Martin County coal slurry spill

By morning, Wolf Creek was oozing with the black waste; on Coldwater Fork, a 10-foot-wide (3.0 m) stream became a 100-yard (91 m) expanse of thick slurry.

[6] U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao, wife of Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), oversaw the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) at the time.

[7] When the Bush administration came into power, they cut the investigation short, as Massey Energy was a generous contributor to the Republican Party.

He reported evidence that showed the administration and the engineers who were to be looking out for the best interests of people were aware of another spill in the same area from 1994 on, but they had never released the information to the public and had instead covered it up.

[16] In 2005 Appalshop filmmaker Robert Salyer released a documentary entitled Sludge, chronicling the continuing story of the Martin County disaster, the resulting federal investigation, and the looming threat of coal slurry ponds throughout the coalfield region.

In the wake of the Kingston Fossil Plant coal fly ash slurry spill, Appalshop provided a web stream of Sludge for a limited time.