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Sunday, July 02, 2006

Mountaintop removal: Moving the mountains -- strip mining by any other name

Mountaintop removal mining is reshaping the geographic profile of Appalachia. An efficient way to mine coal, it stirs environmental and cultural concerns.

By Tim Thornton
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Mountaintop removal: Series home page

Mountaintop Removal

Josh Meltzer | The Roanoke Times

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Coal miner.

Those words may conjure the image of a man with a light on his helmet and a pick in his hand. But more than two-thirds of this country’s coal comes from surface mines — strip mines, or in their latest, largest incarnation, mountaintop removal mines.

Instead of tunneling into a mountain and hauling out its coal, strip miners move chunks of mountain out of the way until the coal is at the surface.

In mountaintop removal mining — just like it sounds — the mountaintop is pulverized to get at the coal. Begun in West Virginia and Kentucky in the late 1960s, the pace of mountaintop removal has picked up in the past decade as demand for coal has grown with the rise in the cost of other fuels. And with the increase in mountaintop removal has come greater outcry about the effects of the practice.

Virginia issued its first mountaintop mining permit in 1974, according to Mike Abbott, a spokesman for Virginia’s Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy. When the mining stopped at the 235-acre site near Grundy two decades later, a baseball field was built on part of the old mine.

Abbott said he doesn’t expect Virginia will ever have the massive mountaintop removal mines common in West Virginia. The geology’s different here. The coal reserves aren’t as big.

Virginia mines may cover thousands of acres, but a single West Virginia mine may take tens of thousands. Even so, mountaintop removal mining and lesser forms of strip mining are altering large swathes of Southwest Virginia’s landscape.

Coal companies and many of their employees regard anyone who objects to the practice as a troublemaker and a threat to their livelihood. But where coal companies see profits and miners see jobs, environmentalists and people who live near strip mines see problems.

Dust and fly rock

Opposition groups blame strip mining and the clear-cutting that precedes it for flooding. They say it damages wildlife habitat. They worry about sludge ponds, filled with the liquid waste created in the coal-cleaning process.

A pond holding more than 2 billion gallons of sludge behind an elementary school in Sundial, W.Va., about 30 miles northwest of Beckley, has become a rallying point for opponents. Strip-mining opponents point out a similar pond’s collapse in 1972 killed 125 people at Buffalo Creek, W.Va.

Another collapse near Inez, Ky., dumped at least 250 million gallons of sludge into the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River in 2000. It was 20 times larger than the Exxon Valdez disaster and affected streams and rivers 100 miles away. Roads and bridges were wiped out. Municipal water systems were contaminated. More than 1 million fish and uncounted other wildlife died.

Then there are the everyday problems.

Dorothy Taulbee has lived in the old Wise County coal camp of Stonega for more than 20 years. She’s lived around mines and mining all 67 years of her life. She said the strip mine up her hollow and the problems that radiate from it have grown in the past five years.

“It’s just so much, it’s hard to explain,” Taulbee said, describing the speeding coal trucks, the dust that coats her house and yard and the indifference she feels from mine operators.

“It’s hell up there now,” she said. “It was such a beautiful place.”

Coal trucks rumble by Taulbee’s house day and night, pausing only when trains of coal cars block the dirt road, leaving lines of coal trucks idling two feet from her porch. Now that another section of the nearby mountain is being clear-cut to accommodate new mining operations closer to Taulbee’s house, logging trucks are sometimes caught in that line, too.

Taulbee said she saw bears wandering along railroad tracks and around her house all winter. The bears should have been hibernating. But even if they could find a place to hunker down among the mines, Taulbee said, blasting wouldn’t let them settle in.

“God, he wants us to take care of the Earth,” she said. “He wants us to take care of one another. He wants us to love one another. This ain’t love.”

Blasting, which federal and Virginia regulations allow within 300 feet of houses, rattles windows, cracks foundations and occasionally hurls rocks — fly rock, it’s called — into yards and houses.

Last fall, fly rock the size of a hard hat flew through the roof of a house in the Wise County community of Glamorgan. No one was hurt that time. But a toddler was killed in Wise County in 2004 when a bulldozer working on a mine site at 2:30 a.m. pushed a half-ton boulder over a hillside. It crushed the boy in his bed.

