Mountaintop Mining Feeds a Growing Coal Need, but at a Price
Posted on: Thursday, 24 April 2008, 06:00 CDT
This is a place where "moving mountains" is no longer a figure of speech. Here, among the steep green Appalachians, mining companies are moving mountains off their pedestals to get needed coal.
It happened here, on a ridgeline called Sugar Tree Mountain, where local residents once hunted for squirrels and puckery sour grapes. Then, the top was scraped off to expose the black seams within, leaving a rock-strewn plateau.
"It used to be West Virginia," said Vivian Stockman, an environmental activist. "And now it's Mars."
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In West Virginia, where mining opponents can face back-roads intimidation, some neighbors say those who rely on coal for electricity might not know the true cost of their power.
"We have to go through a lot for them to get their electric," said Lucille Miller, who picked grapes on the vanished mountain.
The Washington region's six coal-fired power plants bought 40 percent more coal in 2006 than in 2004, according to a Washington Post analysis. About 32 percent of the coal purchased came from surface-mining operations, which involves mountaintop mining.
The region where southern West Virginia meets Southwest Virginia and eastern Kentucky is home to the vast majority of mountaintop mines in the U.S.
Coal companies say these methods provide valuable jobs. The companies can extract coal efficiently from places where tunneling would not work.
"There's one big reason you mountaintop mine. That's where the good Lord put the coal," said Bill Raney, president of the West Virginia Coal Association. He said that about 70 percent of the coal from surface mines in this part of Appalachia originates at mountaintop mines.
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Starting in earnest in the 1980s, mining companies began extracting the region's coal by removing the mountains on top of it. At these sites, the top 100 feet or more of a ridgeline is shaved of its trees, blasted with explosives and then scraped away by shoveling machines the size of small office buildings.
At some sites, the companies try to rebuild the silhouette of the old mountain. At others, they leave it roughly flat. At both kinds, companies often perform "valley fills," in which tons of excess rock and dirt are dumped into nearby stream valleys.
In all, the federal government said, these mines have affected, or could affect by 2012, about 816,000 acres. That is an area 20 times the size of Washington, scattered in patches across Appalachia.
"It just doesn't seem real because of the way it used to be," said Lucille Miller, looking out at the gravelly mesa that used to be Sugar Tree Mountain. In the 1960s, Miller said, she would walk on the hill and describe the trees and flowers to her father, who was blind from an accident in an underground mine.
"This will never, ever be like that again," she said. Nearby, the small creek where her siblings had played has been buried under a pile of rubble.
Elsewhere, neighbors complain about flash floods bursting out of denuded mine sites and about explosions that can disrupt underground wells.
Biologists say the effects can fall even harder on the environment, suffocating the life in Appalachian streams.
"It destroys the streams. I mean, it eradicates them. It's dead. It's gone," said Margaret Palmer, head of the University of Maryland's Chesapeake Biological Laboratory.
Source: Richmond Times - Dispatch
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