end of the century

That includes areas portions of New York, central Pennsylvania, and West Virginia following the Appalachian Mountains onto eastern Kentucky and Tennessee, and western North and South Carolina.

If no action is taken, the research found that a large portion of the Appalachian region is expected, on average, to become drier. A transition area is observed across central Appalachia, specifically around West Virginia. Regions that are already water limited, such as the southeastern extent of the region, including South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama, are projected to become even drier.

The timing of when it rains is also expected to shift in some places, the study found. Historically, the bulk of precipitation has occurred in June when trees have their leaves out and are using water. In the future, most precipitation is projected to occur in early spring, prior when tree leaves are out.

Zegre said while it sounds paradoxical that West Virginia and other parts of the Appalachian region could become hotter, wetter and drier, it’s actually what scientists would expect as climate change intensifies the water cycle across Appalachia.

“So when we have a warming atmosphere, the atmosphere expands, so it can hold more moisture in the air,” he said.

The water cycle is the interplay between when water evaporates from land into the atmosphere, where it cools and condenses into rain or snow in clouds, and falls again to the surface as precipitation. Zegre said a warming climate will change that cycle in Appalachia.

“So the more extreme events are getting more extreme with precipitation. That leads to flooding and landslides. But critically, greater evaporation during the summer months, when society relies on water for air conditioning and electricity, [means] we’re seeing exacerbation of evaporation during that time, which is leading to droughts,” he added.

He said it’s crucial that society begins preparing for these changes.

“The important point is to recognize that the water system that we rely on, and that humanity has relied on for the better part of a century is changing,” he said. “And that increased variability makes it harder to manage for the extremes, but also to provide a reliable source of water as the basis of our economy.”

For West Virginians, the coming decades are expected to be marked with more frequent and intense flooding if efforts aren’t taken to curb greenhouse gas emissions, according to Zegre.

That could have major impacts to the state’s economy.

“Floods not only disrupt day to day life for communities, but it also disrupts the economy,” he said. “It’s hard to run businesses and schools and the government and the economy when we’re inundated with flood water.”

Across the state’s mountainous terrain, Zegre said it’s likely the state’s wetter climate will also negatively impact infrastructure like roads, bridges and water treatment facilities.

Zegre said he hopes this research can help policymakers begin to plan for a climate change-impacted West Virginia. He said while large portions of the country are preparing for a drier future, the inverse is true in West Virginia.

“Here in the Appalachian region we are largely becoming warmer and wetter,” he said. “So besides using this information to reduce the vulnerability of people throughout West Virginia in the Appalachian region, we’re interested in using this information, and helping decision makers use this information, to reshape a future economy in West Virginia, that prioritizes water, the use of our water.

He said he and his colleagues are “very positive about the opportunities that West Virginia can embrace.”

“But in order for that to occur, climate change has to be part of our public discourse,” he added.

The study was funded in-part by a grant from the National Science Foundation.