The company was fined $15,000 for what Virginia’s Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy called “gross negligence.”

“People don’t realize the horrible things they’re doing to us,” Taulbee said.

Now the coal company is trying to work a trade with Taulbee, a new piece of land for her place. She says she’s holding out for a double wide and some land far from any strip mines — maybe somewhere near Bristol.

Bigger mines

Strip mines aren’t new, but new strip mines are bigger. Twenty years ago, 200 acres was a pretty good-sized Virginia strip mine, according to Virginia’s Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy. That’s about 50 times the size of a Wal-Mart Supercenter. In 1996, the mining department issued its first permit for a 2,000-acre strip mine. That’s just over three square miles, room enough for nearly 500 supercenters.

As many folks in the coalfields will tell you, the easy coal is gone. What’s left is much harder to get at. When the mines covered 200 acres, they moved about 10 cubic yards of rock and soil — overburden in the miners’ language — for every ton of coal they dug. Now they may move more than 20 cubic yards of overburden — about 20 full-sized pickup truck loads — to get at one ton of coal.

The most dramatic version of strip mining is mountaintop removal mining, though regulators and environmentalists sometimes disagree about where that term applies. Taking the top off a ridgeline is mountaintop removal in some people’s eyes. Miners and mine regulators prefer to call that cross-ridge mining or finger ridge removal.

Mountaintop removal means clear-cutting the top of a mountain and using explosives to get at the coal beneath. The overburden is sometimes pushed over the mountainside, burying streams and anything else below. That’s a valley fill.

Sometimes the overburden is arranged on the mountaintop’s remnants to create what regulations call “approximate original contour.”

Environmental activists, working since last year under the banner of Mountain Justice Summer, have tried to galvanize opposition to the practice. Mountain Justice Summer is a loosely knit coalition of environmental groups that depends on volunteers, many from outside the coalfields. More than 250 people turned out last summer at a Richmond rally, the group’s largest Virginia event to date.

In West Virginia and Kentucky, where mountaintop removal is well-established, Mountain Justice Summer joined forces with established groups such as Coal River Mountain Watch and Kentuckians for the Commonwealth. In Tennessee, where mountaintop removal is relatively new, a new grass-roots group called United Mountain Defense formed out of Mountain Justice Summer’s efforts.

United Mountain Defense was successful in prompting a review of mine permitting practices in Tennessee. In West Virginia, the opposition coalitions played a part in delaying and denying permits for some coal operations.

In Virginia, there was no organized indigenous group when Mountain Justice Summer arrived last year. But now the Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards are organizing in Wise County with the Sierra Club’s help. Mountain Justice Summer organizers have targeted the area again, renting a house to serve as this year’s base of operations.

So far there are 14 mountaintop removal permits in Virginia. The smallest is 119 acres. The largest covers 1,309 acres. In contrast, one mountaintop removal operation in West Virginia plans to expand to 35,000 acres.

At 11 Virginia mountaintop removal sites, the mining company will attempt to restore some semblance of the mountain’s original contour. On the other three, the rock and soil left after the coal is removed will be dumped into surrounding valleys.

Either method leaves a lot of flat land where a steep-sided mountain used to be.

People have different ideas about that.

Improving God’s creation

Dink Shackleford is executive director of the Virginia Mining Association, a trade association that represents Virginia’s coal mining industry. Shackleford said altering Southwest Virginia’s mountainous landscape can turn a steep slope into land that more easily accommodates development. Shopping centers, colleges, even an airport have been built on strip-mined land. The long-planned Coalfields Expressway — which would stretch 51 miles across Wise, Dickenson and Buchanan counties — may be built across strip-mined land.

Looking at an old strip mine site outside Keokee that left a large terrace where a mountain slope used to be, Shackleford lamented that more of the mountain wasn’t flattened. It could have been a path for a wider, straighter road over the state line into Kentucky.

Strip miners can do more than extract coal, Shackleford said. “We have a chance to improve on God’s creation.”

“That’s a blasphemous statement to me,” countered Chris Dodson, a former Blacksburg resident involved in Mountain Justice Summer. “The mountains are sacred to me.”

Pete Ramey, a retired miner living in Big Stone Gap, thinks it’s just plain wrong to do so much damage to God’s creation.

