MTR and the Environment

Mountaintop removal is widely recognized, even by government agencies that regulate it, as one of the most environmentally devastating practices allowed under U.S. law. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency:

“The impact of mountaintop removal on nearby communities is devastating. Dynamite blasts needed to splinter rock strata are so strong they crack the foundations and walls of houses. Mining dries up an average of 100 wells a year and contaminates water in others. In many coalfield communities, the purity and availability of drinking water are keen concerns.”

This is occurring right at the heart of one of the nation’s main hotspots of biological diversity. According to the Nature Conservancy, the mountain region including southwest Virginia, southern West Virginia, eastern Kentucky and northeastern Tennessee contains some of the highest levels of biological diversity in the nation.

           

This, as it turns out, is precisely the region where mountaintop removal is spreading the fastest. Already, more than a quarter of the mountains in the southern West Virginia coalfields have been leveled. Because there has been no significant effort to track the spread of mountaintop removal by government agencies, and the maps provided by coal companies to state agencies on the locations of valley fills and mined areas are so inaccurate as to be worthless for scientific purposes, there is very little scientific information on the effects of mountaintop removal. The one major governmental report on mountaintop removal that has come out, while based on faulty data, did report significant environmental impacts from mountaintop removal.

Here are some of the impacts and concerns expressed in the final EPA report:

* More than 7 percent of Appalachian forests have been cut down and more than 1,200 miles of streams across the region have been buried or polluted between 1985 and 2001.

* Over 1000 miles of streams have been permitted to be buried in valley fills. (for scale, this is a greater distance than the length of the entire Ohio River).

* Mountaintop removal mining, if it continues unabated, will cause a projected loss of more than 1.4 million acres by the end of the decade—an area the size of Delaware—with a concomitant severe impact on fish, wildlife, and bird species, not to mention a devastating effect on many neighboring communities.

* 800+ square miles of mountains are estimated to be already destroyed. (this is equal to a one-quarter mile wide swath of destruction from New York to San Francisco – it is also significantly underestimated).

Other quotes from the 2003 report include:

* "… studies found that the natural return of forests to mountaintop mines reclaimed with grasses under hay and pasture or wildlife post-mining land uses occurs very slowly. Full reforestation across a large mine site in such cases may not occur for hundreds of years."

* “Because it is difficult to intercept groundwater flow, it is difficult to reconstruct free flowing streams at mountaintop removal sites.”

* “Stream chemistry monitoring efforts show significant increases in conductivity, hardness, sulfate, and selenium concentrations downstream of [mountaintop removal] operations.”

The threat of coal slurry impoundments

In addition to the environmental impacts of blasting mountains into rubble and burying streams with mining waste, mountaintop removal coal mining requires the building of giant sludge dams, which can hold billions of gallons of toxic coal sludge behind un-reinforced earthen dams. These slurries are necessary because, unlike coal from underground mines, coal from mountaintop removal requires extensive washing to separate the coal from debris and residues from the blasting of bedrock.

As of 2000, there were more than 600 sludge impoundments across the Appalachian coalfields. Chemical analyses of this sludge indicate it contains large amounts of arsenic, mercury, lead, copper, and chromium, among other toxins, which eventually seep into the drinking water supply of nearby communities. Even worse than this seepage, however, is the threat of a dam break. Several dam breaches have occurred, one at Buffalo Creek in West Virginia, which took the lives of 125 people, many of whom were children.

The most recent sludge dam breach was in Martin County, Kentucky, in 2000, which the EPA called the worst environmental disaster in the history of the Southeast. When the sludge dam breached, more than 300 million gallons of toxic sludge (about 30 times the amount of oil released in the Exxon Valdez oil spill) poured into tributaries of the Big Sandy River, killing virtually all aquatic life for 70 miles downstream of the spill. The photos below are of the Martin County spill (click to enlarge):

                 

Martin County Coal, Co., a subsidiary of A.T. Massey Coal, which was responsible for the spill argued in court that the event was “an act of God.” Yet not long after the disaster, the Kentucky Department of Surface Mining issued four citations to the company for unsafe waste storage practices and for allowing the 70-acre pond to weaken to the point of collapse.

At present, there are 45 impoundments in West Virginia alone that are considered at high risk for failure, and 32 are at moderate risk. In addition, most local communities are dependent on groundwater, which could be fouled by mining waste.