Tucked inside an old gymnasium, hundreds of wooden boxes are stacked along a far wall. The space, formerly home base for a summer camp, is now host to labs and classrooms filled with bright, freshly painted blue boxes.
But children won’t be playing here this summer. Instead, among the boxes and stainless steel vats, displaced coal miners and low-income West Virginians will learn a new trade — beekeeping. It’s part of a program run by the Appalachian Beekeeping Collective, a program for low-income West Virginians to make supplemental income through beekeeping.
While beekeeping may seem like an odd choice for former coal miners, it’s a viable and increasingly popular way for people in rural areas to make money. In West Virginia, where poverty is high and jobs are scarce, a large part of the population is struggling to make ends meet.
Coal mining once bolstered the region, but between 2005 and 2015, employment in the coal industry decreased by about 27 percent, according to research by West Virginia University. Across the nation, states like Kentucky, Wyoming and Pennsylvania have to find jobs to fill the employment gap left by the coal industry.
Enter the Appalachian Beekeeping Collective. The collective operates across 17 counties in southern West Virginia and offers classes in subjects like, Is Beekeeping Right for Me?, bee basics and advanced beekeeping. It’s a branch of the Appalachian Headwaters, a nonprofit formed to develop sustainable economic opportunities across the region.
Interested beekeepers can take Beekeeping 101, which is a five-week course where they learn the basics of beekeeping, bee biology and solutions to common problems. Once the new beekeeper has completed this course, he or she can become a partner in the collective. The partnership offers training, mentorship, equipment and bees for free or at a reduced cost.
But the startup cost to becoming a beekeeper can be a barrier of entry.
This was the case for Jason Young, a resident of White Oak, West Virginia.
Young originally started beekeeping as a hobby but quickly realized it could turn into a small business. “We had decided that we wanted to move forward,” he says. “But it was really the money that was holding us back.”
When Young discovered the Appalachian Beekeeping Collective offered training and equipment at low cost, he leapt at the opportunity.
Young and his daughter enrolled in the free Beekeeping 101 course and received 12 hives from the collective for a reduced price. From there, he formed White Oak Bee Co.
Last spring was their first harvest. It produced enough honey for his family and his honey-roasted coffee, which is White Oak Bee Co.’s signature item. This season, however, he has 14 hives ready to harvest and hopes to make a profit that he can reinvest in the business.
“Beekeeping and our relationship with the collective has really made that possible,” Young says.
The Appalachian Beekeeping Collective successfully trained 35 beekeepers this past year and plans to train another 55 this spring.
When it’s harvest time, the nonprofit will process, market and distribute the honey for its beekeepers for free. That can result in a nice chunk of change. In 2018, the market value for a pound of honey was about $7.33. A single hive can produce 20 to 100 pounds of honey a year, which means a single productive hive could earn its owner over $700 a year. With multiple hives, a beekeeper has the potential to make thousands of dollars every year.
And the bees do more than produce income for their owners. The forests provide nectar for the bees, and in turn, the bees pollinate these key natural habitats and create more plant diversity, says Parry Kietzman, an entomologist and educator at the collective.
Kietzman says she’s noticed people are more aware of the land and plants once they have bees.
“It seems to give people more of a handle on environmental concerns,” she says. “Simply because they’re worried about their bees.”
For others, like Young, it’s a chance to accomplish goals.
“What I feel most thankful for is the opportunity to take some dreams we’ve had for a really long time,” Young said. “And to really see them, kind of, come to be.”
Tag: West Virginia
How Kayakers Saved a River and Started a Movement
While most mines in the eastern region of the Appalachian Mountains are no longer in operation, they are far from inactive.
In lightly populated places such as Albright, West Virginia, water with heavy metals seeps from mines into tributaries — the small streams that flow into rivers — finally pooling in reservoirs near the Chesapeake Bay. It’s also here where a group of kayakers made it their mission over 20 years ago to clean up one of the most polluted rivers in America: the Cheat River, a 78.3-mile tributary that runs through eastern West Virginia and southwestern Pennsylvania. And they’re still at it today.
Jim Snyder, a 64-year-old thrill-seeker who lives on the banks of the Cheat River near Albright, was one of those initial kayakers.
“The pollution there would burn your eyes,” Snyder says, recalling the condition of the river in the mid- to late-’90s, when a series of underground coal mine blowouts released orange-tinged water thick with heavy metals into the river.
The first blowout, in 1994, lowered the pH of the water to dangerous levels, killing off fish as far away as 16 miles downstream. Another blowout a year later eventually devastated the area’s tourism industry, known for its whitewater recreation. The Cheat River soon after became ranked as one the nation’s most endangered.
To reckon with the pollution and damage to the river’s ecosystem, Snyder and other kayakers in the community formed Friends of the Cheat to clean up the dirty streams and creeks that fed into the Cheat River. Their efforts helped the river recover and, with it, a tourism industry centered around its rapids.
“I’d never done much work on committees at that time so it was an awkward fit for me, but we kept making it work,” Snyder tells NationSwell. “We were rookies, but we endured.”
After the mine blowouts, the whitewater industry suffered from more than a 50 percent drop in business, while whitewater participation increased nationally by 33 percent during the same time period.
“Twenty-thousand people were going down the canyon annually in the ’80s and ’90s,” says Owen Mulkeen, associate director of Friends of the Cheat. “Albright [became] a ghost town compared to what it was like at the height of rafting.”
Friends of the Cheat led an effort with the Environmental Protection Agency to use various methods of water treatment, such as limestone filtration, to clean up the tributaries in the area. The success Snyder and the others had with bringing back the Cheat River became widely considered one of the most successful conservation stories.
“[Kayakers] have a passion and that usually keeps them in West Virginia,” says Mulkeen. “We are blessed with the natural beauty and recreation here.”
And that has helped keep the organization’s ranks filled — a necessity, given that mine pollution is still a very real problem in the waters around the Cheat.
Over 7,500 miles of streams in Appalachia are still polluted by heavy metals from abandoned mines, according to data collected by Friends of the Cheat. Before the passage of the Surface Mining and Reclamation Control Act in 1977, mining companies could seal their operations in whatever way they liked, with little or no oversight. And over the decades many of those seals have busted open.
