News
Citizen Groups Catch Coal Company In Thousands of Violations
Tuesday, November 18th, 2014
Check out the Appalachian Voices Front Porch Blog as well as the New York Times for big news today:
Four years ago, groups, including Kentuckians For The Commonwealth, Appalachian Voices and the Waterkeeper Alliance, represented by the Appalachian Citizen’s Law Center took legal action against the Frasure Creek Mining in Kentucky for submitting false water monitoring reports, and now they are at it again, but this time the false reporting is even more extensive. Almost 28,000 violations of the Clean Water Act in what is likely the largest non-compliance of the law in its 42-year history.
From our friends at KFTC: If you are a coal company operating in eastern Kentucky, you can basically ignore the Clean Water Act because the primary enforcer is “asleep at the wheel.”
This article in the New York Times describes the ongoing failure by state officials to protect our water from mining pollution in Kentucky, and the ongoing failure by major coal companies to comply with the water quality laws.
In recent days, many news reports have focused on chronic and serious problems with mine safety enforcement and noncompliance. We can now add to that picture this new evidence of the coal industry’s routine evasion of environmental laws.
The true costs of these failures, as we all know, can be measured in terms of diminished health and safety of workers, residents and ecosystems.
