The Steep Cost of Cleaner, Cheaper Coal

The cluster of forested peaks that soared skyward behind Donald “Joe” Barnett’s house is gone. So are the streams that flowed through them. Miners sheared several hundred feet off the mountaintops to expose rich veins of coal and then piled up the leftover rock and dirt in a nearby valley to make a naked, flat-topped, 400-foot plateau.

This so-called valley fill is just one of hundreds across the rugged terrain of Appalachia that have covered more than 1,000 miles of streams in a decade-long boom of “mountaintop removal” that has permanently changed the topography in the southwest corner of West Virginia.

To the mining companies, demolishing mountains and filling valleys is the only economical way to get the state’s cleaner-burning coal, which generates affordable electricity to millions of homes and high-paying jobs for thousands of workers.

And the Bush administration, which counts boosting energy production among its priorities, is poised to use its regulatory powers to help the miners continue the practice.

Many Appalachia residents whose lives are nestled into the quiet hollows aren’t sure how much more of the unmistakable environmental transformation they can take. The residents have sued to stop the mining, contending that it strips the region of its coal, as well as its unique charm. Filling the valleys with the dirt and rock, they say, erases streams, threatens wildlife, sullies drinking water and causes dangerous flooding. Perhaps even more threatening, millions of gallons of sludge from processing the coal is stored permanently in huge dams near their communities.

“It’s the biggest localized environmental disaster in the country,” said lawyer Joe Lovett of the Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment. “But it’s ignored because it keeps coal prices low.”

Lovett represented a group of West Virginians who filed a lawsuit against the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1990s, charging that large valley fills violated the federal Surface Mining and Clean Water acts. The corps has routinely issued permits that allow coal companies to bury streams and valleys in the unwanted dirt and rock, even though Clean Water Act regulations do not give it clear authority to do so.

A federal judge ruled against the corps in 1999, but an appeals court voided his decision on jurisdictional grounds, leaving unresolved the practice’s legality and putting the industry on edge.

A newer lawsuit filed by Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, an environmental group, challenges the corps’ right to permit a huge mountaintop project in Kentucky that would fill more than 20 valleys and cover more than six miles of streams. That suit is now pending before the same federal judge, and it could bring mountaintop mining to a halt by making large valley fills illegal.

The Bush administration wants to make sure that doesn’t happen. A senior administration official, speaking on the condition that he not be named, said as early as this month the administration planned to rewrite regulations to allow dirt displaced by mining to be dumped in waterways. This likely would undermine the pending legal challenge and legitimize valley fills.

Under the Clean Water Act and current corps regulations, acceptable “fill materials”--those allowed in waterways--include rock, sand and dirt displaced by development, roadways and erosion protection. The act and the rules specifically exclude the disposal of any material that’s primarily considered waste--such as the dirt displaced by mining.

The Bush administration plans to strip that exclusion from the law by redefining what is acceptable fill material.

Officially, the Bush administration refused to confirm the details of the prospective rule change, which was originally proposed by the Clinton administration. But two senior officials, asking not to be named, defended the decision, saying it would bring the corps in line with the Environmental Protection Agency’s definition of “fill material.”

Administration officials and coal industry representatives describe the change as a bureaucratic clarification.

That’s not how local residents or environmentalists see it.

Lovett, who is also representing the Kentucky plaintiffs, says the administration’s move is the equivalent of changing the speed limit when you get caught speeding.

Environmentalists call it one of the Bush administration’s biggest rollbacks of the Clean Water Act, opening the nation’s waterways to all sorts of wastes. The administration has made a series of actions that weaken environmental protections at the behest of industry, including lowering efficiency standards for air conditioners, reducing hurdles for hard rock mining and backing away from the decade-old commitment to prevent a net loss of wetlands.

Even 12 GOP House members wrote President Bush late last month urging him not to make this “ill-advised and dangerous” rules change.

The change also would affect hard rock mining in the West--most notably in Alaska and Arizona.

Mara Bacsujlaky, assistant director of the Northern Alaska Environmental Center, says she has used the current regulations to prevent the operators of Fort Knox gold mine near Fairbanks from filling wetlands. She said the rules change would deliver “a very serious blow” to efforts to prevent mining companies from harming streams and wetlands.

To Barnett and many other people living in the hollows below the West Virginia mining sites, the Bush administration’s rules change is nothing less than a threat to their very way of life.

The scale of what is being done here is visible best from the air. Giant machines remove several hundred vertical feet of the mountaintops to expose multiple seams of coal, which lie between rocks like the filling in a many-layered cake.

The miners extract the coal and heap the unwanted rock and dirt into the valleys. Other valleys are brimming with massive pools of thick black sludge, hundreds of feet high and as broad as good-sized lakes. Steep peaks are replaced by miles-long stretches of broad, barren plateaus.

Soon, two more mountaintop mining operations plan to move into the snug valley where Joe Barnett built a house for his family--with his own hands, and savings from a lifetime of coal mining--on land that had been in his wife’s family for many generations.

“We were surrounded by God’s beautiful nature,” Barnett, 52, said. “Now we’re surrounded by coal companies’ devastation.”

The explosives used by miners to blow mountains apart have forged a several-inch gap between the ceiling and the walls through much of Barnett’s house. Long cracks punctuate the walls in one of his son’s bedroom.

“I drove every nail with love,” Barnett said. “It breaks my heart that this house is being torn all to pieces.”

Then last summer, flood waters raged through his valley. Two people were killed and 1,500 homes were destroyed in the hollows of southwest West Virginia. The state is investigating whether the mining and timber industries bear blame for the intensity of the flooding.