“Mining had a huge impact on the industrial revolution, and allowed us to win or at least participate in two wars,” says Gavin Pellitteri, a recreational kayaker and outreach specialist for the nonprofit Eastern Pennsylvania Coalition for Abandoned Mine Reclamation. “There’s a lot of that culture and pride left in the area.”
Pellitteri’s coalition works to correct for acid mine drainage, known as AMD. Similar to Friends of the Cheat, EPCAMR’s treatment strategy is to find an empty piece of land that can be filled with mine water into a pondlike basin. Limestone is used to neutralize the water’s acidity, and exposure to oxygen removes iron and drives off sulfates. Once done, the clean water is put back into a river.
“If you look at where these impacts are, it’s the spine of Appalachia — Northern Georgia, Tennessee, West Virginia, up to Pennsylvania,” says Pellitteri, who estimates that there are over 400 billion gallons of mine water in the Scranton, Pennsylvania, area alone.
As water conservationists like Snyder and Pellitteri continue to clean up the area’s waterways, where a virtually endless flow of polluted water streams from abandoned mines, there’s a fear that they’ll fail to attract a younger generation of outdoor activists to the mission.
“Unfortunately, there’s a brain-drain out of West Virginia,” Mulkeen says. “But we’re born and bred by paddlers, and we hope to continue that relationship. That’s our base.”
Because unlike a tree falling in the forest, a blown-out mine will matter, even if no one is around to witness it.
One Couple’s Long, Bumpy Road From Opioid Addiction to Sober Living
It’s just before 7 p.m. in Huntington, W.V., and the street lights have turned on for the night. The east side of the city is illuminated by a deep orange that cascades over the roads and trickles onto the large lawns of two-story homes that line these streets.
Justin Ponton sits with his girlfriend, Jami Bamberger, on the stoop of Newness of Life, the recovery home Ponton runs. Both finish cigarettes (they smoke Newports) as they talk about the homemade cooking — much of it deep fried — they missed by not attending church that Sunday.
Ponton sports skinny jeans, a tight-fitted “Kanye West for President 2020” shirt and black sneakers that are impeccably clean. His arms are tattooed into sleeves of crosses, roman numerals and cartoonish lettering. His bombastic, urban style is very much out of place. Ponton knows — and doesn’t care.
“From where I stand, the skinny jeans make me stand out,” he says.
In front of the couple, a group of five men wearing baseball caps and baggy pants slip out of the shadows and walk side by side in the street. Ponton raises his hand and gives a wave.
They acknowledge him with nods, but continue walking.
“Probably have a meeting or something they need to get to,” Bamberger says as the men walk into Recovery Point, a drug addiction and alcoholism recovery center, at the end of the street.
Bamberger should know. At the time, she was the coordinator for another Recovery Point location about 35 miles away in Charleston, W.V. It follows the same schedule, though that facility is all women.
“Everybody — news outlets, politicians — keep coming to Huntington and talking about how bad it is here. It kills me that Huntington has been reduced to a city that has this dark side to it,” says Ponton. “Dead-ass, we have a problem, but there is so much recovery in Huntington. And nobody ever talks about that.”
In August 2016, Huntington was thrown into the international spotlight when 26 people overdosed on heroin within a five-hour timespan. Since then, a barrage of news outlets have trekked to Huntington — a small city in a rural state that’s experienced the demise of its main industry — to tell the story of how it became the poster child for the nation’s opioid epidemic, nicknaming it the “Overdose Capital of America.”
Residents and public officials resent that moniker. When asked to speak with NationSwell, both the mayor’s office and Huntington Police Department declined to be interviewed, with one member of the mayor’s administrative staff saying that, “even good press is bad press at this point.”
But with a number of options for recovery that are giving thousands of addicts a second chance at life, including peer-mentor models like the ones that Ponton and Bamberger operate, locals have come up with a different moniker for their city: The Recovery Capital.
The Argument for Abstinence
Ponton’s recovery home is well known in Huntington for its underdog approach to recovery. Newness of Life doesn’t turn anyone away; most of its male residents don’t have any money, and many don’t have stable employment. They are exactly how Ponton was when he was in rehab years earlier.
Today, community leaders embrace the 33-year-old former addict. But when he was just 10 years old, Ponton was slinging drugs and living on the streets of a Washington, D.C., suburb.
“There’s something about Justin,” says Kim Miller, a close friend of Ponton’s and director of corporate development for Prestera Center, a rehab clinic. “People just gravitate toward him, and they trust him.”
In and out of prison and rehabs for over a decade, Ponton found himself in Huntington at a faith-based recovery center where he turned his life around.
“I was actually kicked out for selling drugs within the rehab,” he says. “But I came back, got clean and started working for the program. And that’s when I wanted to go out and go on my own.”
Newness of Life is an abstinence-only halfway house that operates out of two houses located next door to each other on the eastern side of Huntington — not far from Marshall University and the local hospital. Setting it apart from the numerous other two-story dwellings in the neighborhood: The vending machine dispensing Monster Energy, a heavily caffeinated drink, sitting on the front porch.
Residents are required to stick to a regimen. Morning chores and attendance at 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and a weekly house get-together are mandatory. No one is allowed visitors, and everyone must have a job.
“I came to Newness and didn’t have anything, didn’t know how to take care of myself or my family,” says Matthew Thompson, a former resident at Newness of Life. “Yeah, it was tough, but with Justin’s help, I was able to get back on track.”
And being tough is exactly what Ponton wants.
“We don’t want you getting too comfortable,” Ponton says. “The point is to become a productive member of society, pay for your child’s bills and get a real home.”
Most importantly, it’s mandatory that every individual living at Newness remain sober — even medically-assisted treatment (MAT) like methadone or Suboxone, which prevents users from suffering withdrawal symptoms like nausea or severe cramping, is not allowed.
MAT is considered the gold standard for recovery treatment. The Centers for Disease Control, The National Institute of Health and dozens of other medical leaders support the use of MAT, and multiple studies have found MAT has reduced opioid deaths from relapsed users by more than half.
