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 at insideclimatenews.org/newsletter.
OAK GROVE, Ala. — Lily Spicer felt the energy of the explosion surge through her body.
She was talking to her daughter on the phone when the boom came. Her family was accustomed to the occasional blasts that would sometimes shake their windows, she said. But this was different.
“The only way I can describe it would be a direct hit with a lightning bolt, a massive explosion and an earthquake, all in one,” she said.
Spicer was the closest neighbor to 78-year-old W.M. Griffice, whose home atop an expanding underground mine exploded on March 8, leading to his death, seriously injuring his grandson and deeply rattling this rural community 20 miles outside Birmingham.
Spicer said that since the explosion she and her family have lived in constant fear of dying themselves.
In the wake of the explosion, she and other residents have been left with serious concerns about the vast mine expanding under their homes, where bladed machines shear coal from expanses more than 1,000 feet wide and a mile long. But no one seems willing or able to answer their questions. Mine representatives and public officials alike have ignored citizens’ calls for transparency and accountability.
An Inside Climate News review of regulatory documents confirmed that Griffice’s home was located over the mine’s expanding footprint, carved by the bladed shearers, which create rock ceilings, called “overburden,” that collapses behind the cutting tools, often causing significant subsidence in the land above.
The documents outline Crimson Grove Resources LLC’s lengthy history of safety violations: Federal regulators have fined Crimson Oak Grove Resources 288 times for safety violations at the mine since the explosion, including 100 times for “significant and substantial” violations that the regulator concluded were “reasonably likely to result in a serious injury or illness.”
Still, state regulators have done little to quell residents’ concerns, and both federal and state regulators have made no serious effort to stop mining activity that residents say has devastated their community.
All this has left those in the area fearful and exhausted, according to more than a dozen residents interviewed by Inside Climate News, and it’s hard for them to see a way forward. Their community park had been closed due to mining activity. Residents are forced to drive miles out of town to get fuel after gas stations stopped pumping over safety and environmental concerns. Even a local church was closed for services until recently, its sanctuary undermined. But picking up their lives and leaving is something they never believed they’d have to do. For some, though, they see no other way.
THE EXPLOSION NEXT DOOR
Even before the explosion that would leave her neighbor dead, Lily Spicer said that Crimson Oak Grove Resources, the company that operates the Oak Grove mine, was already wreaking havoc on her family’s day-to-day life.
In February, just weeks before the explosion, Spicer was told that a contractor for the mining company, Langley Dirt Works, would be digging a trench and replacing the water line that supplied water to her home and, at the same time, running a water line to the Griffice home.
The Griffice family would later name Langley Dirt Works as a defendant in a lawsuit filed against the mining operator, claiming the contractor capped a water well on W.M.’s property after the mine had confirmed the presence of methane, a flammable gas byproduct of longwall mining, in the family’s water source. Lawyers for Langley Dirt Works have denied responsibility for the explosion in court documents, arguing their work was all at the behest of Crimson Oak Grove.
Spicer said Charles Langley, the business owner, had told her he was under growing pressure from the mines to install the water lines quickly. Still, the work took well over a week, with water to Spicer’s home off for much of that period. During that time, Spicer’s family was forced to find water elsewhere — bringing in containers filled with water from friends and other sources. Several times, Langley busted the existing lines, leaving water pooling near the family’s home on Griffis Road. Even when the water line was finally replaced, the lines hadn’t been properly purged, she said, leaving many of her appliances full of mud and debris.
During the water installation work, Spicer said Langley informed her of the fissures he was coming across in the ground near her…
Read More: As a longwall coal mine grows beneath an Alabama town, neighbors of an explosion