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Is toxic dust sickening inmates locked up in coal country?
http://atavist.ibtimes.com/poison-prisonj653tWhen coal is extracted from the earth, it needs to be washed and processed at a preparation plant. Until the mid-1990s, LaBelle, now home to the prison at Fayette, operated one of the largest coal preparation plants in the world. Nearby coal mines would send their coal to LaBelle, which would wash the coal, process it and ship it back out. Years of washing coal creates tons of waste, and by the mid-'90s, when its owners abandoned the site, LaBelle was home to a massive pile of this "slurry."
Untended piles of coal waste can pollute the local environment, so in 1996, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, along with a local company, Matt Canestrale Contracting, began dumping coal ash onto the site. In theory, this process--known as coal ash reclamation--should stabilize the local ecosystem.
...
Fayette is not the only prison built next to a potentially toxic dump site. In fact, it’s something of a trend. Paul Wright, the director of the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), says building prisons near dump sites has happened for the last 15 years, if not longer, "even though the media has ignored it." Wright, working with Prison Ecology, a project that grew out of the HRDC, is currently fighting the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, which is planning to build a new federal prison in Letcher County, Kentucky, right on top of a former coal mine.
Wright says there's a reason former coal towns welcome prisons: money. The declining coal industry has left scores of rural, economically impoverished towns. That decline, coupled with the fact that the United States was opening a new prison every 15 days throughout the '90s, created a toxic mix.
Untended piles of coal waste can pollute the local environment, so in 1996, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, along with a local company, Matt Canestrale Contracting, began dumping coal ash onto the site. In theory, this process--known as coal ash reclamation--should stabilize the local ecosystem.
...
Fayette is not the only prison built next to a potentially toxic dump site. In fact, it’s something of a trend. Paul Wright, the director of the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), says building prisons near dump sites has happened for the last 15 years, if not longer, "even though the media has ignored it." Wright, working with Prison Ecology, a project that grew out of the HRDC, is currently fighting the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, which is planning to build a new federal prison in Letcher County, Kentucky, right on top of a former coal mine.
Wright says there's a reason former coal towns welcome prisons: money. The declining coal industry has left scores of rural, economically impoverished towns. That decline, coupled with the fact that the United States was opening a new prison every 15 days throughout the '90s, created a toxic mix.
2 replies
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= new reply since forum marked as read
Those prisoners, along with the locals who also live there...they're all expendable when it comes to Big Coal and the Prison Industry. A "cruel and unusual punishment" is being dealt to much of Appalachia as our government (fails) works at cleaning up the dregs of mining. Hell, the EPA doesn't even concern itself with the hazards of coal ash, does it?
I read about this last year and not only are TPTB not doing anything about Fayette, I believe that they're intending to dump millions of tons more poison at that Canestrale site. Stabilize the local ecosystem, my ass.
