That Sinking Feeling

In the 1970s, shortly before mountaintop removal came into vogue in Appalachia, the coal industry started using an extraction method nearly as destructive to the habitat of fish, wildlife, and humans. But longwall mining, as it's called, is subtler than mountaintop removal. Like conventional mining, it happens underground and out of sight. It doesn't bury streams, springs, ponds, and marshes under tons of rubble; it quietly sucks them into the bowels of the earth. And even when it leaves some surface water, it destroys aquatic habitat in ways that people can't see unless they understand the ecology of fish, amphibians, and macroinvertebrates. Longwall mining doesn't crush houses with flyrock or sweep them away in torrents of sludge. It just shakes them apart at their foundations when the ground drops four or five feet, in what the industry chastely calls “planned subsidence.”

Conventional miners leave “pillars” of coal to support the earth above. Longwallers operate a track-mounted cutting head—consisting of two whirling, bit-studded drums—that moves back and forth, shearing off three-foot swaths from the coal seam as if it were slicing a giant kielbasa. A longwall cut, or “panel,” may be 1,000 feet wide, 10,000 feet long, and 8 feet high, and when one panel is finished, another is begun. Sometimes longwallers revisit abandoned mines to slice away the pillars. Miners and equipment are protected by hydraulic roof supports, which are removed as the shearer progresses, allowing earth and rock to fall into the empty space. The results on the surface approximate those of a major earthquake.

Longwalling happens anywhere there is coal, but the grossest environmental damage is in the impoverished regions overlying the world's richest mineral deposit—the Pittsburgh Coal Seam, which runs like layer-cake filling for 2,000 miles, 300 to 800 feet under Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Kentucky. These days the seam's bituminous coal is much in demand because it burns more cleanly than western coal and allows industry to meet clean-air standards without making major pollution-control investments. Thomas Hoffman, a spokes- person for Consol Energy Inc., which produces more underground coal than any other U.S. company and primarily by longwalling, estimates that a quarter of the nation's total coal production issues from longwall operations.

I visited southwestern Pennsylvania, not because longwalling is worse there, not because that state's regulatory bureaucracy is more timid and inept, but only because the best biological data has been collected there. No one fishes for or even speaks for the pinky-size darters—the greensides, rainbows, fantails, and johnnies—that depended on the shallow flow that used to hurry over the clean sand and gravel of Hoovers Run in the town of Brave. But darters are as much a part of America's native biota as scarlet tanagers, redstarts, and painted buntings, and they're just as brightly colored. When Consol undermined Hoovers Run, the ground sank, creating “gates” that act like dams. In the undermined reaches, most of the darters are gone now, their sand and gravel buried under mud and silt, their riffles replaced by five feet of green, stagnant water. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Jennifer Kagel showed me plenty of fish at her flooded sample sites, but they were ubiquitous habitat generalists like bluegills and green sunfish. These species are popular with anglers, a fact seized upon by the coal industry and (in the past) state bureaucrats as evidence that longwalling can “enhance” aquatic habitat.

A condition of mining permits issued by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) is that longwallers “restore” streams they destroy. One prescribed method is “gate cutting”—that is, removing dams created by the sagging watershed. At Roberts Run near Spraggs I inspected old and new gate cuts. “We have done mitigation on that stream,” Jonathan Pachter, Consol's manager for environment permitting, had assured me. “We excavated the stream channel, cut gates, did some bank stabilization. It was very prone to flooding pre-mining.”

In some places the meandering stream had been straightened for hundreds of feet; and where once Roberts Run renewed a rich floodplain, there are now five-foot-high banks of raw dirt over a layer of sheared shale. Now there is no place for floodwater to go except downstream, where it becomes someone else's problem. Springs that fed and cooled the flow have dried up, so the “restored” Roberts Run alternates between a raging torrent and a largely dry streambed. Basically, a healthy, biologically diverse stream has been converted to a storm-water ditch.

Organic farmer Leigh Shields, who has lived beside Roberts Run since 1968, remembers the old stream. “Consol actually tried to claim it wasn't perennial,” he told me as he pointed out mature sycamores falling into the eroding channel. “Even during droughts you couldn't wade across with boots. Now you can jump across with sneakers anytime. It was full of big bullheads and smallmouth bass. Now you're lucky to find fish two inches long. The mussels and crayfish are mostly gone.” The falling earth fractured Shields's gas line, so now he has to heat his greenhouses with propane—“a very poor heating source,” he says. Four of his five acres of agricultural land are now too wet to grow anything. His four wells have been plugged because they were venting methane, so now he gets municipal water piped in. Twenty of his neighbors who lost their wells get municipal water delivered to 1,000-gallon plastic bladders called “water buffaloes.”

As we cruised the sunken landscape, Kagel pointed out the remains of houses and the foundations of houses that had been torn apart by subsidence, or had exploded when they filled with methane released from coal mining, or had been purchased, then demolished, by longwallers seeking to lower property taxes. Most of the former residents were living in new double-wides and other modest dwellings provided by the companies. For most it had been a step up.