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The seven-figure debt consists of penalties assessed by the DEP for violations from September 2019 to December 2024 and is in line with the Justice family business empire’s history of unmet financial obligations in deals with its partners and its own workers.

The DEP assessed the penalties for 89 notices of violation and 47 cessation orders it issued Bluestone for environmental infractions across 38 mine permits covering over 3,400 acres in McDowell and Wyoming counties.

Those infractions reported by the DEP have been wide-ranging, including drainage system failures, not maintaining ditches to prevent erosion, not paying groundwater protection plan fees and not cleaning out sediment control structures. The violations have taken place in the Tug Fork River and Upper Guyandotte River watersheds.

The highest-totaling delinquent fines were assessed for:

• Poca No. 11 Contour Auger No. 2 Mine in Wyoming and McDowell counties — $740,788 for 32 cessation orders and 20 violation notices
• Red Fox Surface Mine in McDowell County — $119,815 for six violation notices and five cessation orders
• Unnamed loading facility in McDowell County — $46,617 for two violation notices and two cessation orders
• Unnamed haul road in McDowell County — $25,218 for five violation notices and one cessation order

The DEP issues cessation orders to stop operations until a violation is abated.

Justice Deputy Press Secretary Katie Wadman and Communications Director Will O’Grady did not respond to requests for comment. Justice coal company attorney Steve Ruby also did not respond to a request for comment.

Feds questioned, then signed off on DEP enforcement 

Bluestone operations have continued amid the company’s DEP penalty debt.

The DEP issued public notices Thursday it had received renewal applications from Roanoke, Virginia-based Bluestone for two underground mining permits in McDowell County, including one for which it owed $23,353 in delinquent penalties as of Tuesday, per DEP records.

That permit is for Mine No. 59, covering three acres in the Tug Fork River watershed and carrying on it a $22,500 delinquent penalty issued in April 2024 for a cessation order after disturbance and blasting outside bonded areas.

The DEP has informed Bluestone in recent letters the agency couldn’t issue any permit or permit revisions to the company as long as any civil penalty remains delinquent.

But when questioned about DEP renewals of permits with lengthy histories of violations, DEP Chief Communications Officer Terry Fletcher has said permit renewals aren’t the same as issuance of a new permit or a significant revision to an existing permit.

The DEP came under federal scrutiny last year for its oversight of the 579-acre Poca No. 11 Contour Auger No. 2 Mine, the mine whose permit has by far the highest agency delinquent penalty total attached to it.

In a December 2024 notice to the DEP, the federal Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement indicated it had reason to believe the DEP failed to comply with its own regulation by not promptly reviewing and acting on patterns of violations at the Bluestone Coal Corp. mine site, noting that 13 cessation orders the DEP issued since February 2024 were still unabated.

But in a February 2025 follow-up letter to the DEP, the OSMRE concluded the DEP’s response to its December notice that threatened to take over enforcement at the Poca No. 11 Contour Auger No. 2 Mine was “reasonable and appropriate, with no apparent deviation from the approved program.� The OSMRE told the DEP it planned no further action and would monitor a DEP show-cause hearing process for 12 outstanding show-cause orders on the mine permit.

The OSMRE cited “relevant facts� of enforcement actions the DEP had taken against Bluestone, including patterns of violations the DEP said it identified and show-cause orders it issued after the OSMRE’s December 2024 threat to assume enforcement authority.

Conservationists have objected to the DEP’s oversight of the mine permit given Bluestone’s long history of wide-ranging environmental violations onsite.

Willie Dodson, coal impacts program manager for regional environmental nonprofit , has said the OSMRE had made the right call under the Biden administration in pressuring the DEP to revoke the permit.

Dodson, in a February email, called the Poca mine a “gash on the mountain� that “needs to be healed.�

“Bluestone’s utter failure to reclaim this land is an insult to the communities who live downstream along Pinnacle Creek and the Guyandotte River,� Dodson said.

The DEP has issued Bluestone Coal Corp. 13 violation notices and 16 cessation orders for the Poca mine since the start of 2024, according to agency records.

The DEP issued the orders for a wide range of violations, including expired permits, runoff from a coal stockpile area and failures in surface water and groundwater monitoring, drainage control, diversion ditch and sediment control maintenance.

Justice legal, financial woes piling up 

Justice’s business and personal finances have mounted in recent months.

Last week, a Charleston-based insurance provider, BrickStreet Mutual Insurance Co., told a federal court that Justice’s Southern Coal Corp. hasn’t complied with a 2023 court order to pay $503,985 or a settlement agreement from last year under which the Justice company agreed to make payments to BrickStreet to satisfy its debt.

Five of Justice’s coal companies again failed to provide retirees health care coverage in violation of a collective bargaining agreement, retirees and the United Mine Workers of America union said in an April 2 court filing.

The reported failures were the latest in a yearslong string of intermittent lapses in contractually promised health care and prescription drug coverage that retirees have said resulted in the loss of critical medications.

In another April 2 court filing, a Kentucky tobacco warehouse company and an affiliated firm said two Justice coal company executives, including Justice’s son, James C. “Jay� Justice, stopped paying a daily contempt fine amid their noncompliance with a court order to share evidence in the case.

The filing alleged the defendants’ tax returns and other documents prepared from a general ledger show Jay Justice owes James C. Justice Companies nearly $32 million for shareholder loans made to him.

The filing cites two April 2022 ledger entries the plaintiffs say show that despite James C. Justice Companies entered a what appeared to be a Virginia land transfer as a total loss in a 2016 asset disposal report, its affiliate sold the property six years later for a $10.1 million profit.

New London Tobacco Market and Fivemile Energy brought the case in 2012 after Justice’s Kentucky Fuel Corp. failed to mine coal under an agreement following the plaintiffs’ assignment of rights to mine coal in eastern Kentucky to the defendants in exchange for a cut of the mined coal.

Martinsville, Virginia-based Carter Bankshares Inc., holding company of Carter Bank, reported last month Justice entities had paid $56.8 million of a $301.9 million debt as of March 31, 2025.

Carter Bank scheduled an auction of Greenbrier Sporting Club property that featured prominently in the Justice business empire last year to help satisfy a nine-figure Justice family debt to the bank. The auction was later canceled, and the Justice family and the bank announced the settlement of the dispute, in which the bank has sought $300 million-plus in debt admitted by the Justices.