The group, along with the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy and the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, made their complaint official on June 27 in the US District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia in Huntington.
The suit alleges that runoff from Fola’s mines in Nicholas and Clay counties have contaminated the water in Road Fork and Cogar Hollow, two tributaries of Leatherwood Creek.
Specifically, they said the mines had violated West Virginia’s narrative water quality standards, which set general criteria for water quality, rather than the numeric quality standards that set concentration limits.
“Some tributaries of Leatherwood Creek show significant damage to aquatic life compared to that in unpolluted reference streams,” the Sierra Club said.
“Levels of conductivity measured in Road Fork and an unnamed tributary in Cogar Hollow have been over 10 times higher than EPA’s standards for protecting aquatic life.
“More than 60% of the land area in the Leatherwood Creek watershed has been permitted for coal mining.”
The Fola suit is the fourth filed by the groups in the state over contaminated mine runoff. The group has existing cases against Fola as well as Alex Energy and Elk Run Coal Company.
The environmentalists cited US Environmental Protection Agency data estimating that nine out of 10 streams downstream from valley fills associated with coal mines were biologically impaired.
However, neither the state of West Virginia nor the EPA has moved to require compliance and cleanup of those affected streams.
“Amazingly, at the same time data shows more and more streams harmed by coal mining, WVDEP is interpreting a 2012 state statute so coal companies will no longer be responsible for preventing stream impairment,” West Virginia Sierra Club chapter chair Jim Sconyers said.
“Rather than forcing the mining companies to clean up the impaired streams, WVDEP is trying to let them off the hook.
“So groups like ours have to do WVDEP’s job. We can't allow these companies to keep poisoning our streams.”
The environmentalists’ counsel in the case are Jim Hecker at Public Justice and Joe Lovett and Derek Teaney of Appalachian Mountain Advocates.
Fola has not released a public statement on the suit.
