The dumping generally stopped in 1977 with the passage of the federal Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act. And they would catch on fire through spontaneous combustion and stink of sulfur 24/7.” “They would throw the crushed coal, the slack coal, down the hill, and also into creeks,” said Kilgore, a native of the coalfields. That made for a lot of coal waste, and up until about 40 years ago, coal companies could dump the less pure coal they didn’t want without much thought. “Basically, before there was a lot of technology in the preparation part of coal before it was sold, they weren’t able to separate as much coal from rock as they are now,” Kesterson said. The gob piles that dot Southwest Virginia reflect an older, cruder era of mining in the state, said Tarah Kesterson, a public relations manager for the Virginia Department of Energy. This is the video posted by Mountain Heritage about the problem of waste coal, known as “gob.” Beyond that, though, very little is clear, from how big and how urgent a problem it is to the best way to get rid of it. The video’s release roughly a month before the Virginia November elections reflects the economic anxieties swirling around VCHEC, whose future has been heavily contested in relation to the 2020 Clean Economy Act ushered into law by Democrats.īut the film highlights a reality that Southwest Virginians of all viewpoints seem to agree on: The region’s gob needs to go. “I can’t think of a better way to do it than have repurposed, reclaimed and recycled in a power plant that has the most stringent restrictions on air quality emissions in the United States,” Kilgore says with a confident smile. (Editor’s note: Dominion is one of our donors donations have no influence on our news decisions.) The video explains the environmental hazards gob poses when left out in the open–namely, water contamination and air pollution–then pivots to a solution: getting rid of it by burning it at the Virginia City Hybrid Energy Center, a Wise County power plant owned by Dominion Energy. Short for “garbage of bituminous” and also called culm, coal waste, boney and slate, it’s a mix of low-quality coal, clay, rock and other material: junk that mining companies dumped beside their operations throughout Southwest Virginia’s coalfields and other parts of Appalachia before federal cleanup standards were enacted in 1977.
Gob? Kilgore is referring to the stuff the bulldozers are digging.
“There’s not a better place to burn gob, because under all of those restrictions, what comes out of the smoke stack is nothing compared to one gob pile catching on fire,” Frank Kilgore, the project’s coordinator, says to the camera as somber piano music plays in the background. It opens to a drone’s-eye panorama of what looks like a massive pile of dirt and rock in Clinchco, Virginia, so big it makes the bulldozers and trucks at its base look toy-sized. 7, a Southwest Virginia nonprofit called the Mountain Heritage Project posted a video to YouTube.
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