West Virginia Leads the Country in Population Loss

The population of West Virginia continues to decline. Thirty years ago there were about Three million people living in the Mountain State. Now less than two million folks call West Virginia home. As the Charleston Gazette explains, with more than 3000 residents leaving the state last year, West Virginia is losing folks faster than any other state.

            As one among the many who have left the hollows and the mountains, this is bittersweet for me. I dearly love West Virginia. I grew up eating pepperoni rolls, and I’ve drunk more than my share of sassafras tea. My mom would make cobbler from the blackberries that I picked in our fields. And I remember how black my hands would stain when we’d gather walnuts in the fall.

            More than anything, it was wanderlust that lead me away. And I never really had a reason to go back for longer than a visit. So I now live in southern California instead of West Virginia. Although I am one of the many former West Virginians, my story is not typical of how and why it is that so many thousands of folks have left. When it comes right down to it, there are fewer and fewer jobs. And the jobs that are there don’t pay as well as they may have in the past. Poverty plagues the state, one of the poorest in the union. With a 18.5 percent of West Virginians living in poverty, the Center For American Progress ranks the Mountain State 41st in its state poverty raking.

Below is a map indicating the counties that have seen population loss and the ones that have seen increases in their numbers. The eastern panhandle has seen an increase in numbers, largely because now the eastern panhandle now serves as a large bedroom community for the D.C. area. Monongalia County has seen the largest increase, almost seven percent. As well, it may be that this area of the state is becoming a bedroom community for Pittsburgh.

 GIS mapping by Paul Hormick. Source files: West Virginia Broadband Mapping http://www.wvgs.wvnet.edu/bb/data.html. Population information from West Virginia Public Broadcasting http://wvpublic.org/post/which-west-virginia-counties-have-seen-most-population-loss-recent-years

But of the 55 counties, only 15 have seen increases in their numbers. Forty counties have fewer folks than just a few years ago. Wyoming, Clay, Pendleton, and Mingo have seen population losses of over four percent each. If you take another look at the map, you’ll see that down in the southwestern section of the map are all counties that have lost folks. The one at the bottom, that’s McDowell County, which has lost almost seven percent of its population. Now take a look at the same map below that now shows where the great surface mines and mountaintop removal mines are.

 

GIS mapping by Paul Hormick. Source files: West Virginia Broadband Mappinghttp://www.wvgs.wvnet.edu/bb/data.html and I Love Mountains http://ilovemountains.org/maps: Population information from West Virginia Public Broadcasting http://wvpublic.org/post/which-west-virginia-counties-have-seen-most-population-loss-recent-years

For all of those who equate coal with jobs, this second map reveals the falsehood of that claim. At one time, before the giant machines came in to make the giant mines in the mountains, dozens of men might be employed at a mine. And those jobs were union jobs paying good wages. As with the mountains, those jobs and good wages are gone.

 

A closer view of the footprint that the mines make across West Virginia

This has nothing to do with a fantasy world in which president Obama has a “war on coal” and much more to do with the loss of labor rights, cheaper natural gas from fracking, a criminally negligent West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (and the same can be said of the federal EPA), and politicians who are beholden to and serve King Coal instead of the West Virginia citizens who cast their votes and send them into high office.

More Science Reveals the Harmful Legacy of Surface Mining for Coal

It’s looking like the science is telling us what we have pretty much figured all along, that surface mine reclamation is only a half measure at best. In a recently published scientific paper, “Exploring the legacy effects of surface coal mining on stream chemistry,” scientists studied 30 surface mines in a southern Ohio watershed. The study found that, though reclamation efforts to reduce acid mine runoff seem to be successful, the conductivity of stream water continued to remain high, with some concentrations high enough to impair the biota of many streams. Levels of aluminum in the streams remained high as well.

            The study examined stream waters in the Raccoon Creek watershed, which flows directly into the Ohio River. The study found that, when it came to conductivity, reclamation efforts had little effect. The greatest predictor of high conductivity in a subwatershed was the percentage of the area of that watershed that had been surface mined. The greater the percentage of land that had been mined, the higher the conductivity.

The Raccoon Creek watershed shown in blue, the watershed examined in this study map from  epa.state.oh.us

Conductivity is the measure of water’s ability to pass a current of electricity. High conductivity of water is usually an indication of the presence of inorganic dissolved solids, such as chlorides, nitrates, sulfates, and phosphates. High conductivity can also indicate the presence of sodium, magnesium, calcium, iron, and aluminum. In streams conductivity is measured in microsiemens per cubic centimeter (uS/cm2). Streams that have a good mix of native fish have conductivity ranging from 150 and 500 uS/cm2. Ecological impairment and decreased biological diversity are found in streams with conductivity exceeding 500 uS/cm2. Eight of the 30 sites in the study had conductivity levels exceeding the 500 uS/cm2 threshold.

            Aluminum is a common trace element in coal. It can be disruptive to streams and lakes and, as it has been associated with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, is not desired at high levels for drinking water. The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency limits the amount of aluminum in drinking water to 0.20 milligrams per liter. This limit was exceeded at 20 of the 30 sites. Moreover, aluminum toxicity to fish has been observed as low as 0.10 milligrams per liter.

            Reclamation, to me, has always seemed like a Humpty Dumpty scenario. Take apart a hillside or a mountain, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could never replace the land, streams, and ecosystems as they once were. Common sense tells us this, now the science is confirming it.