Alpha Resources has been sued over Selenium from their WV mines

Alpha Natural Resources Inc. is being sued in West Virginia by The Sierra Club, the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy and Coal River Mountain Watch over claims of Selenium being leached into the ground water. It is very important to realize that this is direct contravention to federal clean water and surface mining laws.

The federal lawsuit alleges that Independece Coal's Crescent No. 2 Surface mine in Boone County and Marfork Coal's seven billion gallon impoundement in Raleigh County far exceed state water quality standards for Selenium. Both of these companies are subsidiaries to Alpha Natural Resources Inc..

As this federal lawsuit unfolds, the both the federal and state governments have remained astonishingly quiet!

This lawsuit was brought in the Southern District Court of West Virginia although I am unaware of what district this is numerically. Members of said groups have stopped fishing and swimming in these waters, and I do not blame them for doing such.

You can read more about this by going here, as the article is predominantly statements given by the plaintiffs in this lawsuit. And let us not forget what happened in the 1972 Buffalo Creek dam collapse that killed 125 people. Here is a rather neat video and song about the Buffalo Creek Disaster.



And what follows at the end of this article is a video produced by the plaintiffs in this case I believe.