“The importance of offering a variety of medication assisted treatment modalities is really that we’re keeping people alive,” says Miller.
But many former addicts reject it.
“You’re just swapping methadone or whatever you’re given for the original drug,” says Ponton. “But not to throw shade on [MAT]… We like to say that not one solution is for everyone.”
In warmer months, Ponton may see only a dozen guys at a time taking shelter at Newness. But once the cold sets in, Ponton usually has a full house, with almost 35 men staying at the facility.
Typically, inpatient rehabilitation centers can cost up to $6,000 a month for residents. Ponton charges just $100 a week for people to stay at Newness of Life, but most of the time, people can’t even afford that. As a result, Newness operates primarily in the red, as Ponton’s mantra is “never turn anyone away, even if they can’t pay.” The houses are in desperate need of maintenance, and shoestring budgets aren’t enough to keep the electricity from being turned off on occasion.
“Somehow, he figures it out. Every single month, the guy has no cash, and he is still able to get those guys heat and water and a roof,” says Ryan Navy, a close friend and executive pastor of New Heights Church, which provides religious counseling for many of the guys at Newness of Life.
“Everyone in the church knows about Newness and Justin, and they’re right alongside them every Sunday,” he says. “They’re willing to help, which kinda shows you what this community has been doing since the news has come out on the problems here — how we’ve tried to address it.”
How Heroin Took Hold
Huntington’s decline is no different than other towns in the Appalachian region of America. Once filled with miners and coal workers, the city found itself struggling in the early 2000s as the clean energy and technology industries decreased the country’s reliance on fossil fuels and highly-educated Millennials flocked to urban centers along both coasts.
It’s easy to blame the economic downturn for why people started using drugs. But that’s leaving a key point out of the narrative: How the drugs found their way into Huntington in the first place.
Workers’ compensation claims over the past two decades have fueled an increased use of opiates nationally, and West Virginia has been flooded with pain killers at a higher rate than other states, according to an investigation done by the Gazette Mail. Since Huntington is a former city of industry, a significant number of its residents incurred injuries on-the-job. Initially prescribed drugs for legitimate pain management — surgery, injury rehabilitation — many later turned to a cheaper alternative, heroin, as states began cracking down on unnecessary prescriptions.
“You had this situation where you had large numbers of people abusing prescription opioids and then we took measures to reduce the availability of those pills,” says Robin Pollini, associate director of the West Virginia University Injury Control Research Center in Morgantown, which studies opioid use in the region. “At the same time, heroin traffickers were looking to these places and saying, ‘Hey, we’ve saturated the urban markets, let’s start going into these smaller markets.’ And what they had was a population that was looking for a cheaper, more available opioid for the pills they were using.”
Bamberger, Ponton’s girlfriend, was one such person. At 21, she was prescribed Oxycontin after undergoing surgery for a sports injury.
“[Prescription] drugs did save my life, at first. They did. Honestly,” she says. “I had knee surgery, but from there — and that’s how it started — it only took about five months, and I was already using a needle.”
Originally from Tennessee, Bamberger excelled in staying clean at Liberty’s Place, a rehab in Richmond, Ky. That success led her to the Charleston, W.V., Recovery Point location, which houses close to 100 women fighting for their sobriety without MAT.
The opportunity to work at a rehab center was something Bamberger, 24, always wanted to do. Before falling into addiction, she was attending school to be a drug counselor.
A tour of Recovery Point Charleston reveals that the women live a militaristic lifestyle. Beds are perfectly made, and there’s a limit on personal items. Residents are confined to the building, strictly monitored and have a schedule that includes daily chores, classes and “trudging” — a practice that requires the women to walk miles each day.
Bamberger explains the practice as, “If we could walk for our drugs, we’re going to walk for our recovery.”
Success is rewarded with a paid gig as a peer mentor, a position that pays minimum wage. Recovery Point claims that more than 60 percent of its former residents remain clean. That number is controversial, however, as critics argue that the organization cherry picks data from its alumni events.
“This program, when you come in, they start you from the bottom and you work your way up. You’re taught responsibility, you get jobs, you have to wake up, you have to you know, do a chore here, you go to classes, you learn a lot more,” says Hailey Miller, 24, who is one of Bamberger’s close friends and a resident at Recovery Point.
Get to Huntington
Some states — including those outside the Appalachian region — have started to look at ways proactively to combat opiate addiction. For example, Washington, Colorado and Vermont have discussed legislation that would allow safe injection facilities where users could receive sterile injections while under supervision.
Those programs have come under fire for a host of reasons, including the assumption that they lead to endorsement of drug usage. But safe injection sites are known to be effective in curbing opioid use and overdose. In one study, their use lowered the number overdoses in addition to reducing the spread of HIV and Hepatitis C.
The research, though promising, is so controversial in America that even doctors have conducted studies in complete secrecy without federal approval.
For now, recovery homes and rehabs are the primary go-tos for people seeking help in Huntington. That’s primarily because the city has become very well-versed in triage, but not in prevention or identifying those who are currently in need of help.
“When you’re in the midst of what has been labeled an epidemic, you kind of get in emergency response mode,” says Prestera’s Miller. “What we’re doing is putting out fires a lot. We’re helping the people that we know are coming in seeking our services, and we’re throwing everything at them.”
The work doesn’t stop once someone is clean. Relapse is imminent for many; up to 60 percent of those in recovery will abuse drugs again, according to the National Institute of Drug Abuse, part of the National Institute of Health.
Miller says that there’s no “best solution” to solve for addiction or eliminate the chance of relapse, including MAT. In multiple instances nationwide, addicts placed into abstinence-only recovery programs by drug courts wound up dead because they started using again.
This is why Ponton doesn’t claim Newness of Life residents achieve success, only a chance at it. And it’s why he keeps fighting for others.
On the Sunday morning that NationSwell is with Ponton, he receives a call from an old friend who is using drugs again. The guy is high and called Justin in a moment of weakness, wanting to get help and come back into the program. It’s a phone call Ponton gets often — sometimes daily — he says.
