Risk perceptions and the maintenance of environmental injustice in Appalachia

ABSTRACT

Coal impoundment failures in Appalachia have caused some of the most devastating environmental disasters in U.S. history. However, people living near impoundments today report low levels of worry about coal waste disasters. This paper connects the literature on environmental risk perceptions and environmental justice to explain the socioeconomic, geographic, and ideological factors that correlate with impoundment failure worry. Survey data collected from more than 500 households in southern West Virginia shows that residents with lower levels of trust in the coal industry and those who perceive themselves as living closer to an impoundment have greater worries of an impoundment failure. However, household distance to an impoundment and living in the region during past disasters did not have a significant effect on risk perceptions. These results highlight how risk habituation in disadvantaged communities maintains environmentally unequal outcomes over time.

KEYWORDS:

• Risk perceptions
• environmental justice
• coal
• Appalachia
• technological disasters

Acknowledgements

I thank the staff and students at the Washington State University Social and Economic Sciences Research Center who assisted with implementing the survey used in this study in 2017, including Thom Allen, Tim Lensing, and Liz Beck. I also thank Don Dillman, Jennifer Sherman, and Raoul Liévanos for helpful feedback on an earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This is relevant in the case of coal impoundments – since there are no publicly available technical estimates about the risk of coal impoundment failures.

2. Greenberg (2017) provides a fuller description of how Freudenburg’s disproportionality framework can be used to study environmental inequality in Appalachia.

3. This also connects to Giddens’ (1999) ideas about the proliferation of low-probability, high-consequence risks.

4. The lack of impoundment data could be because of the unique regulatory system that governs the storage of coal waste. Coal waste is exempt from the Environmental Protection Agency because it is not considered ‘hazardous’ – and therefore coal impoundments are not included in EPA databases on hazards. Instead, the Mine Safety and Health Administration and the Office of Surface Mining and Reclamation Enforcement jointly regulate and monitor impoundments – along with state-level environmental protection agencies.

5. The survey was also part of a methodological experiment to examine how communication elements influenced response rates. Therefore, there were multiple versions of both the questionnaire and letters that accompanied the survey. I controlled for the different versions in the analyses below – and there were no statistically significant differences in responses on variables below.

6. The term ‘coal slurry dam’ was used instead of the more-technical term ‘coal impoundment’ – which could cause more confusion about the nature of the name. In one version of the questionnaire, the question about coal impoundments was preceded with a brief explanation of what they were. There were no statistical differences in response based on the version of the survey.

7. Brasier et al. (2013) also finds either no or modest correlations between income, age, and education and risk perceptions of hydraulic fracturing in a recent study.

8. The age question was asked of all respondents on the 2010 U.S. Census, therefore making that a more accurate count. After 2000, the U.S. Census bureau migrated most demographic questions (such as educational attainment) to the American Community Survey. The use of five-year ACS estimates helps reduce margins of error associated with the smaller sample size, but there are still concerns about the reliability of ACS data in smaller geographies and rural areas (Spielman, Folch, and Nagle 2014).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pierce Greenberg

Pierce Greenberg is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Creighton University. His research examines the connections between environmental and spatial inequality. He holds a PhD in Sociology from Washington State University.