Patriot Coal Corp., which emerged from bankruptcy in December, spilled waste into a creek feeding West Virginia’s Kanawha River, a month after Freedom Industries Inc. contaminated Charleston’s water with a coal chemical, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. About 108,000 gallons of slurry waste from washing coal spilled into Fields Creek from the Kanawha Eagle Prep Plant near Winifrede, West Virginia’s Department of Environmental Protection said on Monday. A slurry-line seal failed sometime after 2:30 a.m. and the company shut the pump at about 5:30 a.m., the department said. The plant, located about 16 miles south of Charleston, is 95 miles from the nearest surface water intake and so the leak isn’t expected to affect public water systems, the state said. A coal cleaning chemical spilled from a Freedom Industries storage tank last month, polluting water used by about 300,000 residents in and around Charleston.
