After seeing the scars of coal, Fayette County banned the disposal of natural gas drilling waste. Industry fought back, arguing the community doesn’t get a say.

This article by Ken Ward Jr. appeared in ProPublica on May 4th, 2018.

FAYETTEVILLE, W.Va. — Matt Wender’s vision for Fayette County begins with the New River Gorge. Whitewater rafters, hikers and mountain bikers congregate there every summer. Craft beer and artisan pizza are helping his home emerge as an outdoor tourism hub.

Just upstream from the river, there’s another reality: A company called Danny Webb Construction Inc. pumps waste from natural gas drilling underground. Chloride, strontium, lithium and other markers of gas waste have been found in Wolf Creek, which flows into the river.

In the southeast corner of the county, developers of a 300-mile gas pipeline hope to turn a wooded, 130-acre plot into the site of a gas compressor station, a facility local leaders say would be noisy and would change the inviting nature of the area.

Fayette County is more than 150 miles from the vast reserves in Northern West Virginia that fueled skyrocketing gas production over the past decade. But the infrastructure to support the drilling crisscrosses the state: new pipelines, a host of processing plants, compressor stations and — industry supporters hope — a new generation of sprawling chemical factories and manufacturing plants.

Residents here know both the costs and benefits of serving the country’s energy needs. As recently as a decade ago, roughly 1,200 coal miners worked in Fayette County. Today, there are only about 600.

When Wender, one of three Fayette County commissioners, drives around the county where he grew up, he sees signs of its former life as a coal-mining community: scarred land and polluted creeks. There’s some progress, like the new national Boy Scout camp, built partly on abandoned mine sites reclaimed with federal funding. But there’s also the town of Minden, where federal officials are back again — after a series of failed cleanups — trying to figure out what to do about lingering pollution left behind by a long-closed equipment shop that served the coal industry.

Two years ago, Wender and his fellow commissioners decided they would fight for a different future. In early 2016, prodded by citizen concerns about pollution, they passed a local ordinance that prohibited disposal of natural gas drilling wastes in their county. MORE…