Barnett and many other people living there have no doubt that they do.

Right after the disaster, coal company employees dug out White Oak Creek, the stream flowing past Barnett’s house, to prevent flooding and protect the road that coal trucks use. Barnett’s well, and many others in the valley, immediately went dry.

And many of the little things that made life in the hollows special have vanished.

Migratory songbirds such as the Louisiana waterthrush are declining in population because they need large swaths of hardwood forests, which were abundant in Appalachia before the mountaintop mining boom, said Jeffrey Towner, the field supervisor for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s West Virginia field office.

Federally listed threatened or endangered species--including the Indiana bat, several fish and 25 types of mussels--are also being affected, Towner said.

“The individual and cumulative impacts to both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems caused by mining projects authorized in the Appalachians . . . are unprecedented,” Towner said in a letter urging the Corps of Engineers to stop its approval of such operations.

A 1998 study by the Fish and Wildlife Service found that more than 900 miles of streams--470 of them in West Virginia--already had been buried in valley fills in Appalachia. Permitting has continued briskly since then.

“Small first-order streams form the heart and soul of the functional stream ecosystem,” said Bernard Sweeney, director of the Stroud Water Research Center in Avondale, Pa. “They support a wide variety of unique species and are critical to larger downstream tributaries.

“Any discussion of destroying even one first-order stream is out of order.”

The state’s forester was so angry about the devastation to forests and his inability to rein in coal companies that he quit his job in 1998 in protest. “It’s a short-term gain for a long-term loss,” said William Maxey, the former forester. “Our mountains were beautiful. What the coal companies are doing makes them uninhabitable.”

Officials from the Environmental Protection Agency and the state Department of Environmental Protection say too little is known to comment on the cumulative effects on forests, waterways and wildlife.

As a result of a settlement of part of the 1999 case against the Corps of Engineers, a sweeping federal study of the environmental impacts is underway. The settlement effectively required the mining companies to limit the size of valley fills to 250 acres. So now the companies are requesting and getting permits for more valley fills for each project, according to Lewis Halstead, assistant director of the mining division of the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection.

Mountaintop removal mining started in the early 1970s and accelerated after the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act gave utilities major incentives to use low-sulfur coal, the kind found here.

The coal industry and most of the state’s politicians see mountaintop mining as an important technological advance that provides electricity across the East and drives the state’s economy. The 60 million tons of low-sulfur coal from West Virginia’s surface mines last year could have fueled 32 million homes for a year, the National Coal Mining Assn. estimated.

“It’s not scorched earth and it’s not devastation,” said Bill Rainey, president of the West Virginia Coal Assn. “It’s a methodical engineering process.”

It provides jobs and flattens out the region’s relentlessly rugged land so that it can be used for development that can support more jobs, Rainey added. A prison, an airport and a high school are among the structures built on former mountaintop mining sites.

Public objections to the projects have mushroomed in recent years as the mining operations have expanded. Meanwhile, the number of mine employees decreased because mountaintop projects are highly mechanized. From 1990 to 2000, the number of miners in West Virginia dropped by half to 15,000, according to the National Mining Assn.

Although West Virginia produced more coal in the 1990s than in any previous decade, the only hint in the Coal River valley communities that they are in the midst of a thriving industry is the steady stream of coal-filled tractor-trailers passing through on narrow West Virginia Route 3.

“On a daily basis, we see millions of dollars going past our eyes, and yet we live in poverty,” said Judy Bonds, organizer for the Coal River Mountain Watch, the local environmental group.

Last year’s floods were another wake-up call to residents, who have been putting up with the coal companies for several generations.

Bonds, 49, and her daughter and grandson were the last to be bought out of their ancestral hollow, Marfork. By then, the air was so thick with emissions from the coal operation that a doctor said her grandson’s asthma could not be treated successfully unless they moved.

Bonds was only one of thousands of residents paid to leave their homes as the mining operations moved in. Most leave only when life has become so miserable that they have no other choice.

Marfork is now home to a slurry impoundment the size of a large mountain. The structure is permitted to hold 5 billion gallons of water and wastes from processing coal. From the air it resembles the Hoover Dam full of thick black sludge.

One of Bonds’ many tasks is to ensure that it does not break, like one in Kentucky that spilled 250 million gallons of toxic sludge in October 2000. Another task is to save the valley’s elementary and high schools, which are scheduled to be closed as more mining projects move in.

The coal companies, she said, want the entire valley for their operations.

“But we’re in their way, and our roots are dug in deep,” she said.

A member of the sixth generation of her family to live in this valley, Bonds said: “We love our life in the hollows. There is nothing like being in the hollows. You feel snuggled. You feel safe. It seems like God has his arms around you.”

She and other local activists acknowledged that given coal industry’s influence in Washington and Charleston, the state capital, the odds are against them.

“If we save one ridge, we will have accomplished something,” Bonds said.

That’s exactly what Larry Gibson is trying to do.

Gibson, 50, a retired General Motors maintenance worker, persuaded his fellow heirs of Kayford Mountain, northeast of Whitesville, not to sell to the mining companies. For nine months he has lived without electricity or running water in a cabin on top of the mountain to draw attention to the plight of his beloved childhood region.

He invites journalists from around the world, federal officials, college students and the public to his rustic outpost to see for themselves the impact of the mountaintop mining that surrounds his thickly wooded refuge.

“I’m trying to help people reclaim these mountains, but most people here think they can’t do anything to stop the coal companies,” Gibson said, choking back tears. “They hope I hold them back. They call me the man with a finger in the dike.”