“Alright,” Ponton tells the friend. “Get to Huntington.”
The friend arrived, as promised, but used again the very next day.
A Winter Gift
This past November, Ponton’s heating systems at Newness of Life were shot, and the guys were at risk of having to spend the entire winter with no heat — a scary prospect considering Huntington’s winters are brutal.
“I don’t know where we’re gonna get the money to fix this,” Ponton says under his breath as he analyzes a spreadsheet that reveals in angry red ink the thousands of dollars he’s behind on his bills.
Two days later, Ponton and Navy, the pastor, meet in the back of Lafayette’s, a cigar and wine shop located in downtown Huntington. Navy had news that could only be announced over a Romeo y Julieta cigar: An anonymous donation had been made to Newness in the form of a new heating system.
Less than a week later, the guys at Newness of Life were living in a warm place again. They may still be battling addiction, but at least they wouldn’t be spending the winter in the cold.
Correction: A previous version of this video incorrectly stated that Ponton and Bamberger opened a new recovery facility in January 2018.
Homepage photo by Joseph Darius Jaafari for NationSwell.
Fighting Drugs With Drugs in West Virginia
Justin Ponton hit the gas pedal and sped his Dodge Charger up a hill to the parking lot of Hurricane City Park, in rural West Virginia. It was November 2017, and he had just found out that a friend was using drugs. Again. Ponton feared what he’d find when he reached the man.
Ponton, 33, only had a few minutes to get there. He has been through this before. As the owner and operator of a sober-living facility in nearby Huntington, he knows all too well how easy it can be to accidentally overdose and die.
Ponton found his friend sitting in the passenger seat of a parked van — just high, not overdosing. Which was lucky considering Ponton didn’t have any naloxone, the overdose-reversing drug that he often carries with him for occasions like this. Had his pal actually overdosed, Ponton would’ve had to wait for the paramedics to arrive.
America’s heroin and opioid crisis killed more than 60,000 people in 2016, according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control. That’s twice the number of fatal shootings for the same year. Put another way, drug overdoses today kill more people each year than the HIV epidemic did at its peak in the mid-1990s.
States have scrambled to find ways to get users clean and halt the spread of heroin and, increasingly, the synthetic opioid fentanyl — a drug that can be up to 100 times more powerful than heroin. Prescription painkillers also remain problematic, especially in rural states.
But now another drug is working to reverse those statistics.
Breathing can slow down or stop completely when someone is overdosing. It’s in that moment when naloxone — more formally referred to by its brand name Narcan — binds to opioid receptors in the brain and reverses or blocks the effects of other opioids. The drug works in seconds to restore normal breathing.
Naloxone is relatively inexpensive. But as the demand for it has increased, so too has its price.
“This is absolutely an epidemic,” says Robin Pollini, associate director of the West Virginia University Injury Control Research Center, which studies opioid abuse. Her state has the dubious distinction of having the highest rate of overdose deaths — 52 per 100,000 people, compared to 19.8 per 100,000 people nationwide. “Have we seen the worst of the drug problem? I don’t think any of us can say, because I don’t think we have a real handle on what’s going on out on the street or in people’s homes.”
Opioid abuse crosses state lines, of course, but recent coverage of the epidemic has put a spotlight on West Virginia — and Huntington in particular. In 2016, the city of just 49,000 made national headlines after 26 people overdosed in one five-hour span. The event launched a federal investigation by the CDC and a media firestorm that was quick to label Huntington as “America’s overdose capital.”
READ MORE: Born Into Rehab: Giving Life to West Virginia’s Tiniest Opioid Victims
As director of outreach of WVU’s Injury Control Research Center, Herb Linn became curious about the effectiveness of take-home naloxone kits. During the heroin scourge of the 1990s, the kits, which typically contain two doses of naloxone, were distributed to drug users in major cities where heroin was prevalent, including New York, Los Angeles and Baltimore. Recipients administered the naloxone themselves when someone nearby overdosed.
Getting an opioid antidote in the hands of drug users in big cities — where you can pinpoint at-risk communities in dense areas and then focus on treatment and prevention — is easier than it would be in the rural environs outside of Huntington. “I became very intrigued about whether this kind of program could translate to a rural population … and whether it would be effective with abusers of opioid pain medicines.”
That’s a legitimate concern, says Pollini, who argues that it’s not enough to simply take a program that worked in a densely populated city and apply it to a remote town of 1,000 people.
“In rural areas, you don’t see [drug users] out in the open as much. There’s not a street scene like you might see in Baltimore or Philly,” she says. “And they’re not accustomed to outreach from harm reduction programs.”
And then there is the stigma of drug dependency, especially in small towns where it can seem like everyone knows your business. For addicts and their families, the fear of public shaming may deter requests for the life-saving kit.
In 2013, Linn published a brief on the effectiveness of naloxone when it’s made widely available in a community. He shared it with public officials in the state, and two years later, the legislature passed a law allowing physicians to prescribe naloxone to anyone who might have to use it — from drug users and their families to first responders answering an emergency call.
“What that did was open up the door to folks who were allowed under that legislation to start programs,” he says. For Linn, that helped local communities start distribution programs from late 2015 through 2016 and led to a collaboration with the state to distribute over 8,250 kits in 2017.
Among those receiving kits were emergency workers in Huntington. They began a pilot program that deploys a quick-response team whenever there’s an overdose. Not only do first responders administer naloxone to revive someone, but they also stay on the case by working to get the victim into a treatment program or a drug court.
Experts say the city has seen a dramatic turnaround in the number of people dying from overdoses.
“We have educated the community about what an overdose looks like,” says Kim Miller, director of corporate development for Prestera, a rehab clinic, and a clinical expert in opioid addiction. “In Huntington, we have allowed access to [naloxone], so that more people are carrying it than ever before. If you’re at a restaurant and someone overdoses in the restroom, for example, and you carrying naloxone, you could save their life.”
That belief has Ponton constantly scrambling to stock up on more of the kits. Currently, he relies on donations to keep a steady supply on hand at his sober-living home.
