Pulling the Plug on Mountaintop Removal Health Research

The saying goes that coal keeps the lights on, but in at least this case the lights are going out. Apparently without much fanfare, the Obama administration pulled the plug on a research project being conducted by the USGS that had been looking into the health effects from mountaintop removal.

            In February of last year the USGS Energy Resources Program discontinued the funding for a study of the air quality in Artie, West Virginia, a very small community that has the misfortune to be surrounded by mountaintop removal mines. You can see Artie pinpointed below in the Google map. The expansive blotches across the landscape are the mountaintop mines.

The study is in its second year and had already resulted in some better understanding of how these large mines hurt the air quality around them and subsequently hurt the health of nearby residents. Folks who live close to mountaintop mining have higher rates of respiratory diseases, including lung cancer.

            The team working on this research has been told that they will be investigating health concerns over fracking. As all agencies have to prioritize their activities around limited budgets, this shift might be seen as a wise move, as fracking, being widespread across the country, has the potential to affect a lot more people than those living in Appalachia around mountaintop removal operations.

            But some folks think that politics may have played a part in the scientific switcheroo, among them Michael Hendryx. Hendryx is a former West Virginia University researcher who has more than two dozen peer-reviewed papers published that establish a link between mountaintop removal and poor health.

            Is this politics or prioritizing? The USGS is continuing other research on MTR, so I really can’t say. I just know it’s a shame that funding gets pulled on needed research, no matter what the reason might be. On the other hand, the science that has been done so far shows mountaintop removal to be harmful to salamanders, fish, people, and other creatures that live in the mountains. We know enough already to see that it should go on no longer.

Should Protesters Compensate UBS? And Who Should UBS Compensate For Mountaintop Removal?

This is a little follow-up story on a protest that some folks concerned about mountaintop mining performed in Stamford, Connecticut a while back. During the protest some protesters commandeered a construction crane and unfurled a large banner that voiced the demand that UBS, a Swiss-based financial company that has financed a great deal of mountaintop removal, stop its unsavory business practice.

            Now get this. Prosecutors are continuing the cases of some of the protesters, 14 in all, for another three weeks so that the prosecutors have the time to tally how much the protest may have cost local businesses.

            Yes, I imagine that the disruption from the protest may have inconvenienced a number of folks and their businesses. Shoppers may have been kept out of stores; diners may have avoided restaurants; and offices of other businesses may have had trouble keeping their workers on task.

            But isn’t there a little bit of bizarro world going on here? The prosecutors are tallying up the dollars lost to business so as to figure out how much the protesters might be charged with restitution, to pay the businesses for their lost business. In a larger sense, however, shouldn’t UBS be required to pay restitution? Shouldn’t this huge company that makes millions off of financing mountaintop removal be required to offer restitution to Appalachian residents for spoiled wells? Shouldn’t the bank be required to compensate the miners who have lost their jobs to the heavy machinery and high explosives that have taken their jobs away? Shouldn’t UBS be required to pay the medical bills of the West Virginians and Kentuckians who have developed kidney disease and cancers from living in the presence of a mountaintop mine? How about the lives that have been burdened by the depression that comes from living close to a mountaintop mining operation, shouldn’t UBS be required to pay for these folks’ antidepressants and medical bills? And what about the lives cut short? Shouldn’t UBS compensate the families of the deceased?

            As I said, bizarro world.

Should UBS be responsible for this?

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.

The Coal Industry Initiates the Appalachian Research Initiative for Environmental Science. Should We Be Wary?

The coal industry has instituted the Appalachian Research Initiative for Environmental Science (ARIES), an organization involving multiple universities and whose stated goal is to “address the environmental impacts of the discovery, development, production and use of energy resources in Appalachia.” If the tobacco industry, cell phone manufacturers, the makers of lead paint, and the industries that find global warming to be an inconvenient truth for their bottom line provide us with any past experience to draw on, science and getting to the truth about environmental impacts may not be a top priority with this new endeavor.

            ARIES is headquartered at Virginia Tech, where Michael Karmis directs the Center for Coal and Energy.  When ARIES was launched a year ago Kamis said that, “the coal industry, at least in the USA, is under major attack” by the government, the press, and NGOs. Supporting his assertion, he cited “unreasonable regulations” based on “questionable science,” “false assertions,” and self-serving interests.”  He called EPA water quality standards for surface mining “arbitrary” and not enforced “in an equitable manner.”

