ESA Protection Proposed For Two Appalachian Crayfish Threatened By Mountaintop Removal

Two crayfish that have died out throughout much of their range in Appalachia may have some hope. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed to protect the two species under the Endangered Species Act.

            More than half of their habitats of the Big Sandy crayfish and the Guyandotte River crayfish have become too polluted, mostly from mountaintop removal coal mining, for these creatures to live in. The proposed protection by the Fish and Wildlife Service is in response to a petition and a lawsuit brought by the Center for Biological Diversity.

Big Sandy crayfish photo: Guenter Schuster

Though the evidence that mountaintop removal causes ecological damage has been mounting, and the health hazards to people because of mountaintop mining have become more evident, this is the first news that I’ve run across that any legislators or government agency is doing anything to mitigate the harm that this mining practice inflicts on the people or land of Appalachia.

            You can read more about the proposed listing in the press release from the Center for Biological Diversity.

D.C. Court Throws Out Bush Gutting of Mountaintop Mining 100-Foot Buffer Zone Protection

This is some good news. The eleventh hour rewrite that the George W. Bush administration gave to the 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act that stripped the 100-foot buffer zone for streams and rivers has been struck down by the Washington, D.C. district court.

            The Obama administration has been unsuccessful in its efforts to reinstate the buffer zone. So this ruling is some progress. The court, in its ruling in this case that was filed by the Southern Environmental Law Center, said that in doing away with the buffer zone, the Office of Surface Mining did not adequately consult with the Fish and Wildlife Service as to the effects the rule change would have on endangered species. The court ruling is here.

            The buffer zone rule applies to the disposal of what is called ‘overburden,” the soil and rock that lays atop the seams of Appalachian coal. In mountaintop mining this overburden is blasted away to get at the coal underneath. As the rock and soil are removed from the mountain, it is dumped into adjacent valleys. The buffer zone protects the streams in these valley from being covered over with the overburden.

Just 100 feet to protect the stream, that's all.

This ruling give us hope, but mountaintop mining will continue. And in many ways the 100-foot rule had been merely symbolic, due to the history of its lax enforcement. Even with the buffer zone regulation, 2,400 miles of Appalachian streams, the length of the Mississippi River, have been destroyed by mountaintop removal. And since the ruling, some Washington lawmakers are voicing support for H.R. 2824, the Preventing Government Waste and Protecting Coal Mining Jobs in America Act, which would turn the 100-foot buffer zone regulation over to state regulators, essentially gutting the federal law.

            Hat tip to Andy for notifying me of this news.

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.

Scientists Discover That Mountaintop Removal Is Harmful to Appalachia

A new research paper takes a large and encompassing view of mountaintop removal and its effects on the land, ecosystems, and the rest of the world.

The authors of the paper, scientists from the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Geological Survey, Rider University, and West Virginia University, say that some past and current efforts, by focusing on water quality, both from a regulatory and legal framework, have lead to less research on mountaintop removal’s effects on forests and ecosystems. Titled The Overlooked Terrestrial Impacts of Mountaintop Mining, the paper has just been published in the journal BioScience.

Anyone who has spent much time in Appalachian knows that the mountains have always played a part in affecting the weather. Pocahontas County in West Virginia will get a lot more rain than areas east in Virginia, where the mountains aren’t as high. This new paper says that moving the mountains is affecting these weather patterns. “Topographic changes and land-cover changes associated with mountaintop mining have the potential to produce changes in climate at local to regional scales,” the paper says. “Modeling is needed to determine if the now extensive development of mountaintop mining is leading to such changes.” On a much larger scale, mature forests, which sequester carbon dioxide, are destroyed when mountains are flattened for coal. The reclaimed lands do not have the same capacity for sequestration. With more than 500 mountains succumbing to mountaintop removal, this disruption to the natural CO2 sequestration process of the Appalachian forests has implications for global warming.

            The authors also say that mountaintop removal causes damaging biographic fragmentation, affecting populations of raptors and songbirds. Back in 2006 scientists found that mountaintop mining was adversely affecting the cerulean warbler,[i] a wonderful songbird native to the Mid-Atlantic states that is “sharply declining in the heart of its range,” according to National Geographic’s Field Guide to the Birds of North America. A more recent scientific paper noted that mountaintop removal jeopardizes the survivability of Appalachian species as they shift their bioregions due to global warming.[ii] And another recent study found that the changes to habitat structure, water quality, stream chemistry, and the populations of macroinvertebrates in streams below the valleys filled with the overburden from mountaintop mines affected the abundance of salamanders in those streams.[iii]

            More and more the science shows that we are endangering and loosing great treasures, all so we can get cheap coal. Could we at least slow down long enough to ask if it is all worth it?

---

[i] Wood, Petra Bohall, Scott B. Bosworth, and Randy Dettmers. "Cerulean Warbler Abundance And Occurrence Relative To Large-Scale Edge And Habitat Characteristics." Condor 108.1 (2006): 154-165. Environment Complete. Web. 19 Apr. 2013.

[ii] Beggs, Paul. "Horizontal Cliffs: Mountaintop Mining And Climate Change." Biodiversity & Conservation 21.14 (2012): 3731-3734. Environment Complete. Web. 19 Apr. 2013.

[iii] Wood, Petra Bohall and Williams, Jennifer M. “Impact of Valley Fills on Streamside Salamanders in Southern West Virginia” Journal of Herpetology 47.1 March 2013 119-125

New Research Shows Irreversible Ecological Damage From Mountaintop Removal

“In many ways, this has been a disappointing effort.” With those words President Jimmy Carter summed up his feelings when he signed the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA) in 1977. Congress had passed two previous bills with better protections for the environment, but both had been vetoed by Gerald Ford while he occupied the White House. Carter felt that, owing to the influence of the coal companies that the law was designed to regulate, the legislation he signed that day had weaker provisions than the bills that received Ford’s veto. Carter’s greatest objection to the new law was that it allowed mining companies to blow up and remove entire mountains. We now call this mining process mountaintop removal.[i]

            In the 35 years since the passing of SMCRA, we have seen that Carter was correct to have his misgivings. This past week a group of scientists at a conference of the Ecological Society of American provided some of the first ecological scientific findings on mountaintop removal. The research sadly shows that the harm done to the ecosystems of Appalachia is irreversible. The damage that these scientists have found goes beyond the blown up mountains, from altered stream flows and flooding to reductions in bird populations.

            With mines so large that you can see them from space, it makes sense that there would be extensive ecological damage. Some of the scientists at the conference called for a moratorium on mountaintop mining to stem the damage. So far, the Obama administration has shown some inclination to give greater regulatory review of this destructive mining practice, but a moratorium seems quite unlikely.

---

[i] “Carter Signs Strip-Mining Bill,” New York Times, 4 August 1977