Sewage Treatment Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

This story was updated on June 16, 2020, at 4:50 p.m. to include a statement from the Environmental Protection Agency.

The rain poured down for hours on Sunday, slamming the valleys of Fayette County with water. As the earth became saturated, local streams swelled.

Minden resident Marie Collins said the water washed out the underpinning of her house.

“We had to sleep in the car last night,” Collins said on Monday.

Weather experts estimate nearby Oak Hill received roughly 5.5 inches of rain in six hours. Minden is just a few miles away and lies in a valley.

“I was too scared to come in the house, because I was afraid my house would come off the foundation,” she said.

The next day, several feet of water surrounded the Collins home. Marie Collins said she noticed an oily substance floating on top that she could smell from inside her home.

Minden has a history with Polychlorinated Biphenyl, or PCB, a known cancer-causing chemical that electrical company Shaffer Equipment Company started storing in a nearby dump site back in the 1970s. The chemical waste site was discovered by the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources in 1984. After years of requests, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2019 added the Minden site to the National Priorities List of Superfund sites.

PCB has contaminated the soil in Minden, the EPA has said, and residents fear that the chemical is flushed out every time it floods, much like Sunday night.

“I’m scared of [the] water now. I’m just so scared,” Collins said. “And then I have got three boys, a 13-year-old, an 11 and a seven-year-old. I don’t want them to have cancer.”

The floods on Sunday, June 14, in Fayette County washed out the underpinning of the Collins’ house in Minden.

On Tuesday, the EPA said initial inspections “indicate no significant damage” to the cap structure encompassing the dump site, or other structures the EPA has put in place to separate PCB oil from the Minden community.

“There is no indication that capped site material was transported away from the site,” the EPA stated in a press release.

Gov. Jim Justice issued a state of emergency for Fayette County Sunday night, deploying state highway workers to the area to free up debris from the roads and begin repairing some of the more long-lasting damage.

A local state of emergency from the county commission that afternoon specifically named Oak Hill, Scarbro, Minden and Whipple.

Justice said in a virtual press briefing Monday morning there were no known deaths or injuries from the flooding. There were, however, nearly 20 home and car rescues by the local swiftwater rescue team.

A rescue boat in Minden, W.Va., helping people with the aftermath of Sunday’s flooding.

Not A First-Time Flood

Annetta Coffman, another lifelong local, recalled a disastrous flood to the area 19 years ago. Every time the water levels rise for smaller, more regular floods that happen every summer, Coffman said residents are afraid to drink locally sourced water or do much outside.

“With oil, it travels because it attaches to mud. Right now, it’s mud and sand everywhere, so it’s hard to tell exactly what the people right now are walking in,” Coffman said of the flood damage Sunday night.

Coffman’s home also flooded several feet high Sunday night, but she said it wasn’t as devastating as the flood in 2001, when she lost her first home and all of her possessions.

“You work so hard. It’s a poor community anyway, and you work to try to have things, and then, something like that can be gone within 30 minutes,” she said.

In addition to the oil, and the expensive loss of having to repair one’s home or find a new one, Coffman said flooding also tends to free up raw sewage.

“And so that now is in our homes,” she said. “People are trying to figure out how to clean up their home. You take the risk of getting Hepatitis A.”

Minden and the surrounding area has also been ravaged by sewage contamination, which the EPA addressed in 2016. According to the report, this was the result of failing and downright non-existent systems to manage human waste. In 2017, a $23 million sewage and water drainage project began in efforts to prevent future contamination by flooding.

But Coffman said many of her neighbors’ houses were flooded with at least two feet of contaminated water Sunday night.

A Developing Response

The Division of Highways entered Fayette County Sunday evening, and will continue working from the area for the next week and a half. Deputy State Highway Engineer Greg Bailey said Monday staff are prioritizing repairs in areas where there are no alternative routes.

“We’re focusing a lot on areas where people are completely blocked and don’t have a way out,” Bailey said Monday.

During his virtual press briefing, Gov. Justice said he anticipated the DOH will have most repairs finished within a week and a half.

Warm Hands From Warm Hearts, a local outreach ministry operating the Center of Hope in Oak Hill, has set up cots in case anyone needs a place to stay. Director Mike Bone said the center also has a shower and a kitchen for anyone in need.

The Red Cross and Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster, or VOAD, were gathering buckets of cleaning supplies to donate Monday morning, and assessing the best way to provide assistance, given restrictions from the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

As for Marie Collins, whose home sustained permanent damage in 2001 and now again Sunday night, she said she plans to eventually use lime, a powder chemical for flooding, to help battle the smell of oil and sewage in her front yard.

“I’m just so ready to move,” Collins said. “If I had the money to move, I would move.”

Emily Allen is a Report for America corps member.

This story is part of West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Southern Coalfields Reporting Project which is supported by a grant from the National Coal Heritage Area Authority.

Mountain Artworks is a studio in Mercer County that houses the unique flair, personality, passion, and dreams of metal sculptor Michael “Mike” Sizemore. Mike has a particular fondness for copper, but he uses all sorts of materials in his work, even recycled glass ashtrays. Like many artists, Mike keeps a day job to pay the bills.

You can find his sculptures at Concord University, private yards, city streets and at Tamarack, in Beckley West Virginia, which features juried artists from across the state. Imagine pipes bent into abstractions of owls, turtles, and even the New River Gorge bridge. Some of his work, which can tower as tall 30 feet, is often inspired by petroglyphs from ancient drawings.

