Mountaintop Removal: The Damage Goes Beyond Appalachia

When I was a child growing up in West Virginia, on our way to school the school bus would drive us over a bridge that spanned a small stream. Out here, where I live in southern California, the waterway would be called a river, but in Appalachia small streams are called creeks. This one was called Simpson Creek. I remember that as we approached the bridge, and for a time after we crossed the span, an acrid smell would fill the school bus. The smell came from sulfur, as well as other toxins in the creek. Those pollutants came from the runoff of old surface mines that were farther upstream in the watershed of Simpson Creek. Besides the odor, the rocks in the stream were stained orange. And there weren’t any fish in the stream.

Simpson Creek earned some infamy back in the seventies. Mayf Nutter, a local native who had become a television star of soap operas Knott’s Landing and Days of Our Lives*, had a country music hit with “Simpson Creek Won’t Never Run Clean Again.” In the song Nutter sang of the freakish color of the creek and its lifeless waters. Simpson Creek was only one of the waterways close to where I grew up with sulfur stained rocks and streambeds devoid of life. I remember that some streams had a smell so strong that it seemed that I could taste the fouled river, although I might be 30 or 40 yards away from its shores.

A creek with acid mine runoff from strip mining (Photo: Ohio Chapter of the Sierra Club ohiosierraclub.org)

Besides the fouling of Simpson Creek, in his song Nutter sang of the West Fork River, a waterway that claims Simpson Creek as a tributary, and how it’s waters were fouled by the contribution of Simpson Creek. You don’t need a degree in watershed management to understand the aquatic karma of tossing something in a creek: whatever goes into a creek flows downstream.

Mayf Nutter, musician, actor, and a man who understands acid mine runoff (Photo: mayfnutter.com)

So in a recent study we have a finding that a television star and country singer understood over thirty years ago: Acid mine runoff flows downstream.

And as the surface mining operations have expanded—when I was a child riding the school bus across Simpson Creek, those mines encompassed dozens or hundreds of acres; mountaintop removal mining now encompasses thousands of acres—that selfsame aquatic karma only grows. You don’t need to be a watershed manager, or even a 1970s country singer, to understand that.

Mountaintop removal does just that, removes mountains. And as the mountains are removed, so are the forests, streams, and ecosystems of those mountains. The lives of the people who live around those mountains are disturbed as well. Their wells are often contaminated from the mining, and they are subjected to noise and coal dust from the mines. They may be facing health risks as well.

But as we know that what you throw in a creek flows downstream, mountaintop removal goes beyond the mountains that it destroys. The pollutants flow downstream. Lives are disrupted or destroyed. And all that coal being burned adds more tons and tons of CO2 to the atmosphere, warming the planet. The problems of this type of extraction go beyond the hills of Appalachia.

* Nutter’s television and film credits exceed these two shows. You can check his website here: http://www.mayfnutter.com/