This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here.
By Lee Hedgepeth and James Bruggers, Inside Climate News
OAK GROVE, Ala.—Clara Riley and her family had a lot of questions. But on Monday, as they gathered around the 90-year-old’s small kitchen table, they weren’t getting many answers.
Kristie Baggett, a representative of Crimson Oak Grove Resources LLC, a mining company, had come to the home after the Rileys expressed concern about a water well located in Clara’s storage room.
They knew there’d been a water well at the home of their neighbor, W.M. Griffice, who died several weeks after his home above a longwall coal mine the company owned exploded on March 8. His grandson was critically injured in what was a devastating blast that left little in its wake but the scorched Alabama clay.
Griffice, 84, had presciently told his granddaughter that he felt like his home would explode, given the methane fumes he’d been living with.
The explosion that would lead to Griffice’s death had rattled the windows of the Riley home, Clara Riley said, and has continued to rattle her entire community.
Now, just weeks after the explosion, as they sat around Riley’s kitchen table, her family was trying to get answers from Oak Grove as its mine branches out below the town and slowly encroaches upon the earth beneath her home. They weren’t having much luck.
“What do you think happened up at W.M. Griffice’s?” Riley’s daughter, Pam White, asked the mine representative during the meeting.
“I can’t speak on it right now,” Baggett said, sighing. “There’s still things going on, and I can’t speak on it.”
But even what Baggett did say concerned the Rileys, the family said. Baggett told them that capping their well would be the ideal solution. Venting was also a possibility, she said, but given that the well is located inside the home, venting may be more difficult. “Plugging wells,” Baggett said, is the mine company’s preference.
“I’d like to plug every one of them,” she said.
“But that’s our concern,” a family member responded, referring to Griffice, now deceased. “They plugged his, too, and we don’t want to be blown to smithereens.”
The members of the Riley family are among hundreds of residents of the Oak Grove and Adger communities in west Jefferson County, Alabama, facing the prospect of continued longwall mining below their homes and commercial establishments that many say has destroyed their way of life. From the Baptist church to the local park to gas stations and beyond, nothing has been left unaffected by mining activity.
Now, residents like the Rileys believe their safety is imminently at risk from the mine, especially now that the Griffice family has alleged in a lawsuit that the explosion that obliterated its homestead and killed the family patriarch was caused by leaks from what one former federal regulator has called a “gassy” seam of coal.
Experts interviewed by Inside Climate News said the explosion and related issues like the well in the Riley home present serious risks to public safety that warrant immediate intervention from regulators.
Meanwhile, while one federal regulatory agency has cited the mine more than 150 times since the explosion, another simply referred questions about the plight of Oak Grove citizens to a state agency. For their part, state mine regulators have been largely silent as to any formal investigation into the cause of the home explosion. All the while, mine operations have continued unabated.
“We’re all in the path of destruction,” said Tony Humphreys, a Riley relative and neighbor. “And they just want us to stay out of their way.”
The impacts of longwall mining
In Alabama and across Appalachia, the potential for methane escaping from underground coal mines is ever-present.
Methane occurs naturally in coal seams. An explosive threat to miners, methane vapors have long been known to cause fires or blasts in or near homes when it has leaked to the surface.
The Oak Grove Mine, located less than an hour outside Birmingham, uses the destructive longwall method in which bladed machines shear coal from expanses as wide as 1,000 feet, hauling coal out of an area that can extend well over a mile. The rock ceiling, called “overburden,” then collapses behind the cutting tool.
When the ceiling of the mine collapses, the ground…
Read More: Alabama coal mine keeps digging after a fatal explosion