Alabama plant owned by W.V. governor’s family fined $925,000

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — A company owned by the family of West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice is paying a $925,000 fine to an Alabama health agency, after it shut down a coke plant it said was leaking polluting gases.

Under a consent decree approved Wednesday by a state court judge, Bluestone Coke will pay the fine to the Jefferson County Health Department for air pollution violations at its coking plant north of downtown Birmingham.

A coking plant heats coal at very high temperatures in what are supposed to be closed, oxygen-free ovens, cooking off impurities while not burning the coal. The process creates coke, which is used as fuel to fire blast furnaces for metal and cement makers.

Coke ovens have long polluted sections of Birmingham, once a smoky center of coal mining and steelmaking and one of Alabama’s biggest cities. But increasing attention has focused on the impact of pollution in the predominantly Black neighborhoods that surround Bluestone Coke and other industrial sites. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has designated the area a Superfund site and has been excavating contaminated soil for years. Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin has drafted an unfunded $37 million plan to buy out nearby residents and improve the area.

The plant, which is more than a century old, has been shut down since October 2021. At that time, the health department declined to renew its operating permit after finding that the oven doors were leaking toxic chemicals, as well as citing other maintenance failures. The agency sued for damages, calling the plant “a menace to public health.”

“There was a lot of ash and a lot of soot that people who lived near the plant said would cover their cars and homes,” Pastor Thomas Wilder of nearby Bethel Baptist Church told WBRC-TV. He was one of a group that protested the plant’s license renewal, seeking more stringent controls.

The settlement would allow the plant to seek a permit to reopen if Bluestone were to install two monitors to detect sulfur dioxide, have an engineer design a repair plan subject to public comment and hire an independent auditor to conduct bimonthly compliance checks for two years. Health department officials said any reopening would probably take more than a year.

The plant’s maintenance failures were chronicled in an investigation by ProPublica. Steve Ruby, a lawyer for the Justice family, told ProPublica that it was unfair to call the fine too low, noting the…