W.Va. Floods Threaten to Run Off Residents

When a heavy rain rolls in, Lois Lester gets out. She knows Pigeon Creek will rise. Always has, always will.

That’s not what worries her as she and husband, Mallard, head for high ground: Lester doesn’t want to be around the next time a piece of Horsepen Mountain crumbles, dumping hundreds of tons of rock and mud on her once well-kept lawn.

“It’s awful to live this way, being scared all the time,” she said, gazing across the now-compacted, 4-foot-high plateau that dammed the creek and sent dirty water roaring over properties downstream.

Flash floods have taken new form in West Virginia’s southern coalfields. The destruction used to only come from rain-swollen streams that spilled their banks. Now, people also look to the hilltops, where many -- justified or not -- believe that logging and strip-mine operators have made runoff problems worse and increased the threat of devastating landslides.

Floods aren’t new to the coalfields, but the severity in recent years is. Just about everyone who’s been flooded since 1991 says the same thing: It’s never been this bad. In 10 years. In 20. In a lifetime.

The only thing that’s changed, they say, is the activity above.

“This is escalating into the biggest problem the state has ever faced,” said Julia Bonds, director of the Whitesville-based environmental group Coal River Mountain Watch.

In 2003, West Virginia received more federal disaster aid than any other state, with $60 million from four flood events. There’s been one federal declaration this year, stemming from floods during Memorial Day week.

State lawmakers have allocated $30 million for flood relief this decade, and last year, the National Flood Insurance Program paid West Virginians $5.4 million for property damage. That doesn’t include claims from Hurricane Isabel, filed after the fiscal year ended Sept. 30.

“Everybody is paying for this,” Bonds said. “The people had better realize they are paying to subsidize the coal and timber industries, and right now, they’re paying a fraction of what it’s going to be.... These environmental disasters are going to keep coming, and they’re going to get worse.”

Industry consistently denies that it’s to blame, pointing even higher than the mountaintops.

“You can’t take Mother Nature out of the equation,” said Bill Raney, president of the West Virginia Coal Assn. “That’s got to be recognized and dealt with.”

Floods and landslides are devastating, he said, but they’re brought on by other kinds of development as well, including shopping centers, parking lots and roads. It’s “terribly unfair” to single out mining or logging, he said.

“I just really think what we’re ending up with is more water falling from the sky in a more concentrated fashion, in a shorter period of time and in a smaller area,” Raney said. “Now that’s not popular because there isn’t anyone to blame in that.... I do understand the need to lay blame, but there is no clear bad guy here.”

Raney may have a point. Warm air arrived early this year, creating thunderstorms that pummeled the state in May. Normal rainfall for the month is 3.75 to 4.5 inches. This year, some places got more than 11.

“Of late, it’s been the coalfields,” said John Sikora, hydro-meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Charleston. “They’ve gotten the rain, and they have the terrain that’s conducive to quick runoffs. But any time you get 2 or 3 inches in a short period -- over any point in the state -- you’re going to have problems.”

Pie took a double hit June 4. Simultaneously, with a sound like roaring wind, hills on both sides of State Route 52 fell. While the Lesters were watching mud fill their neighbors’ yard, those neighbors were facing the Lester home, pointing.

“When I went out back and looked, I just said, ‘Lord, have mercy,’ ” Lois Lester recalled.

The Department of Environmental Protection said the slides occurred near, but not on, coal company land. There were no sediment pond failures on either side of Pie, and the cause appears to have been too much rain, agency spokeswoman Jessica Greathouse said.

However, runoff from the mining operation may have contributed, along with past logging: “If you change the landscape, you change the runoff,” she said.

Darrell Gibson, who has lived downstream in Varney for 13 years, said there’s no doubt that strip mining made things worse. His property flooded three times in a week.

“They can say all they want, but it’s having an effect,” he said. “I’m for coal. Coal is West Virginia. But when they let off a shot, it shakes everything in your house. And you’re telling me that it’s not going to hurt the hillside?”

After devastating floods in July 2001, Gov. Bob Wise ordered a team of engineers, regulators and civilians to study the problem.

“What we concluded was, yes, mining and logging can increase runoff,” said Jim Pierce, the Department of Environmental Protection’s lead mining permit engineer. “In the two watersheds we studied, we found evidence of that.

“It was visual. We could see debris flows. It’s hard to deny when a woman gets a log through the back of her house that it didn’t happen.”

But the study became a point of contention between Pierce’s agency and the Division of Forestry, which refused to revise rules for loggers and prohibit them from such activities as dumping stumps and treetops in streams.

Forestry Director Randy Dye said the team’s technical analysis was flawed because it was based on a runoff formula that works for parking lots and farmland, not forests. He has a $100,000 grant from the U.S. Forest Service for a yearlong study that started July 1.

“Rather than just saying, ‘You’re wrong,’ we’ve taken on the task of developing a tool to predict what certain forest treatments will do,” Dye said.

Scientists will try to find a flow formula that works for Appalachian hardwood forests. In time, that could lead to better predictions and warnings, and could help shape future land-use policies.

For now, West Virginia requires all new mines to have runoff analyses and minimization plans. It also requires new construction methods for valley fills, where coal operators put debris from the mountaintops they blast away.

Pierce said the techniques work: In the recent floods, the environmental agency found no problems with valley fills or sediment ponds.

Some disheartened property owners such as the Lesters want to leave their flood-prone homes but are unable to sell. Others, such as Bo Webb of Peachtree, won’t even consider it.

“Why should we leave?” he said. “My family goes back to the 1700s. That’s our heritage, our culture. This is our home.”

Bonds, of Coal River Mountain Watch, said politicians are as much to blame as industry for today’s problems, having failed to impose meaningful regulations.

At least a dozen flood-related bills were introduced in the last legislative session, including one to create a flood-prevention task force and one to protect people from liability for clearing out debris-filled streams. Neither passed.

“God should have put a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on these mountains,” Bonds said. “He thought our so-called leaders had enough sense not to disturb it.”