Sarah’s story about this situation astounds me both in the extent of the awful acts perpetuated by the coal industry and in the power of the activists working to clean up the pollution and provide citizens with the clean water they need to live. There is so much to be fixed and rethought in the way we do things. I find the story of the activists in Prenter extremely inspiring in my own efforts to contribute in a concrete way, and hope you do, too. -ed. When residents of Prenter Road in West Virginia moved into their community, they were told their well water was so pure, they could bottle it and sell it. Today, that same water is making them sick. In response, the Prenter Water Fund was established this summer by activist Bobby Mitchell and local resident Patty Sebock. Since then, volunteers have been working urgently to get clean water to the community. “I don’t know how to be any more clear about this,” said fund manager, Mat Louis-Rosenberg, “People are dying now.” Louis-Rosenberg has been living in the Coal River Mountain Watch campaign house for the past two months, devoting most of his waking hours to the Prenter Water Fund. He is sustained by a stipend from his position as Coal River Mountain Sludge Safety Intern. Assisted by fellow activist and friend Glen Collins, he has his mission cut out for him. Collins and Louis-Rosenberg joked merrily about being the Water Planeteers for Captain Planet. “We need to get our rings!” they enthused. Humor helps scatter the shadow of King Coal, the force behind Prenter’s polluted waters.

In the 70’s, the Clean Air Protection Act caused the change in coal processing that has led to Prenter’s and other communities’ poisoned water. To make coal cleaner to burn, it is treated with a chemical solution of flocculants, surfactants, sodium hydroxide and sometimes diesel fuel. The waste product, called slurry, includes all these chemicals, along with heavy metals like iron, lead and barium from the coal. The slurry is pumped into abandoned underground mines or stored above ground in “sludge ponds”. A mountain three miles from Upper Prenter Road has been the recipient of underground injections for decades.

In the late 80’s, mountain top removal, a form of mining in which heavy explosives are used to expose coal seams, began in the same area. Roughly one month’s worth of bombing equals the force of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in WWII. After years of blasting, in 2003, Prenter residents began to report a change in their water. The correlation between the injections, the bombing and the increasingly black water was clear. Repeated force from the bombings upset the decades-worth of underground slurry, causing seepage into the ground water that feeds residents’ wells.

The health effects caused by this seepage are severe and pervasive. About 80% of residents surveyed, including one fifteen year-old, have had gall bladder disease or had their gallbladder removed. Five residents within 100 feet of each other have contracted brain tumors. Residents’ teeth are rotting – children as young as seven need to get dentures. Kidney failure and the subsequent dialysis are also common. When local resident Maria Lambert met Bobby Mitchell and he began asking her about neighbors’ health problems, she began writing down the names of the people in the area who she knew had died from cancer or cancer-related illness. Soon, she had filled twelve pages. “I was shaking so bad,” she said, “he tried to get me to stop, but I said I couldn’t or I wouldn’t remember.” From that night on, she has been involved in Prenter Water Fund, writing letters, speaking out and educating volunteers.

Despite the clear connections between their coal slurry and Prenter residents’ health problems, the coal companies deny responsibility. And while the state does officially regulate the underground injections, the coal companies have been able to manipulate the testing process to avoid accountability for the dangerous chemical and metal levels in the slurry. The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection did have a specific person in charge of underground injections, but she retired earlier this year. The DEP has not yet sought anyone to replace her.

Not all citizens are calling for government intervention. While the body may be showing the effects, the mind can get in the way of recognizing their true cause. Many are still in denial that there’s a serious problem with their water. Lambert said, “It’s like, you know something’s not right, but you kinda put it in the back of your mind because you’re used to having the good thing and we had been told that there was nothing wrong but a little iron and sulfur in our water.” When she herself realized that her once pristine water was polluted, she said, “it was a major shock, I quit eating. I lost 50 pounds. I was kinda sick.” She continued, “After shock, you get mad. Then you get depressed because you think your government’s not listening to you. We were in the mountains and we thought [the water] was gonna be good. A lot of people don’t believe it, don’t want to believe it.”

Seeing what others would rather deny can be a burden. Like all who work to shift the status quo, she has moments when she gets tired. “But,” she said, “every time I’d say, ‘I can’t do it anymore, I just can’t do it,’ the phone would ring,” and she’d be on to the next action.

Due to the hard work of these activists, the Prenter Water Fund is starting to make progress in its attempts to clean up Prenter’s water system. The good news is that state and local agencies have pledged funds to the project. The bad news is the timeline associated with the best case scenario still has residents waiting two years before clean water comes out of their taps. For those who must drink, bathe and cook with toxic water, two years is too long to wait. A short term solution must be found while the long term problem is rectified.

