A school in coal's shadow.

• Author: Lydersen, Kari
• Position: Marsh Fork Elementary School

Even though he has told this story many times recently, Ed Wiley still struggles to hold back tears as he talks.

Wiley, forty-seven, describes his years working for a contractor for Massey Energy, which builds and maintains sludge impoundments--reservoirs that hold the gooey black waste from cleaning coal--here in West Virginia, the heart of coal country. Coal provides just about the only decent-paying jobs in Appalachia, and Wiley's work helped him build his family's beautiful cabin with big windows looking out on a creek meandering by outside.

"I was making $13.50 an hour, and I had a medical card," says Wiley. "I'd never made that much before. That had me blinded. I never thought about the environment. I never thought about nothing."

But then two and a half years ago, his granddaughter, Kayla, called him three days in a row to have him pick her up early from nearby Marsh Fork Elementary School in Sundial, West Virginia. She was complaining of coughing and severe headaches. On the third day, he started leafing through the register parents sign when they pick up sick kids. There seemed to be an unusually high number: 15 to 20 out of about 270 students were leaving sick each day.

Kayla had her own diagnosis: the coal processing plant and sludge impoundment operated by subsidiaries of Massey Energy that loom right above the school.

"I looked over at Possum"--his nickname for Kayla--"and she had a weird bluish-purplish look," says Wiley, his face twisted with emotion. "When she looked back at me she had tears running down her face and she said, 'Gramps, that coal mine is making us kids sick.' Those tears are what woke me up. I realized I was setting things up that could possibly kill my granddaughter and hundreds of other kids."

Just a few hundred yards from the school's playground, directly adjacent to school property, sits a silo full of coal and the Goals Coal processing plant, where coal is washed and pulverized. Large conveyor beltlines snake through the surrounding hills bringing coal to the plant. Above the processing plant is a 385-foot-tall earthen dam with a steep, terraced face, holding back the sludge impoundment. Wiley worked on this, the Shumate dam, and similar structures all over West Virginia. The Shumate dam can hold up to 2.8 billion gallons of coal sludge, a mix of coal byproducts and more than sixty chemicals used to clean coal. Toxic heavy metals including arsenic, mercury, uranium, manganese, cadmium, and nickel, among...