After the close call with his friend that night in November, Ponton asked the city’s fire chief, Jan Rader, for a kit she had on her.
“I hope we figure out a way to get more of these out there,” he said, before giving her a hug and heading back to his car.
Less than two weeks later, he used that same kit to revive someone else from yet another overdose.
Additional reporting by Kayle Hope.
Born Into Rehab: Giving Life to West Virginia’s Tiniest Opioid Victims
In the rear of the Cabell Huntington Hospital maternity ward is a medium-sized, unlit room. Occasionally, its darkness is pierced with a scream that nurses can only describe as a kind of cat call.
The patients inside suffer from seizures and are hyper-sensitive to bright light. Sometimes, their bodies cramp, stiffening like a board. Other times, they’re fidgety. And the thumb sucking… it’s never ending — unusual, even for newborns.
These babies are the youngest victims of America’s heroin problem. Exposed to opiates while still in the womb, they suffer from Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome, or NAS.
In the U.S., the number of babies born with NAS increased by more than 300 percent between 1999 and 2013, according to a report released in 2016 by the Centers for Disease Control. In Huntington, W.V., the problem is exponentially worse. CDC findings reveal nearly 33 cases of NAS per 1,000 hospital births — the highest in the nation. But anecdotally, Cabell Hospital nurses report witnessing more than 100 per 1,000 babies, nearly 16 times the national average.
To be clear, these babies are not born addicted to opiates. Rather, their brains were exposed to opioids in utero, damaging how they’re formed and similar to how alcohol affects brain development in children born with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.
It’s well documented how FAS impairs childhood development. In sharp contrast, medical professionals have been able to recognize the symptoms and diagnose NAS for decades, but they continue to be perplexed by what happens to these newborns as they age. Many doctors and nurses say they simply don’t know.
“We have so many babies that are being born prenatally exposed to illegal drugs. That’s been a well-documented problem in our community and in our region,” says Robert Hansen, director of addiction services at Marshall University in Huntington. “The question becomes what’s happening to these babies after they withdraw from those drugs, and what’s going to happen with their moms? What’s going to happen to the children as they grow and develop and enter the school system?”
Where Huntington sees a crisis, it also sees a solution. As community leaders do their best to mitigate the opioid epidemic that has gripped their city, members of the medical community and local university are partnering together to care for these newborns by launching the first-of-its-kind childcare program to study the long-term effects of NAS. The hope is that their findings will be used to inform future educational initiatives.
AN END TO THE SUFFERING
The reason why Huntington has such a high number of babies born with NAS is largely due to its location. The city straddles three state lines — Kentucky, West Virginia and Ohio — and has one of the only large hospitals in the region. Mothers are more likely to give birth there than anywhere else in the area.
Two years ago, the CDC released a report revealing that women aged 15 to 44 were filling opiate prescriptions at a higher rate than normal. Because of the opioid epidemic in this part of Appalachia, Cabell Huntington Hospital is overrun with drug-exposed babies.
There’s just not enough beds, says Sara Murray, nurse manager in the Neonatal Intensive Therapeutic Unit at Cabell Huntington Hospital. Her unit only has 15 beds, but during the first week of November 2017, nurses were caring for 19 babies with another expected at any moment.
Newborns with NAS remain in the hospital longer — up to 100 days, compared to three to four days with other babies — making overflow inevitable. The extended hospitalization got Murray thinking.
“They were staying for long periods of time, and we just felt like there was something that must be missing in caring for them, thus causing them to stay so long,” Murray says.
In response, Murray and two coworkers, Rhonda Edmunds and Rebecca Crowder, opened Lily’s Place, a NAS clinic that would serve as overflow for the hospital.
Lily’s Place is only the second facility in the U.S. that exclusively cares for NAS babies. It’s modeled after a program in Kent, Wash., that, according to Edmunds, “needed to also be in Huntington.” Since opening in 2014, the facility has cared for more than 300 babies. First Lady Melania Trump and other influential politicians have said that the unique program should be a model for the entire nation.
The care provided to newborns at Lily’s Place mirrors what they’d receive at the hospital. To ease withdrawal symptoms, nurses rely on methadone, an opioid that satisfies the physical cravings of opiate dependency, but doesn’t provide the high that heroin or prescription painkillers do.
Though methadone has been controversial for adults in recovery — many view it as a substitute for another drug — treating newborns with methadone is widely accepted within neonatal units.
“Any parent will tell you in here that withdrawal is very painful,” says Sarah Murray, who runs the Neonatal Intensive Therapeutic Unit at Cabell County Hospital. “We don’t want the babies to suffer that pain, so we get them through the acute withdrawal.”
By the time each infant goes home from Lily’s Place, it’s been weaned off all opioids, including methadone.
Despite its success in providing overflow for the hospital and counseling and caregiving services to parents of babies with NAS, Lily’s Place faces tremendous difficulties. Funding is a continual problem. The majority of women who give birth to opioid-exposed babies are on Medicaid. With national healthcare on unstable ground, public and private donors could be needed in the future to finance the cost of treating a newborn with NAS, which carries a price tag of more than $60,000, according to the National Institute of Drug Abuse.
Because of health insurance and Medicaid complexities, Lily’s Place can only accept babies born to West Virginia residents; those born to mothers from out of state cannot be transferred from Cabell Huntington Hospital to Lily’s Place. For now, the hospital’s maternity ward continues to be overrun.
The clinic has tried to solve this by offering other states guidance on how to open up similar programs, but there have been no successful takers, as of yet.
A STEP INTO THE UNKNOWN
The long-term effects of opioids on the babies that leave Lily’s Place or the hospital is anyone’s guess.
“There needs to be a lot more research done about what the children need. That start[s] out with neonatal abstinence syndrome, and really, across the country, there hasn’t been enough research to answer that, so it’s very variable,” Marshall University’s Hansen says. “Some children who start out with NAS may not need much support and services. Others will need different [things]. We just don’t know yet.”
In January 2017, Hansen reached out to Suzi Brodof, owner of a shuttered daycare facility, to discuss what to do about Huntington’s newfound fame as America’s heroin capital.
