Coal dam update: What’s up with the OSMRE study?

Photo by Lawrence Pierce, Charleston Gazette

Appalachian Voices is reporting today on its Front Porch blog about its objections to what is says is the secrecy surrounding an ongoing federal government study of the safety of coal-slurry dams:

The study, by the federal Office of Surface Mine and Reclamation Enforcement, will be the first to combine elements of dam volume and downstream populations in a risk assessment.  Although the engineering work is complete, release of the study is being held up so that coal companies and the state of West Virginia can review it, OSMRE said. 

Appalachian Voices said it has filed a Freedom of Information Act request for drafts of the study:

“Given the current state of emergency and severe flooding in West Virginia, we believe that this information has a direct bearing on vital issues of public safety,” Appalachian Voices said in a letter to OSMRE.

“We think that the government should not, indeed cannot in good conscience, wait for the document to be prepared in such a way as to satisfy stakeholders, but rather, that engineering data and draft conclusions must be released to the public immediately.”

I’m all for the public being able to see these kinds of documents, even in draft form, as early as possible.

But from what I understand about the way OSMRE performs its oversight of the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, I would be very surprised if coal companies were seeing these draft reports before the public does.

Earlier today, I talked with Roger Calhoun, director of the OSMRE Field Office here in Charleston, and he told me his agency regularly shares draft reports with WVDEP. Why? To ensure that OSMRE hasn’t made any factual mistakes, and to try to help WVDEP work more closely with OSMRE to fix problems in the state’s regulatory program.  Calhoun also told me that OSMRE doesn’t share these draft reports with coal companies, and is not aware of WVDEP doing that.

It seems to me that if either agency does share those reports with the industry, then the general public should get to say the draft documents as well. And as I said, I’m not sure there’s any good reason that the general public can’t see the draft documents at the same time OSMRE gives them to WVDEP.

But in this instance, I am also pretty sure that Appalachian Voices hasn’t described the study in question accurately. Remember, the group said:

The study, by the federal Office of Surface Mine and Reclamation Enforcement, will be the first to combine elements of dam volume and downstream populations in a risk assessment.

Actually, this study is not really aimed at dams themselves, and is not really a risk assessment. So what is it?

Well, I wrote a story back in January about a previous part of this OSMRE project. It’s available online here. As I wrote in that story, the OSMRE work is aimed at studying the potential for coal-slurry dams to experience a “breakthrough,” where coal-waste from the impoundment floods into nearby underground mine workings. It’s all part of a continuing examination of that issue by OSMRE, launched in 2001, after the October 2000 breakthrough of more than 300 million gallons of slurry from a Massey Energy impoundment in Martin County, Ky.

OSMRE completed an initial round of the breakthrough study — looking at seven specific impoundments — in October 2005. The second round, the subject of my January story, included three more impoundments. Now, OSMRE is looking at the breakthrough potential of another 15 impoundments.