It's highly mechanized and employs few people. The counties with the most mining remain the poorest counties in Appalachia. Economic studies in West Virginia and Kentucky have shown that mountaintop removal mining costs states more revenue than it produces.
Industry claims that mountaintop removal creates flat spaces for development, but only 3 percent of former mine sites are developed. Surface mining destroys the potential for development based on tourism and sustainable forest products. Mountaintop removal has annihilated more than mountaintops and 2, miles of streams — and the Center is working to stop mountaintop removal before it annihilates any more.
Through outreach, education, and activism, we're spreading the word: Don't let anyone convince you that coal is clean. There's no such thing as a clean coal mine. Yale Environment In areas of West Virginia where mountaintop removal mining takes place, as much as 10 percent of the landscape has been leveled. How did it come to be so widely practiced? Michael Hendryx: Mountaintop removal is a form of surface coal mining. As the name suggests, it literally removes up to feet off the tops of mountains to try to reach coal seams that are not accessible by other mining techniques because the terrain is too steep or the veins are too thin.
One way to do that is to use coal that is lower in sulphur, and the coal in these central Appalachian mountains is naturally lower in sulphur than what is found in the Western coal fields, for example. So it suddenly became more attractive economically to mine this coal, even though it ended up being very destructive of the local environment and to the health of the people who live in these communities. Why do you think that nobody had really looked into this?
When I first started to talk to some of my colleagues about exploring this, many of them expressed skepticism that I would find any relationship. But I thought that they were clearly wrong. What was your first indication that there was indeed a problem? Hendryx: Our first study found that people who lived near MTR sites had higher levels of mortality and illness.
Not only are people who live in mining regions less healthy, but we found that as the levels of mining go up, the health impacts become increasingly more pronounced. Hendryx: When you look at excess mortality — adjusting for age and smoking and all these other variables — the number of excess deaths every year comes to about 1, people who live in these mining communities compared to other parts of the Appalachian region where mountaintop removal does not take place.
The diseases that are most prevalent are cardiovascular disease, lung cancer, COPD chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases, such as bronchitis and emphysema. We were not studying the occupational illnesses of miners, but the public health impacts on the entire community. After adjusting for other factors, including poverty and occupational illness, they found statistically significant elevations in deaths for chronic lung, heart and kidney disease as well as lung and digestive-system cancers.
Overall cancer mortality was also elevated. Hendryx stresses that the information is preliminary. Mountaintop removal has done what no environmental group could ever do: it has succeeded in turning many local people, including former miners, against West Virginia's oldest industry. Take year-old Jim Foster, a former underground miner and mine-site welder and a lifelong resident of Boone County, West Virginia. As a boy before World War II, he used to hike and camp in Mo's Hollow, a small mountain valley now filled with rubble and waste from a mountaintop removal site.
Another wilderness area he frequented, a stream valley called Roach Branch, was designated in as a fill site. Foster joined a group of local residents and the Huntington, West Virginia-based Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition in a federal lawsuit to block the Roach Branch Valley fill site on the grounds that the environmental impacts hadn't been adequately assessed.
They won the first round when Judge Robert Chambers issued a temporary restraining order against the valley fills. The coal company is appealing the decision. Foster says he puts up with a daily barrage of irritations from nearby mountaintop removal projects: blasting, wheeled coal trucks on the road and ubiquitous dust.
As we talked in his living room, trucks carrying coal explosives rumbled by. Before they started on it, it was beautiful twin peaks there, it was absolutely beautiful. And to look out and see the destruction going on day to day like it has, and see that mountain disappear, each day more of it being gone—to me that really, really hurts.
Around mining sites, tensions run high. In Twilight, a Boone County hamlet situated among three mountaintop sites, Mike Workman and his next-door neighbor, another retired miner named Richard Lee White, say they have battled constantly with one nearby operation.
Last year, trucks exiting the site tracked onto the road a mud slick that persisted for weeks and precipitated several accidents, including one in which Workman's year-old daughter, Sabrina Ellsworth, skidded and totaled her car; she was shaken up but not injured.
