W.Va. Senator drinks 'coal slurry' to highlight water risks David Edwards and Stephen C. Webster

Published: Friday March 13, 2009





Print This Email This A West Virginia state senator made a powerful statement to his colleagues Thursday by downing a bottle of what he called "coal slurry."



The statement was on the quality of his constituents' drinking water, which he says has in some cases become contaminated by "coal slurry," the brown water runoff produced by washing coal mined for energy production. The liquid is typically injected into underground reservoirs or abandoned coal mines, but public safety advocates say it has seeped into drinking water.



That's plenty cause for a political fracas in West Virginia, a state which saw its yearly exports boosted by the coal industry a whopping 41 percent in 2008. There, most in government have been content enough by this to even overlook reports of the coal industry displacing and losing graves and human remains.



But dare a senator to drink some "slurry" and it's a whole different story.



To drive his point home, Sen. Randy White (D-Webster) introduced a bill that aims to halt the practice of slurry injection until more is known about it.



"Introducing a bill Thursday in the Senate chamber, the Democrat from Webster County chugged from a plastic bottle filled with a cloudy brown liquid that he said was coal slurry," reported the Charleston Daily Mail.



"He asked his fellow senators to pick up similar bottles he had set on their desks and join him in a drink."



"The bottles from the senators' desks and the bottle I drank out of, it's the same thing the people who live around those slurry-injection sites are drinking every day," he said. "It's an unknown substance, an unknown liquid. It's unknown water with possible contaminants in it."



"White wouldn't reveal exactly what was in his concoction," reported the Daily Mail. "He said that's part of the point -- people don't know exactly what they're drinking."



Sen. Douglas Facemire wasn't quite expecting a bottle of "unknown toxins" under his chair.



I thought from West Virginia, we would have apple cider," he told West Virginia Public Broadcasting. "I was somewhat taken aback by it.



White drank nearly 12 ounces of the "coal slurry," he said.



This video is from WSAZ, broadcast Mar. 12, 2009.









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