Our Roots Run Deep as Ironweed: Appalachian Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice

4. "You Gotta Go and Do Everything You Can--Fight for Your Kids": Donetta Blankenship Speaks Out

chapter 4 “You Gotta Go and Do Everything You Can—FIGHT for Your Kids” Donetta Blankenship Speaks Out against Underground Slurry Injections Donetta Blankenship holding jars of coal slurry–contaminated well water from her house. Photo by the author. Donetta Blankenship lives in Rawl, West Virginia, where residents’ well water became contaminated with coal slurry from an underground coal waste injection site. Before coal is sent to market for processing, it must be cleaned in order to reduce sulfur and noncombustible materials present in the coal. The waste product generated in the washing process is called “slurry” or “sludge” and contains chemicals , water, and small particles of coal, which contain a number of toxic metals. Billions of gallons of this coal-chemical sludge have been produced throughout Central Appalachia. This coal waste is either stored in huge impoundments on the surface of flattened mountaintops or injected into abandoned underground coal mines. In an area where most residents rely on well water, the consequences of a breach in an underground slurry injection site are profound; residents whose water has been contaminated with coal slurry have been found to have high rates of liver cancer, kidney cancer, and brain cancer, as well as gallbladder disease, skin disorders, and even organ failure (Orem 2006; Wells 2006). At the time of our interview (July 2007), residents of Rawl had just recently been connected to a municipal water line, and for the first time in many years, clean water was flowing through their faucets. However, the health impacts of the contaminated water still haunt many people in the community, like Donetta, who came close to liver failure at age thirty-eight because of high levels of toxins in her water. “Why are they allowed to do this?” Slurry Injections and Community Illness When I moved up here six years ago to Rawl from Sydney, Kentucky, just as soon as I got up here, I saw how the water was—the smell of it, the looks of it—what a little bit will do to you. I was automatically in for getting city water, so [in 2005] I started going to all the meetings [about the water problem]. Even though I knew [the water] was bad, I didn’t know it was that bad. Everybody takes it for granted when they have good water—including me. They don’t know what it’s like—I didn’t know what it was like until I moved up here and I ended up almost dying from it. You can see right here what kind of water we had. Donetta picks up a mason jar filled with brownish-black tap water that she collected from her kitchen faucet a year earlier. In 2004, [the nearby coal company’s mining operations] made our well collapse. So we ended up having to drill another well. When we first drilled it, it was ok without the filtering system. But then after a few months, it started gettin’ about like this. So then we had to put a filtering system on. Donetta and other residents of Rawl installed water filters to remove what they believed to be simply dirt in their well water. However, unbeknownst to these donetta blankenship speaks out 61 residents, what was turning their water brown and black was actually coal slurry that had leached from an underground coal slurry injection site. I started getting sick at the end of February 2005. I thought I was pregnant the way I kept on getting sick. I stayed nauseous, I stayed tired. My urine was changing colors. I started having problems with my eyes. I would see the outside of the circle would be like grey—bluish grey, the inside would be orange. I kinda wondered about me being pregnant because even my period was getting irregular—it wasn’t right. The first week of April, I started noticing I could look at my skin, and it looked a little yellow. But then I thought maybe it was just me getting out in the sun too much ’cause I was out selling [second-hand items] by the road. So I thought maybe it was the sun doing it to me. And, my husband, he kinda noticed it, even getting in my eyes. You know, the white parts of my eyes was lookin’ yellow. Then on that Tuesday morning, my kids, I got them up for school, and my daughter looked...