Coal and Water News

KFTC and allies have asked a federal bankruptcy judge to consider the environmental liabilities created by Blackjewel LLC and its affiliate mining companies in settling the company’s bankruptcy case.

Blackjewel – the company that gained notoriety last year when it shut down while owing its workers unpaid wages – has unreclaimed mines throughout eastern Kentucky, as well as in Virginia and West Virginia.

In filings earlier this year, Blackjewel assured the court that the majority of its permits and reclamation obligations had been assumed by other operations, which would be responsible for maintaining and reclaiming the sites.

However, there has been no activity to transfer 149 of the 213 permits the company holds in Kentucky, research has revealed. In the meantime, environmental violations continue to grow at many of the sites.

“We’re alarmed by the fact that so few permit transfers have even been initiated, let alone completed. We’re also alarmed by high, and increasing, number of permit violations at the non-transferred permits,” stated the letter written by Mary Cromer with the Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center, based in Whitesburg.

Members of Kentuckians For The Commonwealth have built connections with allies across the Ohio River valley over the past few years around the fight to protect ORSANCO's regulatory mission.

Communities across the Ohio Valley are among an estimated 2 million people in the U.S. who do not have consistent access to clean drinking water and basic indoor plumbing, according to a report by two nonprofits, DigDeep and the US Water Alliance.

Taking care of those communities distressed by the shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy is an economic and ethical imperative.

The coal industry is dying. But we can’t allow the communities that have been dependent on coal to die along with it.