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| The slurry flood taking a swingset along with it. Still from the documentary film Sludge. | | THE GREAT FLOOD - PART 1The Coal Industry Drops Thick Black Piss Over the Hills of Kentucky
In October 2000, there was a flood in Inez, Kentucky. The EPA called it the worst environmental catastrophe in the history of the eastern United States. It was way worse than the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill.
Mickey and Nina McCoy are a married couple who teach at the local high school. They are also members of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, a group of grassroots activists who fight against the perpetual environmental rape that their part of the world has been undergoing for decades.
The McCoys invited Vice over for a dinner of baked chicken, corn-bread salad, and Kentucky bourbon and told us all about the Armageddon that coal is wreaking on their hometown.
Photo by Jerry Hsu
 ickey: They called it a slurry spill, but I like to call it the slurry flood. A spill is when your daughter reaches across the table to get a cookie and accidentally knocks over her little brother’s glass of milk. That’s a spill. You go in and get some paper towels and handle it. This spill we’re talking about here was 350 million gallons of sludge and slurry.
When coal is washed in a processing plant, they pump the wastewater up a hill to what they call an impoundment pond. Well, this particular pond was 72 acres. A pond is something where you let your Boy Scout troop come in and catch all the bluegill because they’re getting real thick and all. This was not a pond. This was 72 fucking acres. It was a lake.
350 million gallons of sludge burst through the bottom of this lake into an old mineshaft below it. Now, the maps showed that there was a 75-feet-thick barrier between the bottom of that lake and these old underground mine works. It was actually like ten feet. It gave way.
Oh, one more thing. In 1994, there was another mistake at the “pond” and they were allowed to pump some slurry back into that shaft. So when the pond bottom broke in 2000, what we got was not only the shit from that pond but also the stuff that was already in those mineshafts. A lot of mineshafts are used like dumps. You throw old batteries in there. You throw old barrels of oil in there. Jimmy Hoffa could be at the bottom of one of these slurry ponds.
So all this slurry came out. It was moving so slowly that it backed up and burst out another mineshaft too. So it came out of two separate shafts. It popped out of that second part into Wolf Creek, which empties into the Tug Fork. The Tug Fork is where we get our reservoir water. They had all this shit above a reservoir.
Nina: Not only that. If the flood hadn’t happened to have bust through that other shaft in addition to the first one, people would have suffocated. It would have come down in full force on people’s homes.
Massey’s cleanup effort ended up costing $46 million—and many say it only scratched the surface. Still from Sludge.
Mickey: This was bigger than Buffalo Creek. It just didn’t kill anybody. [On February 26, 1972, a coal-company dam burst in Buffalo Creek, West Virginia. 125 people were killed, 1,100 were injured, and over 4,000 were left homeless—Ed.] We as Americans think, “How many people died? None? OK, casualties controlled.”
I remember when Buffalo Creek happened. Everybody remembers Buffalo Creek back here. We saw the funerals on the television for weeks. It carried whole damn houses down with it. And this could have been another Buffalo Creek if it hadn’t gone out through two areas. If it had just gone straight down Wolf Creek, those people would have been smothered in their sleep at night.
Nina: And in ’94 they knew it was leaking. They were told to seal it. They were told how to seal it. But we never, ever checked to make sure that they did it. So they knew, basically, that it was going to break.
 Mickey: Massey Coal knew, and Massey didn’t give a shit. When the people came in here from the EPA and the Division of Surface Mining, they all set up there on a hill on Massey Coal property.
Massey didn’t even warn people that the slurry had spilled. I had a relative who lived at the last house up in the area it spilled tell me about it. He was one of the first ones hit. People didn’t come by telling him about it. They knew a flood had happened, but they didn’t come by and warn people.
Massey Coal does in Appalachia just about what in the hell Massey Coal wants to do. That’s because Massey Coal knows where to put their money. They put it in the pockets of the right congressmen and the right senators—the people who can call off the dogs that are supposed to protect us. Massey can do more than any other coal company here because they are so big and powerful. Massey is one of the grand outlaws of the coal industry. They’re a bunch of sonofabitches located in Richmond, Virginia, with stockholders all over the country. They don’t care how they leave the communities they mine in. Sure, they give pennies to the churches to keep them quiet. Or they fund sports programs to keep the communities quiet. But when the coal is gone and Massey is gone, they won’t give a damn about me, my wife, my kids, or my grandchildren. They done got what they want, and that’s the black gold.
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