Mike traces his love of artmaking back to one day while he was growing up in Fayette County when his mother insisted that he and his brother go to school despite a blizzard.

“Everybody else was home sleigh riding, but my butt was in school,” Mike explained. “To give me something to do, [the teacher] brought me in one of those foot stools and gave me a box of chalk, and she told me to draw the solar system on the chalkboard. So I drew the solar system. It took me all day. What I really remember was coming into class the next day, and everybody was amazed at how cool it was. It was like little tours that came into the classroom. They brought in another chalkboard so they didn’t have to erase it. Yeah, that felt pretty good.”

Mike Sizemore holds up a sketch of the New River Gorge Bridge that he’ll use to create a metal sculpture.

That was the first time Mike realized he had something special to share. As a middle-schooler, a mischievous Mike took his drawings from chalkboards to, well, other surfaces.

“I remember seeing airbrushed T-shirts, and I’m thinking, [I’d] been graffiti painting all over Fayette County,” Mike admits. “Why not take it down to a small scale and put it on a shirt? So yeah, let me say I did a fair amount of graffiti painting all around Oak Hill. Sorry, Mom and Dad.”

Mike also was helped along the way by some of his family in Roanoke, Virginia, especially his infamous Aunt Leona.

“She moved to Roanoke to work for the railroad,” Mike notes, “and she was a horse-snuff-dipping, cigar-smoking, drinking, hard woman. But she was cool.”

Mike’s cousin Tom had a blacksmith shop in Aunt Leona’s garage. That’s where Mike heated up his first piece of metal.

Mike went on to study art at Concord University (then Concord College). He moved to New Mexico, where he learned from other metal sculptors and discovered petroglyphs, or rock carvings left by the Pueblo Indians.

“I would get on my mountain bike and go out to these things and spend hours taking photographs of them and so forth and so on.” Mike says. “I was just mesmerized. . . . There’s a language in that. “

He eventually brought that inspiration back to West Virginia and blended it with his affection for our state and its lush scenery.

Mike’s Day Job

Mike keeps his humor on the job. I even notice a “no fishing” sign hung on a cement tank full of sludge.

Mike Sizemore at the Athens Sewage Treatment Plant

“We have one in the lab also that says ask for free sample,” Mike giggles. “Comic relief at the sewage plant is essential to the job because it gets a little crappy now here sometimes.”

Mike’s plumbing experience goes way back. Growing up in Fayette County, he heard about the days when indoor toilets were first introduced to the area.

“My mother’s father was a manager in the mines, so they were the first people in Whipple to have a flushing toilet. Ya know, everything else just went out to the creek,” he laughs. “So it was a pretty big deal.”

Mike has deep roots here. He says his ancestors were Italian immigrants and native Cherokee. Mike’s parents also grew up in Fayette County, where bartering was a way of life.

“My parents did it on a fairly decent scale,” Mike said. “They still do it to this day. They’re antique collectors, so. . . . If you need your grass cut and this person wants a nice cabinet out back that my mom’s been collecting for 20 years, she’ll get her grass [cut] for the summer, and he’ll get the cabinet.”

Mike learned to be resourceful, too. He says it was often a matter of survival. He recalls gathering glass bottles with his mother along the side of the road as a kid in Oak Hill, for extra cash.

“Remember when you could take bottles back and get three cents for them? Yeah, that was our job on Saturday morning. We’d steal a buggy from the A&P, or borrow it or whatever you want to call it because we always took it back, but we took it back full of bottles. Then, when I wanted money, I’d go get bottles myself, with my friends.”

He remembers those days fondly. But they weren’t easy, care-free days.

“It was pretty tough, and that struggle got passed down to all of us,” Mike explains as he wipes his nose. “It basically taught you if you want it, you gotta go get it. Gotta find a way to do it. Do it without breaking the law; my parents taught me that, too, which we didn’t always succeed at, you know,” Mike said as he chuckled.

Today, there are lots of colorful walls adorned with paintings and metal sculptures in Mike’s home. Relying on that time-tested tradition of bartering, Mike has collected hundreds of pieces of art by trading his own work. It’s taken some growth and courage, but he’s making money selling his art, too.

“I don’t know too many people like myself that can take any kind of metal and turn it into something. It’s taken me a long time to get to that point because I just want to make people happy, and I do make people happy, but now it’s just business coming into that fold.”

Mike has helped to create a Youtube channel for the Town of Athens. The page explains how what flows out of your toilet is treated at a plant. Mike is planning on retiring soon from the sewage treatment plant so he’s taken on a young apprentice. He plans to work more on his art but these days, he’s getting help from his son, Willie, especially when it comes to the digital presence of his work. As he teaches Willie to weld, his son helps out with social media. So it seems the dependable barter practice of Mike’s past, is still helping to take him forward.

You can find Mountain Artworks on Facebook. Special thanks to Goldenseal Magazine for help with this report. You can also find Sizemore’s story and more on this week’s episode of Inside Appalachia.

Tag: Sewage Treatment

Fayette County Flood Stirs Up Long Held Concerns On Cancer-Causing Oil Site

Metal Sculptor by Night, Sewage Treatment by Day, An Interview With Artist Mike Sizemore