An act of God is a lightning strike or a hurricane. It is not a coal-company screw-up. Yet Martin County Coal last week dared to blame the Almighty for one of the worst environmental disasters in the Southeast. What an insult to the people whose creeks were ruined and trust betrayed.

        On Oct. 11, a company storage pond broke apart, dumping 210 million gallons of coal-processing waste into two creeks in Martin County, Ky. The thick, black goo traveled about 60 miles before dissipating near the Ohio River.

        People along the creeks were devastated. Once-babbling brooks had turned dark and stagnant. Schools were temporarily closed while new water supplies were established.
       

At first, apologies
               To its credit, Martin County Coal launched a massive cleanup. Crews worked through the night, using pumps to suck up the goo.

        At several town meetings, company President Dennis Hatfield acknowledged the magnitude of the spill, apologized and said there would be an accounting of what went wrong.

        That was a real person talking. Now we're getting the lawyers.

        In its responses to several lawsuits, the company officially blames natural phenomena beyond its control — the so-called “act of God” defense.

        The same weaselly pose was struck by the Pittston Co. in 1972 when one of its dams broke in Saunders, W.Va. The resulting flood killed 125 people along Buffalo Creek.

        Survivors of that tragedy spent years in a fog of despair, apathy and distrust, writes Kai T. Erikson, a sociologist at Yale University.

        Pittston knew the dam was at risk of failure. But instead of accepting its responsibility, it hunkered down.

        “The heart of the company turned out to be located a thousand miles away, and its first reflex was to treat the survivors — many of them employees with decades of loyal service — as potential adversaries in a court action,” Mr. Erikson writes in the journal Society.
       

Human mistakes
               Like the Buffalo Creek disaster, the one in Martin County could have been prevented.

        The sludge pond was located next to a catacomb of underground mines. Millions of gallons of sludge were pressing on the wall between the pond and the mine shaft.

        This wall had failed once before, causing a small spill in 1994. At the time, federal authorities ordered improvements to the structure.

        The question now is whether those improvements were made and, if so, what went wrong the second time.

        Whatever the answers, God was not responsible.

        It was Martin County Coal that switched its processing methods in the 1980s — a switch that required the use of sludge ponds, environmental groups said in a statement last week.

        And it was Martin County Coal that continued adding waste to the pond after the 1994 break, the groups said.

        The company should drop its “act of God” defense and establish a fair, speedy process for handling damage claims, they recommended.

        “These acts were the acts of man, and the consequences that followed were foreseeable and avoidable,” said the Kentucky Resources Council and the Sierra Club.

        They're right. It's time the coal industry stopped taking God's name in vain.

        E-mail ksamples@enquirer.com or call 859-578-5584.
       

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