Here are initial reasons to oppose this renewal. We may have more at the conference:

-Alpha has a history of violations, including "black water" spills and other pollution events from associated facilities causing pollution of the Little Marsh Fork, the Marsh Fork, and the Big Coal River, at times causing the river to run black for at least 20 miles.

-Marfork has had 38 safety violations since the beginning of 2025 and two of Alpha’s four fatalities in that time. They will have even less concern for public safety than they do for miners’ safety.

-The dam/impoundment is built over abandoned underground mines, by the same parent company (Massey Energy) responsible for the disaster in Oct. 2000 in Martin County, KY. That impoundment burst through into the underground mines and released 300 million gallons of waste into adjoining streams.

-Continued operation by Marfork, and additional elevation and addition of slurry to the impoundment, increase the risk to the river and to the communities downstream.

-The first bi-annual dam engineer's inspection of 2025 was conducted on Aug. 20, 2025. This was more than eight months after the previous engineer's inspection on Dec. 16, 2024. While the most recent inspection yielded no concerns, the previous one still had uncorrected issues uncovered in the May 2024 inspection. The May 2024 inspection resulted in Notices of Violation 59 and 60. WVDEP then vacated those violations, resulting in no civil penalty assessed to the company. The facts that Marfork lets conditions deteriorate to the point of findings by the WVDEP, and then WVDEP vacates the violations, and then Marfork takes seven months or more to correct them, and then WVDEP delays inspection, cause concern that Marfork and WVDEP don't really take public safety seriously.

-This dam is a growing, festering monument to coal industry greed and hubris. 

-This operation facilitates the ongoing climate crisis, harming people worldwide.

-Remember Buffalo Creek.

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