Mat Louis-Rosenberg and Bobby Mitchell met at a 4th of July celebration on the top of Kayford Mountain where renowned activist Larry Gibson owns a family land trust that has become a major symbol in the movement to stop mountain top removal. Mat and Bobby connected and began talking about Prenter water. As their conversation progressed, they both had the same thought: “Why don’t we just get these people some water?”

In September, a $10,000 grant from the Paul and Vivian Olum Charitable Foundation gave them the money to jumpstart an effort to solve the short-term need for clean water. They have purchased barrels and arranged a filling station, provided by the Boone County Commission and West Virginia American Water, to be able to deliver fresh water to Prenter Residents. They need just $4,000 more to get the service fully started ($14,000 more to expand the service to every family in a ten-mile radius) and will have a $1,000 a month operating budget in part to pay the driver, who will be a Prenter resident.

Unfortunately, Prenter is not the only community in Appalachia whose water has been polluted by toxic coal waste. Louis-Rosenberg would like to eventually expand their efforts to become the West Virginia Water Fund. A major media campaign about West Virginia’s polluted water would, he believes, be incredibly influential. Collins and Louis-Rosenberg both believe that water is the issue through which the movement to stop mountain top removal will gain widespread support. “I think water is how we’re really going to beat MTR and is the single biggest post-MTR issue.”

Even if mountain top removal stopped tomorrow, the grave threat to Appalachian waters would remain. The amount of water used by the coal companies over the past 10 years in West Virginia alone equals 4.3 times the volume of Lake Ontario. The Brushy Fork slurry impoundment, outside Whitesville, is the tallest dam in the Western Hemisphere at 900 ft. In 1973, just such an impoundment overflowed, destroying a community of 4,000 and killing 118 people. Today, that same threat exists times more than a hundred—the number of slurry impoundments in West Virginia. A 2.8 billion gallon sludge pond sits perched directly above the Marsh Fork public elementary school, putting children’s lives in immediate danger.

Native Americans referred to coal as the earth’s liver. Indeed, it was because of the rich, nearby coal seams that Prenter’s water was once considered as good as Evian. Now that that coal has been removed and replaced with toxic waste, human organs must work beyond their capacity to prevent the body from being poisoned. But 100x safe levels of heavy metals such as manganese, iron, arsenic and antimony along with countless organic chemicals is more than human organs were designed to handle. So they are failing. Bodies in distress, bodies that are dying because of lack of access to a fundamental resource: this is a picture we don’t expect to see in America.

Before Louis-Rosenberg and Collins came to West Virginia, they had been working in post-Katrina New Orleans. When asked about parallels between West Virginia and New Orleans, Louis-Rosenberg said, “I couldn’t even describe to you the gut feeling of sameness.” He cited that West Virginia and Louisiana are the two biggest chemical hotspots in the country. And just as coal has destroyed the mountains, yielding toxic floods, “Oil and gas extraction destroyed the wetlands that would have impeded and prevented Katrina.” As in Prenter, he said “everyone’s dying, there’s poor healthcare and a huge prejudice against the lower class.” Hurricane Katrina may have awakened Americans to the fact that human rights violations that we expect to see in a dictatorship could happen right here in our own country, but by no means was it an isolated instance. Wherever there is large scale extraction of a prized resource—oil, coal, natural gas, copper, etc.—there is subjugation of human and environmental well-being. As resources become scarcer, this will only affect more and more of us.

“My hope is that as this issue gets people’s attention, it will help them acknowledge the larger problem,” concluded Louis-Rosenberg. At first, I thought he was talking about mountain top removal again, but he said no, bigger than that. As we stood in the kitchen of that little, creekside cabin, people floating in and out to grab handfuls of cornbread, I acknowledged that what really drives people is not something that can be put into words. I saw this something in Mat Louis-Rosenberg’s eyes. I heard it in his pauses and I felt it in the bond between he and Glen Collins. I felt it in Maria Lambert’s faith and perseverance, even when she gets tired. There’s a lot of work to be done, but when a commitment is borne through the heart, it rises above the red tape of dividend-driven “reality” and moves swiftly toward justice. This is how I know clean water is coming to the residents of Prenter Road, West Virginia.

If you would like to help bring clean water to Prenter Road, please go to www.prenterwaterfund.org where you can find out more and donate to the cause. To let Governor Manchin of West Virginia know that his state is violating the human rights of its citizens by allowing the pervasive poisoning of its waters, call 1-888-438-2731.