Is coal making children sick?

Producer Eva Freeman blogs about the story she’s working on for tonight’s broadcast: In Sundial, West Virginia, Marsh Fork Elementary School sits beneath a 164 foot coal silo. A stone’s throw away, through the woods, is a coal processing plant where coal is stripped clean of heavy metals and loaded onto railway cars. In the early morning light, the plant’s conveyor belts cross one another hundreds of feet in the air. With their twinkling lights, they look almost alien. The plant is now the subject of a civil suit, filed by three families in the community who claim the Massey Energy site is making their kids sick. Above the town’s elementary school is a slurry pond where the waste generated from cleaning coal is held. On days when there is blasting at the plant, the kids at Marsh Fork worry that the dam up there will fail and they will drown in the ensuing flood. It’s not a wholly unfounded fear. In 1972, the Buffalo Creek dam failed and a fifteen foot wave of black sludge wiped out the towns in its path. Herb Elkins’ two aunts died in that flood and his father, a coal miner, died of black lung. He is quick to point out, that it was his father’s choice to work in the mines. That hasn’t been the case with his son. "He has got his whole life ahead of him to do what he wants to do. He could be whatever he wants to be. He does not have to die with a disease that he did not choose to have," Herb said. Like other parents in the community, he believes that the coal silo and plant are making his child sick, and his wife Connie is part of the lawsuit. The children, they say, complain of headaches, nausea, and sore throats. In the course of our reporting, we couldn’t draw the same conclusion. But neither could we definitively say that the school was not making the children sick. It is a mystery that can only be solved by further testing. For more on this story, watch the full report tonight during “World News Tonight” and “Nightline.”