[NYTr] Blowing the Top Off Mountaintop Mining

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by tsimonds (activ-l) 

Wired - Sep 10, 2007
http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/news/2007/09/mountaintop_mining

Blowing the Top Off Mountaintop Mining

By Brandon Keim

Between 1985 and 2001, miners leveled about 800 square miles of
mountains in Appalachia.

At 4 o'clock every afternoon except Sunday, the blasting starts in the
mountains around Judy Bonds' home in Whitesville, West Virginia.

There as elsewhere in the Appalachian coal country that stretches
through Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky, coal is
produced by what's self-descriptively known as mountaintop-removal
mining.

Mining companies clear forests from mountaintops, dynamite the peaks,
excavate buried coal, and dump the waste into nearby valleys. It's
cheaper and more efficient than old-fashioned mining, but the effects of
mountaintop removal -- or MTR -- are devastating.

In just two decades, hundreds of mountaintops, more than a thousand
miles of stream, and hundreds of square miles of forests have been
obliterated by the practice. Opponents say the pollution is also
dangerous to people who live in the region.

"There is no place on earth like this place, and it's being destroyed,"
says Bonds, the outreach coordinator for Coal River Mountain Watch, an
anti-MTR activist group. "They call West Virginia 'almost heaven,' and
it is, until the coal industry bombs your home."

Activists have fought a losing legal battle against MTR. First they
claimed the practice violated Clean Water Act rules against dumping
waste in waterways. But in 2002, the Bush administration rewrote or
"clarified" the rule, so that MTR debris wouldn't be classified as
waste.

MTR opponents then turned to the stream buffer-zone rule, a Reagan-era
regulation for streamside mines. They say the rule forbids any mining
within 100 feet of a stream, which would effectively end MTR. Mining
companies, on the other hand, say the rule only requires that mining be
done as cleanly as possible.

That's the interpretation favored by a new rule issued August 24 by the
Department of the Interior's Office of Surface Mining. The regulation is
currently scheduled to take effect after a 60-day public-comment period
ending October 23. As written, it will make life even harder for MTR
opponents.

"The law's intent was never to stop (MTR) from happening, but to
mitigate its impact on water quality," says National Mining Association
spokesman Luke Popovich. Under this and other regulations,
environmentally destructive mountaintop-mining operations are
supposedly not allowed.

"If you're intending to place your dirt and rock directly into a stream,
you have to get a permit. You have to show that you won't harm
downstream water-quality standards. You have to show that the plan is
the most environmentally protective," he says.

But activists say regulators ignore the requirements.

"There's a huge disconnect between the Bush administration's own
scientific studies concluding that the environmental damage caused by
mountaintop-removal mining is widespread and irreversible" on the one
hand and the granting of mining permits on the other, says Joan
Mulhern, senior legislative counsel for environmental group
Earthjustice.

To begin a mountaintop-removal operation, crews clear trees from the
site. Then they dynamite to shake the peaks loose, and excavate the
coal with a 2,000-ton, 20-story-high machine called a dragline. They
bulldoze the debris, dumping it into nearby valleys.

The practice is relatively new, dating from the mid-1980s, and it's
already responsible for about half of all Appalachian coal mining. It's
cheaper than old-fashioned techniques, and safer in the short run
because miners don't have to tunnel underground. It also lets mining
companies reach more coal than they could by digging shafts.

The environmental impacts, however, are far greater. According to the
Environmental Protection Agency, MTR destroyed more than 1,200 miles of
Appalachia's streams and 7 percent of its forests between 1985 and 2001.
Approximately 800 square miles of mountains were leveled.

According to the EPA, waste from MTR will bury another 1,000 miles of
streams in the next decade. Mulhern says the effects are also felt
downstream.

"Headwater streams are where life is born, creating the nutrients and
energy that flow downstream," she says. "All that is lost when you fill
the headwaters and replace them with storm drains."

The EPA estimates that at least 2,300 square miles of forest -- an area
the size of Delaware -- will be lost by 2010. In the past, cleared
mountaintops have been vegetatively reclaimed by grass and shrubs rather
than the region's characteristic hardwood forests.

"Appalachia is America's own little miniature rain forest," says Bonds.
"It's the world's most diverse temperate hardwood forest. The
Appalachian forests are the carbon sinks and lungs of the East Coast."

According to a rough estimate by West Virginia University bio-geochemist
William Peterjohn, the deforestation could add as much as 138 million
tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- and that's not even
counting the even-larger CO2 emissions from burning the coal.

But opponents say the damage from MTR is more than environmental: It's
human.

So far, no one's published epidemiological research into the effects of
pollution generated by waste dumping and explosive residues, but
anecdotal evidence like that collected by Erik Reece in his book Death
of a Mountain links MTR waste to cancer and other serious health
problems.

"When the explosives go off, you can smell and see the pollution coming
down, the ammonium nitrate," says Bonds, whose father and grandfather
worked in West Virginia coal mines. "When you see on CNN the drama of a
miner trapped underground, you don't see the slow poisoning of the
people who live here."

The New York Times (subscription required) reported last month that the
rule now under consideration is unlikely to change substantially. But
the Office of Surface Mining (.pdf) says that's not so, and opponents
are taking the comment period seriously. They've requested a 90-day
extension as well as a public hearing. They're also asking people to
call their senators and representatives on September 20 to ask them to
stop the rule.

Other legislation that would strengthen the Clean Water Act's original
prohibition on dumping waste in streams has stalled in Congress.

"There needs to be pressure on Congress to take this up and have a
hearing on it," says Mulhern. "At least we should make a conscious
decision about whether we as a country want to have this unique and
important area of the country blown up as a coal sacrifice zone."

Even better, Bonds says, would be to reduce our reliance on coal.

"We have to change our ways of producing energy and where we get our
energy from," she says. "It's time for us to face the fact that coal is
a filthy and finite resource. Why would we destroy our very earth and
air and water, that we need and our children need, for short-term gain?"