Mountain Holler
End of the road for Coal Slurry Ban Bill
April 14th, 2009
After weeks of a strong citizen lobbying effort our bills to ban slurry injection, SB 568 in the Senate and HB 3279 in the House of Delegates, were introduced, however they will not become law. In the Senate, Sen. Randy White introduced the bill in fiery fashion complete with a toast to the Senate and impacted communities before taking a big drink of "Coal slurry." However, Sen. Mike Green, the chair of the Energy, Industry, and mining committee refused to bring the bill up for discussion. Sen. Green met with citizen activists several times and said he wanted to wait for the DEP to report back their findings of SCR 15, which is now 16 months late. The data from the report is available and shows that coal slurry is toxic, but Sen. Green is waiting on the full report and in the meantime forcing the ban to wait another year as the legislative session runs out.
In the House, Del. Manypenny introduced a bill to ban all coal slurry production, however it was introduced late in the session and assigned to a committee that was not meeting any more, effectively killing it.
In response to the lack of the DEP's report, Sludge Safety Project put together a citizens' report (download the pdf) which compiled the findings of the slurry samples the DEP had analyzed for SCR 15 along with the few other samples of slurry that exist and came to the conclusion that coal slurry contains many toxic substances that will cause a illness and death if consumed. Taking that into consideration, the recommendation from the report was to ban slurry injection.
Despite the bills not turning into laws, the citizen lobbying effort had many successes. The push forced DEP Secretary Randy Huffman to report before the senate committee twice on the progress of the unfinished slurry injection study and he will continue to be brought before the legislature during every interim until they actually finish the report. And with the knowledge we have given the legislature and the pressure we put on them this session, we'll be ready to get a ban passed first thing next year.