More specifically, he wanted to talk about babies with NAS.
“I went to a meeting and there were about 30 other people from all different organizations in the community. We all wanted to help because we were concerned about what was going to happen to all these babies that are being born to moms who are addicted,” Brodof says. “Everyone went around and said what they could offer. When it got to me, I said that I have a building that was built to be a childcare center, and if we want to still use it in some way for children, I’m willing to contribute that to the cause.”
Brodof had contemplated turning her building into an office complex, but stopped due to the fact that everything inside was miniaturized.
“We didn’t want to just convert it to some other use if we could use it for something for children,” she says.
Educators estimate that 500 students with NAS will be entering the school system in Huntington alone, but didn’t provide proof of that number. “The concern is that the teachers are not prepared,” Brodof says. “They don’t know what to expect or how to handle them.”
That’s where Brodof’s new childcare facility, River Valley Cares, steps in. The childcare center, which opens this year, is studying NAS children in a controlled environment in conjunction with researchers from Marshall University. One nursery room, for example, has a two-way mirror that researchers can use to observe child interactions without intruding.
The hope is that the program will provide the first-of-its-kind research on how toddlers with NAS interact with other students and how they work in learning environments.
If successful — and it will likely take years to conduct the research — River Valley Cares will be able to give teachers, parents and educators the tools needed to figure out how to manage children with NAS.
A PERSONAL SOLUTION
Ryan Navy, a 26-year-old pastor, adopted a baby boy with NAS after a parishioner in his church, New Heights, relapsed on heroin.
“She was clean for, I think, two years. She was doing well,” Navy tells NationSwell. “Three or four weeks before this baby was supposed to be born, she relapses and started shooting up heroin again.”
This story isn’t uncommon in Huntington. But neither are the examples of city residents demonstrating their belief that it takes a village to raise a child — especially when those children are afflicted with NAS. In many instances, mothers can’t manage a newborn while going through opioid withdrawal themselves and the baby ends up in foster care.
Navy’s New Heights congregation is well known for fostering NAS children. The church has about 18 foster families, Navy says, and a fellow pastor has adopted “two or three kids.”
“I can’t even keep track anymore,” Navy says with a laugh.
The good that results from this village mentality extends far beyond Huntington’s newborns. When Brodof went to that first meeting with Hansen, she immediately recognized the benefit of the community banding together.
“Until we all came together last January, none of us really were interacting,” she says. “We were all doing good things for children and families, but we realized once we all came to the table that we would be able to be much stronger if we worked together.”
Additional reporting by Kayle Hope
Correction: A previous version of this article stated that bright light causes babies with neonatal abstinence syndrome to have seizures. A previous version of the video stated a factual error regarding medical information. NationSwell apologizes for the errors.
The Surprising Story Behind One School’s Healthy Lunch Program, The Best Way to Reach Your Reps and More
Revenge of the Lunch Lady, The Huffington Post Highline
In a country where cheap mass-produced food is king and pizza counts as a vegetable, healthy lunches for kids can be hard to come by. But a recent revamp of school fare in Huntington, W.V., previously designated as the nation’s unhealthiest city, provides a hopeful model. There, an enterprising employee managed to implement a healthy lunch program, starring locally grown produce, while maintaining the district’s minuscule $1.50-per-meal budget.
Getting a Busy Signal When You Call Congress? Here’s How to Get Through, The Christian Science Monitor
Since President Trump’s inauguration last month, there’s been a surge in citizens reaching out to Congress, but not all forms of communication are equally effective. If you really want your voice heard, say experts, try meeting with your representative in person, writing a personal letter and focusing on policy rather than cabinet picks.
The Compost King of New York, The New York Times
New York City alone generates 1 million tons of organic waste per year, but a new plant on Long Island will process this waste into both fertilizer and clean energy, generating significant returns. This new large-scale industrial waste processing is both more environmentally friendly and more profitable than traditional composting, and could revolutionize American energy.
Continue reading “The Surprising Story Behind One School’s Healthy Lunch Program, The Best Way to Reach Your Reps and More”
Can Citizen Science Save Us From Environmental Disasters?
During the rush-hour commute on Tokyo’s trains, it’s easy to spot riders gaming on their phones, sorting sweets in Candy Crush or mustering armies in Clash of Clans. But Kevin Hemphill, a geeky ex-pat, played a different game on his iPad, flipping through images of forests and meadows in Pennsylvania that had been cleared. Tapping the screen, he marked the location of ponds and transmitted the data to a nonprofit halfway across the globe.
Through the web-based FrackFinder, a project of the nonprofit SkyTruth, Hemphill, nostalgic for his childhood home in the Rust Belt of Ohio, pored over the images of the Keystone State. He was looking for evidence of hydraulic fracturing. Better known “fracking,” it’s the process of blasting chemicals, sand and water into underground rock layers to dislodge natural gas — a controversial method of energy extraction that’s brought jobs to the region while potentially putting locals’ health at risk. In a uniquely digital “citizen science” effort, Hemphill and hundreds of volunteers around the world have plotted Pennsylvania’s energy infrastructure, creating a detailed map that can be shared with activists, regulators and academics.
Biologists have long relied on group expeditions to study wildlife populations, but FrackFinder brings the process online, giving anyone with a keyboard the chance to participate. As users click through FrackFinder, SkyTruth’s team hopes the abstract science of environmental exploitation becomes tangible. Their pictures, shot from aircraft and 400-mile high satellites, clearly depict the damage that can be hard to visualize, and even harder to reverse.
“We can look at not just one township or county or state. We’re able to look at changes across entire regions over decades. That’s almost like having access to a time machine,” says David Manthos, SkyTruth’s program coordinator. “It’s the region-wide perspective we offer that you just can’t get from one place on the ground.”
