That Sinking Feeling

At Laurel Run near Waynesburg we encountered another method of restoration—“grouting,” whereby two chemical agents that bind together to form an epoxylike glue are injected into subterranean fractures, supposedly sealing them. A contractor for Foundation Coal, running a drilling rig beside the stream, said things weren't “looking good” for grout injection at this site. But where it had looked good—where the earth is full of glue—the stream and the springs that fed it keep disappearing. I saw grass and red maples growing in the streambed. At the farm of Murray and Laurine Williams, we inspected stagnant, dewatered ponds and hillside springs that had dried up. Now the Williamses and many of their neighbors are on municipal water. To qualify for the DEP permit, all the company (then called RAG Emerald Resources) had to do was promise to grout. Both Pennsylvania's Clean Streams Law and the federal Clean Water Act make it illegal to dewater streams. “Show me how you can mitigate for the loss of flow,” declares Mark Hersh, former director of the Raymond Proffitt Foundation, a Philadelphia-based group specializing in environmental protection. “You simply can't. Longwalling is much like mountaintop removal in that government approves a method of mining that is inherently illegal. And now that the companies have invested in this method, DEP doesn't know what to do. The pot is too hot to grab.”

After RAG had dewatered parts of Laurel Run, the DEP made it post a $351,900 bond to ensure that it fixed the damage; but this work was scarcely under way when RAG applied for a permit to longwall the rest of the watershed. The DEP granted it without waiting to see if restoration would succeed. It didn't. Now the stream called Laurel Run is basically gone. As I stood on a cement bridge contemplating its remains, I thought of Frost's elegy for his own buried brook: “Deep in a sewer dungeon under stone / In fetid darkness still to live and run— / And all for nothing it had ever done / Except forget to go in fear perhaps. / No one would know except for ancient maps / That such a brook ran water. . . . ”

Traditionally the Pennsylvania DEP has operated under the popular superstition that intermittent streams can be written off, though there is nothing in the Clean Streams Law that encourages this interpretation. If a company showed the agency photos of dry pools (which may be seen in most any small perennial stream during low water), the DEP declared the stream intermittent, and longwalling proceeded.

Also with me in Pennsylvania was one of the nation's foremost authorities on headwater ecology: Ben Stout of Wheeling Jesuit University in Wheeling, West Virginia. “First,” he explained, “intermittent streams are critically important to the whole river system and watershed; cutting them off is like cutting off your fingers. Second, these streams—at least before they are undermined—are not intermittent; they're perennial.” Every time Stout looks at a stream the DEP has declared intermittent on the strength of industry allegations, he finds macroinvertebrates with multiyear aquatic-residence requirements such as five-year-old dragonfly larvae, three-year-old Dobson-fly larvae, and mature aquatic salamanders.

“Macroinvertebrate abundance was 44 percent lower, diversity was 47 percent lower, and long-lived taxa were 51 percent fewer in longwall mined versus reference [control] streams,” writes Stout in his most recent study. “No water was present at 18 percent of samples from longwall mined streams. An additional 17 percent of samples failed to support a minimum viable community of at least two individuals, from each of two kinds of macroinvertebrates. . . . In general, longwall mining resulted in streams harboring about one- half the abundance and diversity of reference streams. . . . Twelve years after longwall mining, biological communities failed to achieve the abundance, diversity, or longevity of unmined or [conventionally] mined reference streams.”

Consol's Pachter dismisses this work as bad science in that Stout included a pristine Ohio stream as a control while the forest in the longwalled area was second growth. But Stout hadn't used just one control; he'd used 11, almost one for each of 12 longwalled streams he studied, a ratio unheard of in such work. Finding 11 controls had been a monumental challenge. “It's very tough to find a stream around here that hasn't been impacted by these guys,” said Stout. “I couldn't figure out why the hell one longwalled stream had such a good biological community; then I found out it hadn't been mined after all.”

The Laurel Run debacle energized the environmental community, which, in turn, helped the DEP acquire a modicum of resolve. On November 12, 2004, the agency ordered UMCO (a subsidiary of Murray Energy Corporation) to cease work on panel 6E under a tributary of Maple Creek, 30 miles south of Pittsburgh. The order was hardly draconian. For this one mine UMCO had already received 70 DEP citations and noncompliance orders, and for two years the mine had been destroying other tributaries of Maple Creek. UMCO was free to longwall elsewhere in the watershed, and it was free to continue to remove coal from under the stream if it left conventional pillars. Still, the company responded by shutting down the entire mine, laying off 495 workers, whooping it up in the media about government abuse, and predicting imminent bankruptcy. It had done the same thing the previous July in response to a similar DEP order. After being pilloried in the press, the agency had reissued the permit with a provision for more grouting (that later failed).

Meanwhile, UMCO was facing other challenges. By law the coal industry must give homeowners at least six months' notice before it undermines them. But in a letter to the DEP, PennFuture—a statewide citizens' group committed to environmental protection—cites DEP documents it says indicate UMCO notified homeowners after they'd been undermined, then submitted “at least 14 falsified certified mail receipts, misrepresenting by ten months the dates when UMCO notified landowners that the company would be undermining their homes.” The DEP has turned the matter over to the attorney general's office, and a criminal investigation is under way.

On November 30, 2004, Justice Bernard A. Labuskes Jr. of the state Environmental Hearing Board denied UMCO's appeal of the DEP's November 12 order, finding that “when UMCO mined in Panels 4E and 5E, every spring and seep, as well as the 5E stream itself, went dry. When the remnants of a hurricane that caused devastating flooding in much of Pennsylvania this past autumn passed through the area, remarkably, the 5E stream stayed dry. . . . UMCO is at least partly responsible for where it finds itself due to its (1) aggressive business plan and (2) questionable course of conduct. . . . There is and should be no reduced level of environmental protection for operations that consciously expose themselves to these heightened risks. In the face of these developments and these warnings, UMCO proceeded to prepare to mine Panel 6E as if authorization were a fait accompli. It developed the panel, installed the longwall equipment in place, and readied the stream mitigation measures.” Nine days later—when it was clear that Labuskes wasn't kidding—UMCO stopped kidding, too, putting everyone back to work, reopening its mine, and cutting longwall panels that don't underlie streams.

Despite UMCO's histrionics, there is no need for longwall mining. Like mountaintop removal, it's just cheaper for the industry. Environmentally acceptable alternatives include conventional underground mining and, in some situations, even surface mining. What's more, “planned subsidence” is strictly an American euphemism, designed to give the impression that manmade earthquakes are okay so long as the industry knows they're going to happen. In Europe, where longwalling has a much longer tradition, companies are required to prevent subsidence by “backstowing”—that is, by filling their empty panels with rocks.