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Mountaintop removal: Series home page

Josh Meltzer | The Roanoke Times

Moving the mountains

Stories

• Mine it or enshrine it?
• Stopping the miners
• Roanoke proudly plays a bit role in the battle
• Mine strife sounds familiar?
• The Battle of Blair Mountain
• The Battle over Blair Mountain

Interactive graphics

• See how a mountain is cut to retrieve the coal beneath
• See how coal powers cities and towns
• See a panoramic view of Kayford Mountain in West Virginia

Photo galleries

• Photos of the mining community
• Photos of the mining business
• How the community responds

Message board

• Talk about mountaintop removal and this series

PIGEONROOST HOLLOW , W.Va. — James Weekley lives just outside what’s left of Blair.

The Logan County community used to have a train station, a school and a store. They’re long gone.

“They was 400 homes here,” Weekley said. “They might be 35 now.”

In time, if Arch Coal has its way, much of the hollow where Weekley has lived for 66 years will be filled with spoil — the rocks and soil removed to get at coal seams — from the Spruce Fork No. 1 mine.

“They say that they’re helping, helping,” Weekley said of the mining companies working around Blair. “They ain’t done it. They’re destroying. They’re destroying everything we got. When they destroy this town, they’re going to go on to another town and they’re going to destroy it.

“If you get cancer and you don’t treat it, sooner or later, you’re going to die. And that’s exactly what this is.”

So Weekley and his wife, Sibby, joined in a lawsuit against an alphabet soup of federal agencies and West Virginia’s Department of Environmental Protection nearly a decade ago. In a 1998 settlement, the West Virginia DEP — along with the federal Office of Surface Mining, the federal Fish And Wildlife Service, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — agreed to develop policies that would minimize adverse environmental effects of mountaintop removal mining and the valley fills it creates.

One issue was whether such operations can be covered by a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers general permitting process, which involves much less scrutiny than individual permits. General permitting is intended for procedures that have minimal effect on the environment.

Federal and state agencies cooperated in an environmental study that covered about 12 million acres and 59,000 miles of streams in Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee and Virginia. The area holds about 26 billion tons of coal.

The study found that 1,200 miles of headwater streams have been directly affected by mountaintop removal mining. Those streams have less diverse and more pollution-tolerant aquatic life than those not affected by the mining process. About 724 miles of streams had been buried.

Water flow downstream from valley fills was described as “more persistent” than those in comparable unmined watersheds. Habitat loss from mountaintop removal mining affects a variety of wildlife, including migratory song birds such as the threatened Cerulean Warbler, the study found.

Despite its descriptions of severe environmental effects, the agencies involved in the study have in the past several years streamlined the permitting process for the mines and the valley fills they produce.

The Corps’ use of general permitting for mountaintop removal operations generated a pair of lawsuits, one in West Virginia and one in Kentucky.

Plaintiffs argued that the Corps ignored the federal Clean Water Act by letting mining companies bury streams. They won the West Virginia case but lost on appeal.

A three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in November that the Corps followed the proper process. But the panel sent back to federal district court the question of whether the Corps’ determination that the mining operation would have minimal environmental consequences was reasonable. A district court decision is expected before the end of the year.

Appeals Judge Robert King, who argued unsuccessfully that all 13 4th Circuit judges should hear the case, called it a “case of exceptional importance” to the nation and to Appalachia.

“The panel’s decision … poses unnecessary risks to one of this nation’s great places,” King wrote.

The Kentucky case, which turns on a similar question of permitting and the Clean Water Act, is still at the federal district court level. A decision is expected any day. If it is appealed, it will go to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, which is not bound by decisions in the 4th Circuit.