Mountain Madness

Mountaintop removal is a quick, cheap method of mining, suddenly popular in Appalachia (at least with the coal industry). Twenty years ago the industry could cut only about 150 feet down into a mountain. Now that it can cut down 600 to 700 feet, the Appalachians really aren't in the way anymore. So instead of taking the coal from the mountains, it takes the mountains from the coal. If you drive over the coal seams of West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, or even if you live on them, you can catch only glimpses of mountaintop removal because roads and communities are sealed in valleys and because the industry spares no effort to keep the public away from active mining sites.

So on the bright, mild morning of February 7, Susan Lapis of SouthWings--a group of volunteer pilots who show journalists and others the footprints of industry as they exist on the face of the earth instead of on the pages of glossy promos--packed me into her Cessna 182 and punched a GPS line to the coal fields of southern West Virginia. Nowhere in the nation are the effects of "mountaintop mining," to use the coal industry's euphemism, more obvious.

But even "mountaintop removal" is a euphemism. It connotes a neat pruning operation, a single mountain separated from its peak the way you'd clip a rose from a bush. This is more like using a rototiller on the whole garden. What I saw was mountain-range removal. Fifteen minutes out of Charleston's Yeager Airport, the most diverse and productive temperate forest on earth gave way to sprawling brown ulcers strewn with black piles of slate spoil and dingy pits full of half-frozen slurry--a toxic brew of water, coal dust, mercury, lead, arsenic, copper, and chromium. There are 600 such pits in Appalachia. Last October one of them--created largely by mountain-range removal by A.T. Massey--ruptured, spilling 250 million gallons of slurry into the Ohio River system in southeastern Kentucky and burying or poisoning 90 miles of stream; polluting public water supplies; clogging water-treatment plants; shutting down schools, restaurants, laundries, and power generation; and wiping out fish, snakes, turtles, frogs, salamanders, mussels, and other aquatic fauna. It was God's fault, declares Massey's legal team--His "act."

At 4,200 feet we could smell the smoke from the last scraps of forest being scorched off doomed mountains. For almost an hour at an airspeed of 140 knots we saw other mountains in various stages of removal radiating from all compass points. White-rimmed drill holes, spaced like bristles in a hairbrush, marked the spots where the next chunks of mountain would be blown off the coal seam. Where charges had been detonated, draglines--20-story-high shovels with maws as wide as football fields--consumed pieces of mountain in 130-ton bites. Ad writers for Arch Coal proclaim that "mountaintop mining is good for West Virginia, and it's the right thing to do."

On the "reclaimed" sites, topsoil, roots, and stumps had been dumped onto streams, along with "overburden," as the industry calls broken mountains. The steep, triangular faces of recently buried valleys had been terraced like highland rice paddies. Down their centers ran straight, rock-lined gutters--the new streams. Rubble had been bulldozed and seeded with native and alien vegetation. A few trees had been planted in tiny squares. It all looked as if God had rested on the first day and subcontracted the rest of creation to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

In 1977 Congress outlawed this kind of coal extraction when it passed the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA). The act requires that only a small area be disturbed at one time, but in the mountains that's not possible. So the Interior Department's Office of Surface Mining (OSM) and the state regulatory agencies it has authorized to enforce SMCRA--such as the West Virginia Division of Environmental Protection (DEP)--looked the other way. SMCRA requires that there be no surface mining within 100 feet of a stream, but in the mountains there's no place to dump overburden except on streams, so the agencies looked the other way. SMCRA requires that each site be restored to its "approximate original contour," but you can't put a mountain back together, so the agencies looked the other way. If a site is not restored to its approximate original contour, SMCRA requires that it be converted to a "higher and better" use, a shopping mall or an airport or some such development--but who would pick their way through Appalachia to do business on a remote mountain stump? So the agencies looked the other way. Rules that weren't ignored were done away with by changing definitions. For example, if a "valley fill," as the industry calls its spoil dumps, contains less than 80 percent nondegradable rock (rock that won't break under pressure), fill must be trucked in, compacted, and large material used to make a drain. But it's cheaper to drop everything onto a stream, so the regulators declared all rocks, even shale, to be nondegradable.

A large part of the problem is that the regulators and the coal moguls are frequently the same people, flouncing between offices in a perpetual game of musical chairs. Regulators come from the coal industry (as did the three previous directors of the West Virginia DEP, for example). And when these officials step down, the industry clutches them to its breast. In April 2000, OSM director Kathy Karpan was removed from her post after she unsuccessfully negotiated with the National Mining Association about assuming its presidency.

A survey of eastern coal states by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service--incomplete because some mining regions weren't evaluated--turned up 897.2 miles of streams buried by mountain-range removal. In West Virginia the service checked only 5 of 13 coal counties but still found 470 miles of obliterated stream. Parts of the Little Coal River that once supported commercial barge traffic are now so choked with mining waste they're not even navigable by canoe.

While mountain removers traditionally violate SMCRA by interring streams that flow for more than six months of the year, the law does allow the sacrifice of streams that flow less than that. But, if anything, such streams are more important, argues Ben Stout of Wheeling Jesuit University in Wheeling, West Virginia. Stout is working on the environmental-impact study resulting from a successful citizens' lawsuit against the DEP and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that held that their stream-filling permits violated both SMCRA and the Clean Water Act. "The coal industry prefers to call these streams 'dry washes,' " he says. "But at 175 permit-application sites in West Virginia and Kentucky, we found all 8 orders of aquatic insects we were looking for--in all, 80 taxa, including perennial species. The biological community begins in watersheds as small as six acres. In fact, the most diverse communities start right up there at the spring seeps. The majority of taxa we found are leaf shredders; when they shred leaves the particles feed the whole downstream community. And emerging insects export this energy back to the forest in a form that's available to salamanders, frogs, fish, and birds. An intermittent stream is the link between a forest and a river. Fill it, and you break that link."

Once a rivertop gets buried, the rest of the system is not only starved but poisoned. "The runoff from the toes of these valley fills is laden with aluminum, iron, and manganese," says Stout. "It's nasty, nasty stuff."