Citizen slurry study

Coalfield citizens have scheduled a press conference for noon tomorrow to release their own study of the impacts of coal operators injecting slurry underground. The Sludge Safety Project organized the event.

But Vicki Smith at The Associated Press is on top of it, and already has some of the results. I posted Vicki’s entire story over on the Gazette’s Mining the Mountains page.

Recall that, as Vicki reported earlier, the state Department of Environmental Protection can’t seem to get its act together and publish a study on this topic mandated by the state Legislature.

But, as the AP’s latest story reports:

To comply with a legislative inquiry on whether underground injection is safe, the DEP is testing water and slurry samples from six sites in Monongalia, McDowell, Raleigh, Nicholas, Kanawha and Boone counties.

Those results will be made public in early May, DEP spokeswoman Kathy Cosco told the AP this week. Then the Department of Health and Human Resources will decide if there is a potential health threat.

But DEP also shared samples with scientists at Wheeling Jesuit University, who sent them to Heidelberg University’s National Center for Water Quality Research in Tiffin, Ohio.

Those tests found six metals — antimony, arsenic, lead, barium, cadmium and chromium — in levels that exceeded federal standards for primary drinking water at one or more sites, said chemist Mary Ellen Cassidy and biologist Ben Stout.

What’s unclear, Cassidy said, is whether DEP’s samples came from the pipe where the slurry is injected or the underground pool where it is stored. In theory, slurry is pumped into a void where the solids settle out and the water remains trapped as long as the geology is undisturbed.

The tests also found high levels of metals in the solids at all six sites, the scientists said.

Last week, state Sen. Randy White, saying he was frustrated by delays in DEP’s research, introduced legislation that would ban slurry injection starting May 1.