“It doesn’t belong to us as some people think it does,” Ramey said. “It belongs to Him. It belongs to future generations.”

Put the land back

The aftermath of strip mining can be ugly. A legacy of eroded slopes, silted streams and devastated communities led to three decades of regulation and an increased emphasis on reclamation, the art and science of restoring a landscape — and an environment — after the coal has been removed.

The mining association’s Shackleford said he and his industry are helping Southwest Virginia. Mining companies are providing jobs, he said — though the growth of surface mining and the use of bigger and bigger equipment has reduced that employment. The number of miners employed in Virginia declined from 7,696 in 1997 to 5,248 in 2002.

Once the mining is done, Shackleford said, what is left behind is developable land suitable for other industries. And mining is resulting in improved wildlife habitat, he said, citing deer and turkey populations that have grown since his boyhood.

Shackleford recounts reeling in big, healthy-looking fish from strip mine containment ponds.

He grew up in Keokee, where his father and uncles owned a mining company.

“We bought the coal mine in 1963, and Keokee came with it,” Shackleford said.

Back then, strip mining was simple. “They just come up here and blowed the damn mountain off and got the coal and left,” he said.

Companies don’t mine and run now, Shackleford said. The restored sites they’re leaving behind are better than anything the last generation of strip-miners thought about.

“I see it getting better,” Shackleford insisted. “I know it’s getting better.”

One reason restorations have improved is the federal government said they had to. In 1977, the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act established standards for reclaiming mined land.

“Back in 1977, part of the goal was just to get something to grow” when mining was finished, said Carl Zipper, an associate professor of crop and soil environmental science at Virginia Tech.

Zipper is director of the Powell River Project, a 1,100-acre demonstration of how mined land can be reclaimed. The project is financed primarily by companies tied to the coal industry, including Alpha Natural Resources, Arch Coal, Red River Coal, Penn Virginia Resource Partners and Norfolk Southern.

“Our attitude today is you’re transforming that land from what it was before the coal mining into what it will be after the coal mining,” Zipper said. “If you do it right, you can transform that land into an asset — an economic and environmental asset.”

Reclamation means taking sites that even Shackleford compares to a moonscape and making them suitable for some use.

“If you’re going to tear it up,” said Cooperative Extension agent John Rockett, “how are you going to put it back so it’s worth something?”

Rockett takes school children on tours of the Powell River Project. He shows how blueberries, strawberries, Christmas trees, sugar maples, turf and cattle can thrive on old strip mines.

Rockett said screech owls, barred owls, coyote, bear and turkey have made themselves at home on the project. Swallows don’t know and don’t care whether the cliff they nest in was made by wind and water or explosives and bulldozers, he said.

The landscape is different now. Not better or worse, Rockett said, just different.

“We’re looking at things in transition all the time,” he said.

But mine reclamation isn’t all screech owls and strawberry patches.

Rockett, who also is chairman of Norton’s planning commission, points to the shopping centers outside Norton that were built on former mine sites. The University of Virginia at Wise was built on an old strip mine. In the Kentucky county where the Inez sludge dam burst, the town of Martin is moving to higher ground to get out of the path of floods. Much of the town’s new location will be on a former strip mine. Dominion Power recently announced plans to build a coal-fired power plant on a former strip mine near the Wise County community of Virginia City.

Commercial and industrial development is a small part of post-mining land use. Less than 2 percent of the land that used to be strip mines is completely devoted to commercial or industrial plans. Most old mine acreage, 75 percent to 85 percent, according to Abbott, becomes “unmanaged forest” — what non-bureaucrats might call woods. Even that can be an improvement, Zipper said.

Level land, well managed, can produce more timber than steep slopes with thin soil, he said.

Larry Bush, a former miner and mine inspector who lives outside Appalachia, is not impressed.

“They’ll put millions of dollars into something like that Powell River Project for these legislators to see,” Bush said. But he hasn’t seen that kind of reclamation near his home.

Zipper said the quality of reclamation can vary. “There’s a lot of different coal companies out there,” he said.

Rockett, the extension agent and planning commissioner, is sanguine about it all.

“There’s no real right answer or wrong answer,” he said. “There’s a series of choices and each choice has consequences.”
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