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This article originally provided by
The
Washington Post
By Cindy Rich , Brooke Lea Foster
Cutting off the tops of mountains is a cheap way to mine, but
it’s changing the landscape and may be endangering lives. Here’s
what it’s like to be able to smile again.
 |
| Retired coal miner Chuck Nelson came to
Washington to lobby against mountaintop mining, a practice that
involves stripping trees and blasting open peaks to remove coal.
Says Nelson: “How many people, when they flip on their light
switch, stop and think: What is the true cost of it?” Photograph
by Matthew Worden |
Chuck Nelson needs a smoke. He lights a Marlboro while steering
his Mitsubishi Eclipse along the winding roads of West Virginia’s
coalfields. A slight man with a raspy voice, Nelson spent 30 years
working underground in the mines. He drives fast because he’s late
and because these roads course through him like veins. He’s lived in
these mountains since he was born.
In this part of Appalachia, there are no luxury condos. It’s mostly
trailers and rundown houses with pickup trucks out front.
The coal industry has nearly taken over these hills, and at times it
feels as if you’ve left America. Along Route 3, Nelson points to one
industrial complex after the next, each with tubes snaking up and
down the hillside—they’re preparation plants where coal is washed
before it’s shipped to power plants. He points to dozens of
onyx-colored pyramids, piles of coal as tall as buildings.
“See that ridge up there?” Nelson says. “On the other side of that,
the coal companies are blasting every day. Blasting the mountains
right off.”
After hearing that people in a nearby town were getting sick,
possibly from coal waste in their water, Nelson and others started
taking samples from their wells. The samples, a dozen Mason jars
containing different-colored liquids, are in his trunk. One looks
like coffee with cream, another like iced tea.
Nelson thought he’d stop thinking about coal when he retired from
the mines. He thought he’d keep quiet after a coal company bought
his home to appease him; so much dust had been blowing into his
house from a nearby prep plant that Nelson’s asthmatic wife couldn’t
breathe. But he can’t stay quiet. In his mind, coal is destroying
the communities it used to lift up.
He asks: “How many people in other states, when they go to flip on
their light switch, stop and think: Where’s this power coming from,
and what is the true cost of it?”
Until a storm knocks out power, we take for granted that a steady
stream of electricity will keep Washington humming. But power has to
come from somewhere, and in our region about half of it comes from
coal-burning power plants.
Coal-fired electricity has gained popularity because it’s the most
reliable and least expensive source on the grid. The rising cost of
natural gas makes gas-fired power plants unpopular. No nuclear-power
plant has been built since the 1979 meltdown at Three Mile Island in
Pennsylvania.
According to the National Mining Association, the United States has
more than 265 billion tons of recoverable coal reserves, enough to
last for 240 years at today’s usage rates.
“We refer to ourselves as the Saudi Arabia of coal—we actually
possess more coal reserves than all of the Middle East has oil,”
says Kraig Naasz, president of the National Mining Association.
“It’s the advantage the US has over the rest of the world.”
But climate scientists have a problem with coal-fired power plants:
The planet is warming in part because of their CO2 emissions.
According to the Sierra Club, coal emits about 40 percent of the
nation’s carbon emissions—carbon is the prime global-warming
pollutant—second only to petroleum. If all of the planned coal
plants are built, that will increase carbon emissions by 15 percent.
Environmentalists aren’t the only ones fighting coal. Residents of
Old Town Alexandria are hoping to shut down an aging coal-fired
power plant that they say sprinkles soot onto their balconies and
sends pollutants into their lungs. Residents of Wise County,
Virginia, are fighting to stop construction of a planned coal plant.
But what would Washington do without coal? The area’s population is
growing. All those new houses, flat-screen televisions, and laptops
need power. The West Virginia Coal Association says the average
Internet user, online 12 hours a week, uses 300 pounds of coal every
year.
According to Naasz, by 2030 the nation’s electricity needs will
increase by nearly 30 percent. To keep up with demand, he says,
we’re going to need more coal-fired power plants.
If Chuck Nelson followed the coal leaving West Virginia, he might
end up in Washington. Most of the Washington area’s six coal-fired
power plants burn coal from West Virginia. Coal from the southern
part of the state is low in sulfur dioxide, making it easier for
plants to meet pollution controls. The coal is shipped in on trains,
sometimes 50 or more railcars long.
“It’s hard trying to get everyone to understand that the people in
New York and Baltimore and DC could not conduct their daily lives
without the coal miner in West Virginia,” says Bill Raney, president
of the West Virginia Coal Association.
The spike in oil prices has helped increase demand for coal. In the
past three years, spot-market prices for Appalachian coal have risen
from between $50 and $60 a ton to more than $100. Some companies
have reduced underground mining production, and the industry is
using more-efficient computerized equipment, which has reduced the
number of miners.
In 1952, more than 100,000 people were employed by West Virginia’s
coal industry; in 2006, about 20,500 were. As a result, residents
say their towns are disappearing. Most storefronts in Nelson’s
hometown of Whitesville are empty.
The Appalachian coal industry is increasingly turning to mountaintop
mining, which critics call “mountaintop removal.” Miners strip trees
from mountains, blast open peaks, dump the waste into valleys, and
excavate the coal seams using a bucket large enough to hold more
than 20 compact cars.
“The method of mining is dictated by the geology,” says Raney. “The
coal seams are in the upper horizons of the natural geology and
topography in the state—you can’t underground those seams.” ➝
Coal companies have been mining mountaintops since the 1970s; the
National Mining Association says the method now accounts for about
10 percent of US coal production. During the Clinton years, says
West Virginia University political-science professor Richard Brisbin,
“people were just beginning to realize the nature of the injury.”