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Geologist John Amos founded the nonpartisan Skytruth, which collects satellite images of potential eco-hazards, in 2001, moving it to tiny Shepherdstown, W.V., two years later. A former consultant for a natural resources exploration firm, Amos put similar tracking tools into the hands of conservationists, as a way to atone for his past “disservice to the planet.” But for nearly a decade, SkyTruth remained a one-man shop. Few donors could see how SkyTruth’s aerial imagery might help the environmental movement. That all changed in April 2010, when the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. BP and the Coast Guard estimated 1,000 barrels of oil were gushing out each day, but after studying photos of a vast, shimmering pool of oil on the ocean’s surface, he and oceanographer Dr. Ian MacDonald calculated the spill was more than 20 times worse than officials claimed. After publishing a critical blog post, the federal government quickly revised its numbers upward.
Now a 12-person staff, SkyTruth has used their planetary perspective to create the first repository of mountaintop-removal mining sites in Appalachia; to film flaring over North Dakota’s Bakken oil fields by equipping a high-altitude hydrogen balloon with a camera; and to track unregulated commercial fishing in the world’s most remote waters. After wrapping up in Ohio, FrackFinder will launch in its third state, West Virginia, early this year. Analyses of other states will likely follow.
How is this data used? FrackFinder’s crowdsourced analysis confirmed the exact location of 1,400 active wells and 7,835 wastewater ponds, allowing a team of public health researchers at Johns Hopkins to verify a list of drilling permits provided by the state. Guided by that knowledge, paired with extensive medical records, the university epidemiologists proved that asthmatics were 1.5 to 4 times more likely to have an attack near the drilling, and mothers were 40 percent more likely to give birth prematurely near the most active sites. The researchers weren’t able to pinpoint why locals sickened — maybe sleeplessness from noisy, earth-shaking vibrations, stress from dropping home values or the chemicals themselves — but SkyTruth’s data helped them prove a point.
Surprisingly, crowdsourcing the information is actually harder for SkyTruth than sifting through the images themselves. But the team continues to invest in citizen science because they know the value of the public’s involvement. “It actually puts an image of what’s going on in the world in front of citizens, so they can see for themselves,” Manthos explains. “What kinds of regions are being developed? Is it all forest, rural land or a little of the suburbs? We’re exposing people, up close and personal, to these images. That’s a formative process, and they can draw their own conclusions.”
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Hemphill, for example, says he used to support fracking as a reasonable way to bring much-needed economic growth to Northern Appalachia’s struggling towns. His support persisted, even as he analyzed nearly 5,000 images of Pennsylvania’s scarred terrain. “Wow, they’re really tearing up the earth,” he thought, almost disinterestedly. But because of his exposure to the issue through FrackFinder, he began paying more attention to relevant news stories, reading, for instance, that some homeowners could set the contaminated water in their kitchen sink on fire. Eventually, he turned against the unconventional drilling method for good.
The process influenced Hemphill in another way, too, by reaffirming his faith in technology’s possibilities beyond our social media addictions and diversionary entertainment. “People are on the internet a lot. What do you have to show for so many hours of your life?” he asks. “Especially for millennials, where does it go from here? It’s not a guaranteed thing that we all will just watch Netflix forever. The internet needs to go beyond that now.”
Hemphill imagines closing our Tetris-stacking apps, halting the Instagram scroll and doing something meaningful online. With just a few clicks, he still believes, the Earth can be improved.
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This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st-century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future-forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.
Stories of Redemption in America’s Coal Country
How much money must pour into Central Appalachia before locals will see any substantial change? The Promise Zone has already lined up $189 million, but insiders say that’s a drop in the bucket.
“Before the downturn of the coal industry, in which we lost nearly 8,000 mining jobs in the region, we were already a distressed area,” says Jeff Whitehead, executive director of Eastern Kentucky Concentrated Employment Program, a workforce development agency. “It’s more than just reviving an economy, it’s trying to diversify an economy that was in tough shape before this crisis.”
Not all of the hard-hit counties in Central Appalachia are part of the Promise Zone, so those that are excluded have to pursue their own economic diversification and mine restoration strategies. But as with the rest of the Promise Zone’s work, economic diversification must clear additional hurdles inherent to rural areas. And since these areas may not have the cash (or cachet) of being part of a federally recognized program, these counties must shoulder the burden of their own redevelopment.
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“We’re not in a metropolitan area where we can identify other sectors and other kinds of employment that are growing as the economy rebounds, where you can transfer over to this profession or that profession,” Whitehead adds. “This isn’t a real quick fix. There’s a level of frustration in the region because we see the dire straits that so many people are in.”
Here are three counties just outside of Southeastern Kentucky who aren’t waiting for the federal government’s assistance to create economic diversity.
For years, Knott County, Ky. — adjacent to the Promise Zone — tried to capitalize on its isolated, “backwoods” qualities to appeal to tourists wanting a rustic getaway. Its county seat, Hindman, a coal town with a population of 777, had the folksy feel, but it lacked the necessary infrastructure. As a result, an $11.8 million, state-funded plan launched by Gov. Paul Patton in 1997 aimed at generating “arts and smarts” in Hindman never resulted in the exhibitions, classes and shopping that bureaucrats envisioned — even after the investment doubled to more than $25.2 million by 2003.
“I got a call last week from a woman who asked me, ‘How do I get to you from Interstate 75?’” Corbett Mullins, former mayor of Hindman and director of the Appalachian Arts Center, told the Lexington Herald-Leader two years ago. “I paused and I said, ‘Are you sure you want to come here? To the Appalachian Artisan Center? In Hindman? Because we’re a couple of hours away from the interstate.’ And she said, ‘Oh, no, I’m sorry, I meant the Kentucky Artisan Center in Berea.’ ‘That’s what I thought,’ I told her.”
Now, though, a public-private partnership is thinking regionally. Beyond a center for the arts downtown, it’s defining how to create a culture of artists that will attract visitors, part of which involves creating demand. Recreation is an early part of it, with hundreds of miles of trails in the reclaimed hillsides through the Mine Made Paradise Park, a draw that will boost sales at local shops and could even bring a hotel to town.
