Massey Valley Fill Disaster Lyburn, WV

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Photos extracted from video taken by Bob Gates photonzx@intelos.net

Imagine sleeping restlessly, if at all, any night it rains. Imagine getting up every half hour to check that the creek near your home isn’t rising swiftly and running dark with sediment and debris. Imagine wondering each time it rains if you are about to lose your possessions and even your life.

That’s what life is like for residents who live close by valley fills and sediment ponds at mountaintop removal (MTR) operations. Many residents wonder if their communities will be the next hit by flooding, flooding brought on by hard rains and made worse because of mountaintop removal. Click here for Charleston Gazette coverage.

On July 19, an early morning thunderstorm (3 to 3 1/2 inches during a three-hour period) brought disaster to the little community of Winding Shoals Hollow at Lyburn in Logan Co., WV. Huge, rain-saturated chunks of a giant valley fill at Bandmill Coal Corp., owned by Massey Energy, cleaved away from the valley fill and crashed into a sediment pond below.

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: Massey brought big equipment to the valley fill to begin cleaning up. Note in the foreground where the tidal wave of sediment and debris-laden wate…

: Massey’s valley fill (pictured above on July 19,2002), like all MTR valley fills was created when rubble from former mountaintops–that were blaste…

: Toe of Massey’s Bandmill Coal Corp. valley fill near Lyburn, WV.

: Top of the valley fill, with some sign of fallen chunks. Coal companies are supposed to keep these sediment ponds cleaned out, but the DEP had rec…

: )ne of the destroyed homes.

: one of the destroyed homes.

: one of the destroyed homes.

: Clean up operations included scraping and spraying all the mud on the road and in people’s yards into the already brutalized stream-which flows int…