State law requires that mining operations have working truck washes to remove mud; this one did not. Workman also remembers when a coal slurry impoundment failed in , sending water and sludge pouring through a hollow onto Route The water was plumb up in her house past her windows, and I had to take a four-wheel-drive truck to get her and her kids.
And my house down here, [the flood] destroyed it. Ansted residents have had mixed success fighting a mining operation conducted by the Powellton Coal Company outside town. In , they lost an appeal before West Virginia's Surface Mine Board, which rejected their argument that the blasting could flood homes by releasing water sealed in old mine shafts. But the year before, the town beat back an attempt to run big logging and coal trucks past a school and through town. Communities have to fight for their lives to get this stopped.
But many residents support the industry. Her husband is a retired miner and her son does mine-site reclamation work. They don't appreciate what the coal industry does for this area. My husband's family has been here since before the Civil War, and always in the coal industry.
The dispute highlights the town's—and state's—predicament. West Virginia is the nation's third-poorest state, above only Mississippi and Arkansas in per capita income, and the poverty is concentrated in the coal fields: in Ansted's Fayette County, 20 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, compared with 16 percent in the state and 12 percent nationwide.
For decades, mining has been the only industry in dozens of small West Virginia towns. But mountaintop coal removal, because of the toll it takes on the natural surroundings, is threatening the quality of life in communities that the coal industry helped build.
And mountaintop removal, which employs half as many people to produce the same amount of coal as an underground mine, doesn't bring the same benefits that West Virginians once reaped from traditional coal mining. The industry dismisses opponents' concerns as exaggerated. West Virginia's political establishment has been unwavering in its support for the coal industry.
The close relationship is on display every year at the annual West Virginia Coal Symposium, where politicians and industry insiders mingle. This past year, Gov. Joe Manchin and Senator Jay Rockefeller addressed the gathering, advocating ways to turn climate-change legislation to the industry's advantage and reduce its regulatory burdens. Without such backing, mountaintop removal would not be possible, because federal environmental laws would prohibit it, says Jack Spadaro, a former federal mining regulator and a critic of the industry.
Since , U. Army Corps of Engineers, which is supposed to evaluate the environmental effects and require mitigation by creating new wetlands elsewhere. If the potential impact is serious enough, the National Environmental Policy Act kicks in and a detailed study must be done.
But the coal-mining industry has often obtained the necessary dumping permits without due consideration of possible environmental impacts. The Corps has admitted as much in response to lawsuits. In one case, the Corps said it probably shouldn't even be overseeing such permits because the dumped waste contained polluting chemicals regulated by the EPA.
In another case, brought by West Virginia environmental groups against four Massey Energy mining projects, the Corps conceded that it routinely grants dumping permits with virtually no independent study of the possible ecological fallout, relying instead on the assessments that coal companies submit.
In a decision in that case, Judge Chambers found that "the Corps has failed to take a hard look at the destruction of headwater streams and failed to evaluate their destruction as an adverse impact on aquatic resources in conformity with its own regulations and policies.
Massey has appealed the case to the Virginia-based United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which has overturned several lower court rulings that went against mining interests. In , the Bush administration rewrote the rule defining mountaintop mining waste in an attempt to work around the legal ban on valley fills.
Industry critics say they're also hampered by West Virginia regulations that protect private interests. The vast majority of West Virginia acreage is owned by private landholding companies that lease it and the mineral rights to coal companies. Environmental Protection Agency impact statement on mountaintop removal in Appalachia, it may take hundreds of years for a forest to re-establish on the mine site.
Mountaintop removal takes place primarily in eastern Kentucky, southern West Virginia, southwestern Virginia, and eastern Tennessee. Appalachian Voices commissioned a study in that showed nearly 1. In some counties, such as Wise County, Va. The researchers found that the mines and valley fills could range anywhere from 10 to meters deep.
Across the region, the average slope of the land dropped by more than 10 degrees post-mining. View satellite imagery of mining encroachment and learn about the top 50 communities at risk from mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia with our Communities at Risk mapping tool on iLoveMountains.
Most mountaintop removal coal is burned in power plants in the eastern United States and in some Midwestern states.
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