What Is Mountaintop Removal?

The US Environmental Protection Agency defines mountaintop removal as the following:

Mountaintop removal/valley fill is a mining practice where the tops of mountains are removed, exposing the seams of coal. Mountaintop removal can involve removing 500 feet or more of the summit to get at buried seams of coal. The earth from the mountaintop is then dumped in the neighboring valleys.

One mountaintop removal mine can strip up to 10 square miles and dump hundreds of millions of pounds of waste into as many as 12 valley fills that can be 1,000 feet wide and 1 mile long. Regulators in four Appalachian states (West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee) have approved nearly 6,000 valley fills that will bury 75,000 acres of streams. Click here if you'd like to take a virtual tour of a West Virginia mining site.

Recently, coal companies have devised methods to conduct much smaller mountaintop removal operations that do not require filling valleys with waste. Frequently termed “cross-ridge” mining, the coal companies will actually store the waste on old strip-mined areas and then pile the waste back on to the mountaintop when the mountaintop removal operation is complete. People living near these mines are skeptical about the stability and safety of these giant mounds of waste and employ the term “delayed valley fill” for such piles, as much of it will certainly come down into the valley in the decades and centuries after the operation ceases.

“Cross-ridge” mining is only one of many synonyms (or euphemisms) that continue to arise because coal companies and state mining agencies are often reticent to admit that they are permitting and conducting mountaintop removal.

So far, federal agencies have also neglected to track the extent and impacts of mountaintop removal. The only attempt at acomprehensive analysis of MTR by government agencies was presented in a multi-agency Environmental Impact Statement that was completed in 2003. This effort was initiated in the late 90s, but, unfortunately, the focus of the EIS was revised after the Bush Administration took over in 2001. According to the Charleston Gazette:

When it formally kicked off the project in February 1999, the EPA said the goal was "to consider developing agency policies ... to minimize, to the maximum extent practicable the adverse environmental effects" of mountaintop removal. By October 2001, then-Deputy Interior Secretary Steven J. Griles, a former mining industry lobbyist, had ordered the project refocused toward "centralizing and streamlining coal mine permitting."

Cindy Tibbot, a FWS biologist involved in the EIS process, was one of many agency scientists who expressed outrage about Griles’ directive, stating in an internal memo:

"It’s hard to stay quiet about this when I really believe we’re doing the public and the heart of the Clean Water Act a great disservice."

As Tibbot put it, the only alternatives offered in Griles’ proposed EIS would be:

"alternative locations to house the rubber stamp that issues the [mining] permits."

While the EIS did compile a lot of disparate information on the effects and extent of MTR, the analysis was based on mining permit maps. According to satellite analysis done by Michael Shank at the TAGIS center of the West Virginia DEP, however, those permit maps are underestimating the extent of valley fill in 6 West Virginia coal counties by about 40%. Thus, the entire EIS is based on verifiably faulty data.

Because government agencies continue to refuse to meaningfully analyze the impacts, or even track the extent, of mountaintop removal. Appalachian Voices worked to produce the first ever comprehensive map of mountaintop removal sites in Appalachia, which you can find in Google Earth at iLoveMountains.org.