Critic Questions Way Coal Firms Build Slurry Ponds Slurry pond failures like the one that swallowed a bulldozer and its driver last week at a West Virginia coal mine could be avoided if the waste pits were built to strict construction standards that regulators ignore, said a mine safety expert and frequent critic of the coal industry. For at least a decade, state and federal regulators have allowed coal companies to build or expand massive slurry ponds atop loose and wet coal waste, said Jack Spadaro, an engineering consultant and former director of the National Mine Health and Safety Academy. "They're building on top of the existing slurry, and therein lies the problem," Spadaro said. It's wet and it has no stability. It's creating hazards for all of us downstream. In all, there are 596 coal slurry impoundments in 21 states. West Virginia has 114, more than any other state, according to the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration. Kentucky has 104, while Illinois is third with 71. Spadaro's criticisms follow the Nov. 30 failure of a section of embankment at Consol Energy's Robinson Run mine slurry pond near Lumberport in the north-central part of the state. Two workers escaped after pickup trucks slid into the massive pond, but the dozer driver is missing. "Since we're still in recovery mode and have barely begun the investigation, it would be premature to comment at this time," MSHA spokesman Amy Louviere said. This Dec. 3, 2012 photo provided by the W.Va. Department of Environmental Protection shows the embankment after a collapse at the Consol's Robinson Run operation in Harrison County, W. Va. Crews continued to look for a missing miner and bulldozer that slid into the impoundment with two trucks and two engineers when an embankment under construction internal to the impoundment collapsed around noon on Friday, Nov. 30. (AP Photo/W.Va. Department of Environmental Protection) Close The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection also declined comment on Spadaro's charges, but Bill Raney, president of the West Virginia Coal Association, said impoundment failures are rare. "These are the most scrutinized and most engineered earthen structures in the world, certainly in this country," he said. They're monitored routinely. They have lots of eyes looking at them. ... Anytime there's a heavy rainfall, the agencies are out there looking at them. Pennsylvania-based Consol was working to raise the elevation of the impoundment when the accident happened, vice president for safety Tom Barletta said. Once the worker is found, the company will determine what happened "so we can learn from it and prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future," Barletta said. The pond encompasses about 78 acres and is estimated to hold at least 1.6 billion gallons of wastewater, the equivalent of more than 2,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Slurry is a byproduct of washing coal to help it burn more cleanly. Companies have disposed of the dirty water, silt and solids in various ways over the years, injecting it into abandoned mines, damming it in huge ponds like the one at Robinson Run and, less commonly, disposing of it with a costly dry filter-press process. Impoundments typically hold up over time. But they do fail, and in spectacular fashion. In 1972, an earthen dam in Buffalo Creek in southern West Virginia collapsed after heavy rain, unleashing 130 million gallons of water, sludge and debris that killed 125 people, injured 1,100 and left 4,000 homeless. Spadaro dedicated his life to preventing that sort of disaster from happening again and helped write the nearly 40-year-old regulations that are now on the books to guide slurry pond construction. The regulations give the government and coal companies detailed design, compaction strength and other criteria so the structures will withstand internal pressures and additional stress from big rain storms.