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Trucks laden high with coal lurch and career into every bend as they barrel down WV Route 3, slipping past a nondescript tawny brick building on the side of the tight mountain road in this rural hamlet. The old brick community center, still outfitted with hard-backed restaurant booths, is now headquarters of a homegrown revolution, fighting to loosen the grip of coal.

 

For local activist Debbie Jarrell, coal’s stranglehold on the state wasn’t apparent until about a decade ago, when she realized that her then-8-year-old granddaughter was getting sick, complaining of headaches at school and her face becoming blotchy.

 

“A girl that young shouldn’t be keeping headaches,” Jarrell said, recalling when she knew something was wrong. Other kids were complaining of feeling sick, too.

 

The community’s elementary school yard, she realized, was sitting about 200 feet from a newly built coal silo at the preparation plant next to the Brushy Fork Coal impoundment in Sundial. There coal is washed and chemically treated before being loaded into the railcars that snake alongside a tributary of the Coal River. More troubling, she quickly learned, was the nearly 400-foot-high earthen dam that filled in the hollow on the back ridge behind the school, holding back nearly 3 billion gallons of toxic coal sludge.

 

Jarrell’s husband, Ed Wiley, worked at the local coal mine and realized the danger to anyone near that dam. Heavy rains could cause a sludge impoundment — a reservoir of coal sludge — to overrun or or the dam holding it to burst. It happened in 1972 south of Naoma in the Buffalo Creek Valley in Logan County, when about 132 million gallons of coal slurry — the liquid mineral suspension byproduct of coal production — broke free, killing 118 and leaving more than 4,000 homeless.

 

“Why would an engineer say it’s OK to build that on top of a school?” she wondered. Jarrell and her husband tried to engage politicians about relocating the school to a safer site but got nowhere. He quit his job because of his activism, and they made do the best they could. Then they mounted an effort to get their voices heard. Others joined. Her husband walked more than 450 miles to Washington in a bid to raise awareness and money for a new school.

 

“He had more dedication and more gumption than I ever thought possible,” Jarrell said.

 

She joined Coal River Mountain Watch, a small local nonprofit focused on coal’s environmental impact, and is now a co-director. And in January 2013 a new community elementary school opened its doors about six miles down the road in Rock Creek.

 

“The years of continuous bickering with the officials and the community turning their backs on you — it was definitely very stressful,” Jarrell said.

 

“I blame our state representatives, our elected politicians for that. They get up here in front of the TV cameras and talk about how people are taking these coal-mining jobs.”

 

It’s a rote script throughout West Virginia, Jarrell said: “The tree huggers, you know, they’re taking your jobs. You better stand up for yourself or you’re going to be out of a job and you can’t feed your family.”

 

Her mouth went tight, her lips stretching into a line. “It’s been like that for a long, long time. I would say since the conception of West Virginia.”

 

 

Source: http://america.aljazeera.com/