An Army of Two Fight Pollution in West Virginia’s Waterways - Governing

For decades, toxic runoff from abandoned coal mines has left streams and rivers lifeless in the Mountain State. Then two men decided to reverse the damage taking place in their own backyards.

Mike King and Eddy Grey are next-door neighbors in rural West Virginia. They live in the last two houses on Morris Drive, just up the road from Opossum Hollow. Morris Creek runs through their backyards on its way to the nearby town of Montgomery, where it empties into the Kanawha River, which flows into the Ohio River. Now in their 60s, both men grew up here. The creek was a major attraction in their youth. It still is. “When we were kids, we played in the stream,” says Eddy. “Catching minnows, fish bait, crawdads and stuff like that.” “Actually,” says Mike. “We played in the creek to keep from getting in the road.”

At the time, three shifts of miners were moving up and down Morris Drive every day, along with a hundred or more coal trucks trailing clouds of black dust behind. “The water was pretty good at the time,” remembers Eddy. But two centuries of mining in the nearby mountains has taken its toll.

Twenty years ago, the two neighbors decided that something needed to be done to reverse the environmental damage caused by polluted runoff seeping from nearby abandoned mines. Together, they formed the Morris Creek Watershed Association (MCWA), a nonprofit community organization dedicated to restoring the creek. “The stream was dead of aquatic life for about 30 years,” says Eddy. “About...

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