The damage to people,
communities, and the environment have always long outlasted the life cycle of a
surface mine. What I recall from growing up in West Virginia were dozens of
scarred landscapes from mines that had been abandoned ten or even twenty years
earlier. Waterways suffer long after a mine closes. As I wrote in a previous
blog, as a schoolchild I remember passing over a very polluted Simpson Creek.
The acid mine drainage that stained the rocks and sand in the creek a rusty
orange and killed all the fish was from mines that had been closed years
before.
Now,
in a move that is intended to address this mining legacy, three environmental groups are suing the Pocahontas Land Corporation and Hernshaw Partners LLC over
alleged violations of the Clean Water Act in a U.S. District Court in
Huntington, West Virginia. The environmental groups—The Ohio Valley
Environmental Coalition, the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, and the
Sierra Club— say in their lawsuit that pollution still flows from two former mines
in Mingo County that are owned by the companies, even though the mines were
“reclaimed.” The reclamation of these mines entailed cleaning them up and planting them with vegetation. The
environmental groups say that state and federal regulators are not working to
end the pollution, so the landowners should be held responsible. The lawsuit
demands monitoring and sampling, a restoration program, and a judge to fine the
defendants $37,500 per day for each violation.
When
they wrote the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act in the late
seventies, it was supposed to mitigate the damage to the environment that I
grew up with. That never really happened. The enforcement of SMCRA in the past
has been lax to nonexistent.[i]
And the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has in the past
been exceptionally negligent in fulfilling its protection of West Virginia and
its people. In the late nineties investigative reporter Ken Ward uncovered that
the department did not know the number of acres permitted for mountaintop
removal. The DEP could not even provide to Ward the number of permits that it
has granted for mountaintop mining.[ii]
Given the even worse track record of the second Bush administration, I have no
reason to hope that things have changed much in the last fifteen years.
With
the failure of the regulatory framework for surface coal mining, this move by
environmental groups is an obvious and wise move. Whether it is the coal
companies or the landowners, somebody should be responsible for what they are
doing to Appalachia and Appalachians.
