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Gob Story

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The wind blows strong and cold across the flat horizon as Dot and Wilbert Timmerman survey the 80 acres around their house, where Wilbert once farmed soybeans, wheat, corn and cattle. When they bought the property from Dot's dad in the mid-1960s, he'd already sold the underground mineral rights to Exxon. In the early 1970s, Exxon returned to Clinton County and began buying ground from the Timmermans' neighbors, paying them four times the land's value.

"Every night we'd get home from work and here would be that car sitting on that side of the house," Dot recalls. "A guy from Texas. And he wanted us to sell this property to him. We said we didn't want to sell. We had just built this house."

The man from Texas came back every day for months, Dot continues. "Finally he came one day and he said, 'We'll give you ten days. Either you sell for what we're offering you, or we'll do it by eminent domain.'"

"We couldn't stop progress," Wilbert puts in. "Or that's what they said it was."

Exxon let the Timmermans keep their home and five acres. Then they watched as a coal mine was built around them.

Most people in the farm communities of Albers, New Baden, Looking Glass, Damiansville and Germantown welcomed the Exxon mine, which provided as many as 700 good-paying jobs as well as healthy tax revenues to Clinton County and local school districts.

"Everyone looked at it as an opportunity," says Germantown's mayor, Gerald Kohnen. "The mine did pay well. It's a dangerous job to go down there. It was good for the economy -- it was jobs for younger guys getting out of school."

"It gave the whole area a shot in the arm," seconds Jennifer Malacarne, whose husband worked at the mine. "This mine had good top, so they didn't have nearly as many cover-ups, where the mine falls in. They could stand up straight, they weren't bent over. It was perceived as a good thing, to start with."

In 1977 Exxon's Monterey Coal Company began extracting coal at what was known as the Monterey No. 2 mine. The mining permit issued by the state of Illinois allowed the company to mine up to 12,000 acres, making Monterey No. 2 the state's fifth-largest producer. Men toiled more than 300 feet beneath the earth's surface, operating machinery that snatched foot-long chunks from ancient coal seams, then placed them into rail cars and finally onto conveyor belts that lifted them to daylight.

Once the subterranean treasure was extracted, it was cleaned with water to remove shale, rock and dirt. That coarse material, called gob, was used to build the walls of an aboveground impoundment that held a mixture of water and fine particles of coal and dirt, as well as more gob. The good stuff, meanwhile, was stored in silos until it was poured into railroad cars bound for the power plants of Indiana. According to the trade journal Coal Week, Exxon had a 25-year contract to supply coal to PSI Energy Inc. of Plainfield, Indiana.

Exxon's Monterey No. 2 mine annually delivered three million tons of coal, valued at $90 million, to PSI. But in 1996 PSI bought out the contract, which hadn't been scheduled to expire until 2002. Both companies reportedly said high-sulfur coal mined in Illinois was no longer competitive; PSI could buy low-sulfur coal from western states and avoid costly air-pollution regulations. "Without the current contract, continued operation of the mine is not viable long term and the mine will be closed," Exxon told Coal Week in 1996. The amount PSI paid Exxon to cancel the contract was not disclosed.

Miners at Monterey No. 2 were furious when the facility was shut down after nineteen years of operation. Many would have needed to work only one more year in order for their retirement benefits to fully vest. When they closed the mine, Monterey Coal sealed all of the shafts and tore down all of the buildings. And when the company pulled out of Clinton County, they left behind a colossal garbage dump.

Locals refer to the 360-acre mass of muck as the gob pile. Gob, a sticky mixture of subterranean rock, dirt and coal, forms the exterior of a volcano-shaped heap that contains millions of tons of liquids and solids left over from the mining process. In an aerial photo, the coal-black stain on the land is a stark contrast to the quilt of neatly cut squares of farmland all around it, dotted with modest houses, tidy barns and thousands of acres sown with corn and soybeans.

When mining commenced at Monterey No. 2 in 1977, Exxon needed a place to dispose of the unwanted material that came out of the mineshafts. A consultant's report prepared for Exxon two years later indicates that the company dug a six-foot-deep pit and dumped liquid and solid waste only a few feet above the water table, which is as shallow as ten feet in some places. That pit became the base of a waste pile that grew to its current height of 50 feet.

Over the years, contaminants trickled through the silty clay beneath the gob pile into the Pearl Aquifer, confirms Bill Buscher, a supervisor for the Illinois EPA's water bureau. In 1991 the state ordered Exxon to begin pumping water out of the aquifer to prevent the spread of pollution underground.

But another eight years would pass before the state officially cited the company for violations. "That was the first written notification," Buscher says. "We were well aware of the problem and we were working on it."

Groundwater samples taken in 1999 indicated levels of iron, manganese, sulfate, chloride and total dissolved solids that exceeded state and federal water-quality standards. State regulations do not require that water beneath the pile be regularly tested for heavy metals, even though coal and coal waste contain a veritable who's who of toxic metals including arsenic, cyanide, lead, cadmium, beryllium, mercury and chromium.

In 2002 and 2003, the state Department of Public Health, acting on requests by several residents, tested the water wells of people living near the waste pile. Levels of manganese above 500 parts per billion were found in one quarter of the 33 wells sampled, according to a report prepared by the health department.

"You do need some manganese in your diet," says David Webb, an environmental toxicologist at the health department. "But long-term exposure to levels above 500 parts per billion can cause health-related problems."

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