Coal slurry is what is left after raw coal has been washed. It is a black, gritty soup of fine coal particles suspended in water, mixed with the chemicals used to separate them - and shot through with the arsenic, mercury, lead, and other heavy metals that occur naturally in coal seams. When 306 million gallons of it hit Wolf Creek and Coldwater Fork that night, every living thing in the water died. Fish, salamanders, crayfish, mussels. The slurry choked the headwaters of the Tug Fork, spread into the Big Sandy, and ultimately reached the Ohio River. Hundreds of miles of stream were polluted. The EPA called it one of the worst environmental disasters in the history of the southeastern United States. Only the 2008 Kingston Fossil Plant ash spill in Tennessee has exceeded it for volume.

Martin County is small - about 11,000 people, most of them clustered in Inez and a handful of communities along the creek bottoms. The families whose yards filled with slurry that night had been drinking water from those creeks, fishing in them, baptizing in them, raising kids alongside them for generations. Many of them worked in the mines. Many of them had family members who had spent a lifetime underground. They were not anti-coal. They simply wanted water that did not poison their children. The Massey impoundment had failed before - a smaller spill from the same pond in 1994 had been quietly cleaned up and not publicly disclosed. Engineers had known the impoundment sat on a known weak point. The people who lived downstream had not been told. Two decades later, residents are still finding slurry in their surface waters. A separate Martin County water crisis - involving brown, smelly tap water and decaying treatment infrastructure - has compounded the trauma. Trust, once it has been broken at the headwater of every spring, does not come back easily.

The federal penalty levied against Massey Energy in 2002 was $5,600. Five thousand six hundred dollars for a spill approximately 28 times the size of the Exxon Valdez. The math says everything about how the incoming Bush administration had decided to treat coalfield environmental enforcement. Massey was a generous Republican donor. The Secretary of Labor at the time was Elaine Chao, wife of Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, and she oversaw the Mine Safety and Health Administration. The investigation was cut short. Whistleblower Jack Spadaro, one of the lead MSHA investigators, said publicly that the prior 1994 spill had been covered up and that the new administration was burying evidence. On June 4, 2003, federal agents entered Spadaro's office, locked him out, and placed him on involuntary administrative leave. His evidence was discarded. He spent years afterward trying to clear his name.

In 2005, Appalshop - the Whitesburg-based documentary cooperative that has spent fifty years recording Appalachian voices that the rest of the country does not bother to record - released Sludge, a documentary by Robert Salyer chronicling the disaster, the cover-up, the whistleblower's ordeal, and the continuing threat of coal slurry impoundments throughout the coalfields. There are still hundreds of these ponds across Appalachia, each one a small lake of toxic waste perched in a holler somewhere, held back by an earthen dam built by a coal company under regulatory regimes that have varied widely in their seriousness. When the Kingston, Tennessee, ash dam failed in 2008, Appalshop posted Sludge online for free viewing. The film was meant as a warning. The Tennessee spill came anyway.

Twenty-six years after the spill, the families along Wolf Creek and Coldwater Fork are still finding sludge in their surface waters. The streams will not heal in their lifetimes - perhaps not in their grandchildren's lifetimes. Martin County's drinking water system has been the subject of multiple federal investigations and a separate, ongoing water crisis. The coal industry that once employed half the county has largely left, taking the jobs but leaving the impoundments behind. Massey Energy, the company responsible for the spill, was bought by Alpha Natural Resources in 2011 after its CEO, Don Blankenship, became one of the most controversial figures in modern American business. The people of Martin County did not ask for any of this. They lived in a place that the country needed - coal kept the lights on across half the eastern United States for a century - and the place they lived in was permanently broken in return. Their story is not unique in Appalachia. It is one of many. But what happened in Martin County on the night of October 10-11, 2000, deserves to be remembered exactly as it was: a disaster that did not have to happen, in a place that the rest of America has spent too long looking away from.