With hope renewed in Hindman, the initial $5 million that built the Kentucky School of Craft may prove worth the expense. The facility nearly closed down in 2012 when two instructors resigned, unwilling to spend another year in Knott County. A sculptor, Michael Flynn, has taken over and promises to expand offerings in digital media. “We are in the heart of Appalachia. When you look out our windows or walk around our campus, you are surrounded by nature, the foothills, the flow of Troublesome Creek, and wildlife right at our doorstep. The Kentucky School of Craft is iconic Eastern Kentucky, and I believe our success lies in a grassroots movement that starts with those native to the region that treasure the uniqueness of Appalachia,” Flynn says. It’s why as it “expand[s] to become a nationally recognized art organization,” Flynn won’t just be promoting their arts, he’ll be hooking artists on the unique mountain culture as well.
Upshur County, W. Va., also realized that businesses couldn’t thrive without demand, so community leaders focused on finding active buyers. Within the county, taking the word “grassroots” literally, they generated a self-sustaining local food system centered around a farmer’s market in Buckhannon. State officials point to statistics showing the boom in West Virginia agriculture: Last year, there were nearly 180 farmers markets, up from 16 in 2002. Sales at the stands accounted for nearly $4 million in 2012; that number more than doubled last year to $9 million, according to the farmers market association’s figures.
Additionally, businesses in the same industry also collaborated on marketing to generate more buyers, as the Hardwood Alliance Zone did for value-added timber products. Today, forestry and logging only accounts for 49 jobs in the county (at an average weekly wage of $568), while wood product manufacturing accounts for 483 jobs (at a higher average salary of $745).
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The city of Bristol in Washington County, Va., is located on prime real estate between two interstate exchanges. While counties deeper into rugged Appalachia concentrate on drawing tourists, this area is drafting a business plan to sell retail to those passing through, the centerpieces of which are the Believe in Bristol program to revive Main Street and construction of The Falls, a huge retail destination that could generate up to 2,000 jobs. Construction began in January on Cabela’s Outfitters, the 80,000-square-foot anchor tenant. Up next? Lowe’s Home Improvement, Smoky Mountain Brewery, Calhoun’s, Zaxby’s and Sheetz. “It’s really exciting to see walls going up and know that this fall we’ll see…more job opportunities and revenues for our city,” Mayor Catherine Brillhart tells the Bristol Herald Courier. Downtown, more retail shops, a planned hotel and the recently opened Birthplace of Country Music Museum have generated so much business that the city’s now looking at places to build a parking garage to control the overflow.
Retail development and investment in infrastructure brings hope, but it can’t fully erase the struggles that Appalachia’s citizens have endured. “It’s about solutions. [But] That doesn’t preclude me from knowing I have a sister and brother who are suffering, that I have the shortest life expectancy in the United States because I happen to be a woman in Perry County,” says Gerry Roll, executive director of the Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky, a local community foundation in Perry County, Ky. “I am going to fight my way out of it so that it’s not a reality when my grandchildren are my age.”
READ MORE:
Part 1: Poverty Is a Way of Life in Appalachia. But This State Proves That It Doesn’t Have to Be
Part 2: Inside The Big Plan to Get One Appalachian Community Back on Track
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This Coal Capital is Going Solar
West Virginia is one of top coal producers in the United States, but it’s a distinction that just cannot continue following last February’s devastating coal slurry leak — and especially if the country wants to solve its carbon crisis.
It’s clear that renewable energy is the way forward. In an incredible sign of promise, 100 residents in the small West Virginia town of Shepherdstown in Jefferson County decided to band together to spread some sunshine in a first-of-its-kind community-funded project.
As Think Progress reports, a local church was able to install 60 solar panels on its roof for a single dollar instead of the $55,000 it would have cost.
MORE: These 10 States Are Leading the Way in Solar Power. What’s Their Secret?
How did they do it? Well, it literally pays to be green. According to Think Progress, nearly 100 families and businesses installed demand response controllers (which act like a virtual power plant) from Mosaic Power on their water heaters. The Maryland-based company then sells the electricity created by the heaters back to the power grid. Mosaic also pays participants $100 a year for installing the controllers. Instead of keeping the $100, the Shepherdstown participants generously put that money toward solar panels for the church. The panels will reportedly generate half of the church’s annual energy needs.
This innovative idea was pioneered by nonprofit group Solar Holler, who aims to help “non-profits and municipalities can go solar with no cost — upfront or in the future.”
It appears that the Shepherdstown Presbyterian Church members had been interested in solar panels for several years, but didn’t know how to fund it until Solar Holler came along. “There’s certainly a common understanding that we’ve got to be good stewards of the environment — it’s a Christian value, but it’s really a human value,” Than Hitt, a member of the church who worked on the solar project, tells Think Progress. “It’s something that resonates with people, and it’s something that we know we need to do, especially in West Virginia.”
Encouragingly, the church project is only the first of many more crowd-funded solar installations at nonprofits in West Virginia. Solar Holler founder Dan Conant tells Think Progress that there are about seven more projects lined up with the goal of hitting each of the state’s 55 counties within five years.
If America’s coal heartland can go solar, so can the rest of the country.
DON’T MISS: Just As This West Virginia Town Ran Out of Clean Water, Something Miraculous Happened
Can Rain Solve West Virginia’s Tap Water Problem?
West Virginia’s toxic chemical spill last month left hundreds of thousands without clean water for weeks. Although state officials declared that the tap water is once again usable, residents are understandably wary of contaminants. There’s still the bottled water option but that comes with an economic and environmental price. In, Kanawha Valley, however, some residents have come up with a cost-and-environmentally friendly solution: rainwater.
“It’s sort of primitive,” Charleston resident Lori Magana told the Charleston Daily Mail. “The rain barrel is hooked up to my downspout and it has a faucet. After many trials, I figured out the best way to take a seven-gallon jug from Walmart and carry it inside.”
MORE: Just As This West Virginia Town Ran Out of Clean Water, Something Miraculous Happened
Magana’s part of the Facebook group Charleston Rain Catchers, that now has more than 200 members and counting. The group shares tips the best ways to harvest rain water, and advice like what’s the best and most affordable rain receptacles (pickle or soy sauce barrels). The wall is also updated with information on often free rainwater harvesting workshops. These West Virginians are showing that even during environmental disasters, a sustainable solution can be as easy as looking to the sky.