Why I Rant So Much: A Primer on Mountaintop Removal

Just a couple days ago I talked to a friend who reads this blog. She said that she appreciated the post about locavores and why I am not among the geographically restricted dieters, but she confessed that she doesn’t always “get” what I write about, specifically why I so oppose mountaintop removal coal mining.
          I grew up around coal mining. I remember seeing strip mining and am familiar with the effects that surface mining can have on the land and streams. I’ve written about my memories of passing over Simpson Creek, the one whose pollution was made infamous in song, on my school bus. I have read and researched a great deal about the development of surface mining into mountaintop removal and seen the films such as On Coal River that describe the suffering of people who live around mountaintop mining. I guess I forget that other folks aren’t as obsessed with this as I am and may not know some basic stuff about mountaintop mining. So here is a quick primer on some of the practices of mountaintop mining and their effects on land, streams, and people.

Mountaintop Removal is Big

Mountaintop removal is so big that people have a hard time imagining it. The Hobart Mine in West Virginia stretches for about ten miles from one end to the other. To get an idea of the scale of the mines, images below from Google Earth, show the footprint of the mine compared to the cities of New York and San Diego.

The Hobart Mine would dominate Manhattan

The Hobart Mine would swallow up all of downtown San Diego, a portion of Balboa Park, and stretch into National City

The Hobart Mine is just one of the more than 500 mountaintop removal mines across Appalachia. Below are Google Maps satellite images of southern West Virginia and Kentucky. The mines are so large that they can be seen from space. There are towns and cities among the hills in these images, but they are unnoticeable compared to the images of the mines. The Environmental Protection Agency estimated years ago that by now, 2013, the total area to be deforested and destroyed by mountaintop mining would be as large as the state of Delaware.

The grey splotches among the trees are the mountaintop mines. More than 500 of these stretch across Appalachia

When the coal miners blow up a mountain, removing the topmost portion to get to the coal beneath, they take all that was once a mountain and dump it into adjacent valleys in what is appropriately called valley fills. A mountaintop removal mine might have a permit to fill five, six, or seven miles of streams with these valley fills. In the last 35 years valley fills have destroyed 2,400 miles of Appalachian streams. If you were to take all those streams and lay them end-to-end, they would stretch almost the full length of the Mississippi. Of all the practices of mountaintop mining, scientists think that valley fills are the most destructive, because they destroy headwater streams and the surrounding forests, severely affecting the mountain ecosystems.

A valley filled with rock from a mountaintop removal mine in Appalachia image from biologicaldiversity.org

Valley fills may be hundreds of feet deep image from windpub.com 

Before coal is shipped off to power stations it is first “washed” to remove impurities, some of the material that is washed from the coal, a combination of clay, silt, water, and bits of coal is called slurry and is stored in impoundment ponds and reservoirs. Impoundments contain toxic residue, some from the constituents of the rock and coal that has been mined and some from the mixture of chemicals that are used when coal is washed. Slurry and impoundments have been around for about as long as folks have mined coal. There are at least six in Harrison County, West Virginia, where I grew up, with plenty more across this country’s coal mining region.

The impoundments can be dangerous. After heavy rains an impoundment dam at Buffalo Creek, West Virginia failed releasing a 15 to 20 foot black wave of water and slurry into the hollow below. More than 1,400 houses and mobile homes were damaged or destroyed. There were 125 residents killed and more than a thousand were injured. In 2000 an even larger impoundment failure occurred in Martin County, Kentucky, releasing 306,000,000 gallons of slurry, more than 30 times the volume of the oil released by the Exxon Valdez, into the valley below, making it the worst environmental disaster ever to occur in the South.

The increased size and volume of the mining operations increases the size, volume, and risk from the impoundments, increasing their risk. Below is an image of the Brushy Fork impoundment, made infamous in On Coal River.

Image from ilovemountains.org

Just to give you an idea of the size of the impoundment, If France decided to bring a little savoir faire to the Mountain State and build an Eiffel Tower next to the Brushy Fork impoundment, the dam and the slurry behind it would dwarf the Parisian structure.

Mountaintop Removal Relies on a Bad Interpretation of the Law

Mountaintop removal relies on a legal fiction created by a court ruling in Kentuckians for the Commonwealth v. Rivenburgh in 2002. Clearly, filling up valleys with the rock permanently destroys the valley, its ecosystem, and stream at its bottom. Mining companies are allowed to get permits to fill up valleys with rock from their mines under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act. The original purpose of the 404 permits was to allow for the placement of fill or dredge for the construction of bridges and other construction in and around rivers and lakes. The valley where the mining companies in Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia are thus allowed the fiction of considering the filling of a valley with debris as being like that of a construction site, as though a bridge or levee were being built next to their mountaintop mine.

            Another fiction of mountaintop mining is that one of the original rationales for the practice was that is would create flatland for Appalachia and provide areas where there could be civic and industrial development. But places where mining operations have ceased have not seen the development of towns or industrial parks on the former mine sites.

Mountaintop Removal Does Not Help People

Appalachians have not benefited from mountaintop removal. Southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, where mountaintop removal is most prevalent, has some of this nation’s highest rates of poverty.

Image from the Appalachian Regional Commission arc.gov

Mountaintop Removal is Harmful

Besides not benefiting financially from the mines, Appalachians suffer when mining afflicts their towns and homes. As depicted in the documentary, On Coal River, mountaintop mines despoil the wells that Appalachian residents rely on for drinking and bathing. Recent scientific research has found that mountaintop mining severely affects the health of the people who live around the mines, with increased incidences of cancers, birth defects, and other health problems. Science also indicates that creatures that live downstream from mountaintop mines are adversely affected by the runoff from the mines. Bird populations also decrease around these huge mines.

OK, there are plenty more details, but that's the primer. I hope that it makes a little clearer the enormity of mountaintop mining and the effects that it has on the people and land of Appalachia.