The record of the West
Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has not been a good one. In her
exposé of Appalachian mountaintop removal for U.S. News and World Report Penny
Loeb found that enforcement of environmental regulation was lax to nonexistent
in West Virginia.[i] And Ken
Ward, who has covered mountaintop removal, as well as all things related to
coal and coal mining for the Charleston Gazette, had once uncovered in an
investigative report that the DEP did not know the number of acres under mountaintop
removal operations. The West Virginia DEP did not even keep track of the number
of mountaintop mining permits that it had granted.[ii]
Well,
finally after all this time, a group of environmental and religious groups hope
that they can get officials from the federal surface mining office to ameliorate things in the Mountain State. They want the feds to hear the
concerns of citizens who claim that they have been rebuffed by West Virginia’s
environmental department. And now in response to a petition by 19 community and
environmental groups, including the League of Women Voters and the Catholic
Committee of Appalachia, the federal Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and
Enforcement said it would investigate five aspects of West Virginia’s DEP
mining regulation.
Among
the complaints are wells drying up or being contaminated and damage to homes
and other structures. Rob Goodwin, technical analyst for the Coal River
Mountain Watch, a small grassroots organization that works to empower local
residents in the face of mountaintop removal, says, “Ninety-nine percent [of
the complaints], if not all, are being dismissed as frivolous or unsubstantiated.”
The
coal industry responds that it is over-regulated.
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| The coal industry says that this type of mining is over-regulated. |
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