Qualla: Martin County coal slurry spill

Martin County coal slurry spill: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Just after midnight on October 11, 2000, the floor of a coal slurry impoundment owned by Massey Energy in Martin County, Kentucky, gave way. The pond had been sitting on top of an abandoned underground mine. The mine roof failed. Three hundred and six million gallons of black, arsenic-laced sludge - approximately 28 times the volume of the Exxon Valdez oil spill - poured into the mine workings and erupted from the portals into Wolf Creek and Coldwater Fork. By the time dawn broke over Inez, the creeks no longer existed. Wolf Creek, normally a clear mountain stream, was oozing with waste five feet deep in places. Coldwater Fork, normally ten feet wide, had become a hundred yards of thick gray slurry. The water in 27,000 homes across the Big Sandy watershed had been poisoned overnight.

Martin County coal slurry spill: What Went Into the Water

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

Martin County coal slurry spill: The People in the Hollers

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 al...

Martin County coal slurry spill: The $5,600 Fine

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

Martin County coal slurry spill: What Sludge Filmed

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 whistlebl...

Martin County coal slurry spill: Twenty-Six Years On

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 s...