            Does this guy sound impartial when it comes to environmental research?

            On the ARIES website, their Research Bulletin No 1 disputes the use of conductivity, the ability of water to carry an electric charge, as an indicator of water quality in some Appalachian streams. High conductivity usually indicates that the water has high concentrations of nitrates, sulfates, magnesium, or other substances considered to impair the ability of a stream to support life or to be suitable for drinking. While testing for conductivity will not specify which of the inorganic solids are in the water, measuring conductivity is easily done and inexpensive. It is thus used a lot for water quality monitoring. Their second research bulletin is one designed to cast doubt on the recent scientific studies that found higher incidences of mortality for those who live in proximity to mountaintop mining.

            To keep selling cigarettes, the tobacco companies knew that they didn’t have to show that cigarettes were good for you. All they need do is to cast doubt on what independent research found, that cigarettes can give you high blood pressure, heart disease, and cancer. The research bulletins of ARIES don’t show the mountaintop mines improving the environment or the lives of Appalachians. They do, however, work to cast doubt on the prevailing science. That shadow of a doubt may not last forever, but it can give talking points to coal company executives and politicians friendly to King Coal. Attempts to rein in mountaintop mining can be staved off for years and years. And a lot of mountains can be flattened in that amount of time.

Weaker Standards For Selenium on the Horizon For West Virginia: House Passes Law Allowing For Weaker Standards Today

Well, it looks like West Virginia will be changing the standards for selenium in its rivers and streams. The West Virginia House of Representatives approved the legislation that would allow for weaker standards today. The bill has the votes in the State Senate, and Governor Earl Tomblin has said that he will sign the legislation.

            Even considering the state of politics in the Mountain State, it’s at least somewhat surprising that the bill received no opposition in the House, passing with a vote of 99 to 0. Isn’t there at least one representative in West Virginia who is not totally beholden to Big Coal? Not one representative to consider the health of his constituents or the life in the streams and rivers of his state?

            Of course the anti-environmental rhetoric that has been fueled by big business and the GOP crops up in this debacle and makes one’s head spin. The West Virginia House Judiciary Chairman, Tim Miley, said the bill should be passed “so that the coal industry is not crippled.” It's hard for me to think of an industry that has been able to eviscerate the United Mine Workers union and rip off the tops of hundreds of West Virginia’s mountains with impunity as being crippled.

            Miley referred to “punishing fines” on the coal industry for violations of existing selenium standards. Well, a fine is intended to be punishing. That the coal companies have been allowed to pay such small fines for serious violations of safety and pollution for too long is the real crime.

Big Coal Wants Weaker Selenium Standards For West Virginia's Waters

A coal industry sponsored bill in West Virginia, considered by that state’s House of Representatives, would allow West Virginia to disregard federal recommendations and set its own standards for the amount of selenium that can be released from coal mines.

            Selenium occurs naturally in the environment. A little bit of it is very good. Your body uses trace amounts of the element to make antioxidants, which can fight off cancer. The thyroid gland also uses selenium. There are foods rich in selenium. Bacon has lots of it, so does shrimp. Like a lot of things, you can also get too much selenium. Too much selenium can give you bad breath. Much more can cause kidney and liver problems. Too much selenium can kill you, too.

            Selenium affects animals as well. A 2010 study of the streams of West Virginia, mandated by state legislation, concluded that high levels of selenium were associated with deformities of fish larvae. In some streams that had high selenium levels, 20 percent of some fish species had deformities.

            Most likely because of the recent lawsuits it has faced over selenium pollutions, the coal industry wants to disregard the science and allow for much higher selenium concentrations in the waterways of West Virginia. Looking at the scars of the land in West Virginia from surface mining, it’s hard to believe that the coal companies need to have the rules that allow for their large-scale mining operations weekend even further. But that looks to be the case here.

No More Excuses: Let the Children of Appalachia School You About Mountaintop Removal

This is from Appalachian Voices, an organization that works to protect the people and lands of Appalachia. Needless to say, they oppose mountaintop removal. Go ahead watch the video.

I’d like to see this go viral and get more hits than Gangnam Style. All the figures and statistics that that the children tell us, all in less than two minutes, are accurate. They are also frightening. No child should live with these threats to life and health.