Citizens’ groups had started taking legal action, Brisbin says, but
their efforts were complicated by eased restrictions during the Bush
administration. In 2002, the Environmental Protection Agency and the
US Army Corps of Engineers redefined two words in the Clean Water
Act of 1977—“fill material.” The definition had previously excluded
waste disposal. The rule change, first proposed by the Clinton
administration, would allow fill material to include mining waste,
which meant coal companies could now legally dump debris from mining
sites into streams.
Mountaintop mining is cheaper than underground—it requires fewer
workers and maximizes the recovery of coal. According to EPA
estimates, more than 470 mountains in Appalachia have been destroyed
along with 1,200 miles of streams. Every year, millions of pounds of
explosives are set off in the mountains there, and the blasts are so
powerful that residents say they can knock houses off their
foundations.
Some coalfield residents are moving away. “They’re losing that
connection to where they’re from—that connection to belonging to
these mountains,” says George Davis, a Marshall University assistant
professor researching citizen movements in Appalachia.
Lots of people in Appalachia are hesitant to speak out. Nearly
everyone knows someone who works for a coal company, and people have
lost their jobs by objecting. But as health concerns grow and jobs
slip away, more residents are raising their voices.
Says waitress turned activist Maria Gunnoe: “We’re the people being
sacrificed—our water, our land, our air—in the name of energy across
the country.”
“All We Want Is Clean Water”
Nelson pulls up to his friend Maria Lambert’s house, a mobile home
with yellow vinyl siding. A gurgling creek runs in front.
Lambert lives in Seth, about 30 miles south of the state capital,
Charleston, and two hours west of the Greenbrier resort. She’s a few
miles from a mountaintop-mining operation, in a hollow off Prenter
Road. Her parents and grown son have mobile homes next to hers. For
about a year, she and her husband, Ralph, a disabled miner, heard
blasting every day around 4 o’clock.
On a snowy morning in January when she opens the door to her
home—where she spends days playing with her four-year-old
granddaughter—Lambert explains the odor. “We both took a shower this
morning,” she says. “That’s what that is—it’s our water.”
Lambert was raised in a coal camp called Prenter. Her father worked
25 years in the mines before he retired at age 42, sick with
black-lung disease. She once had a job at the camp’s company store,
making sandwiches for miners. Now her 29-year-old son makes his
living driving a coal truck.
That hasn’t stopped Lambert from talking about her belief that coal
waste buried underground has seeped into her water. She and Ralph
get their drinking water from a well behind their house because the
city water lines don’t reach them. They’re convinced it’s making
them sick.
Today Lambert has set out photographs on her living-room
table—pictures of discolored bathtubs and toilets, rusted hot-water
heaters. She’s helping organize community meetings and writing to
politicians.
Until recently, she sometimes drank a gallon of well water a day.
She was trying to lose weight, and that helped keep her from eating.
Now she doesn’t drink it at all, but she still has to bathe in it.
There are 118 mines in Boone County, where Lambert lives, more than
in any other West Virginia county. According to the West Virginia
Coal Association, the county has more than 3.6 billion tons of coal
reserves; its mountaintop-mining operations produced more than 13
million tons of coal in 2006. The county’s median household income
is about $30,000.
Lambert remembers a blast nearly five years ago that was so loud,
she looked out the window to see if her parents’ house had blown up.
Her computer nearly fell off her desk. After a few more days of
heavy blasts like that one, she says, there was “orange and black
stuff” flowing through her water pipes. She couldn’t help but think
it was related to the mining.
The mountains near Lambert’s home used to calm her. She could get on
her four-wheeler, ride up the hollow, and feel in another world. She
doesn’t feel that peace anymore.
Lambert started getting worried last fall after her father saw a
flier for a community meeting about the water. Her mother, who’d
worried for years about what was coming out of the tap, suggested
they go.
At the meeting, a young environmentalist, Bobby Mitchell, talked
about heavy metals that might be contaminating wells. Residents held
up water samples and talked about how often they had to replace
hot-water heaters and well pumps. A woman who lives near Lambert
talked about losing her 29-year-old brother to a brain tumor. The
woman said she had neighbors with brain tumors, too—five people in
seven houses.
Other neighbors described digestive problems; many had had their
gallbladders removed. Lambert talked about her thyroid problems, her
dad’s thyroid cancer, her mom’s skin condition. She didn’t mention
that her son and a grandson had attention-deficit disorder, a
condition rampant in her hollow.
Until the meeting, Lambert had always thought discolored water came
with living in a state that had poor infrastructure. When she was
growing up in the coal camp, everyone drank water that smelled bad.
That’s iron or sulfur, people would say—it won’t hurt you.
But things were different now, she realized. Too many people were
sick. The past few summers, Lambert had noticed a red, filmy liquid
oozing from the ground when she gardened. Vegetables were rotting as
soon as they were canned.
Lambert didn’t like the idea that people were thinking “poor old
dumb hillbillies” like her wouldn’t know any better.
Coal companies have two common methods of disposing of the liquid
waste generated during a mining operation. The waste, called slurry,
is a mixture of water, particles, and chemicals formed when coal is
washed. Metals in the slurry—which may include mercury, arsenic,
selenium, and chromium—vary depending on the type and age of the
coal. Companies store the slurry in impoundments, where it’s
intended to stay, or inject it underground into abandoned mine
sites.
In 1972, a slurry impoundment collapsed above Buffalo Creek in Logan
County, West Virginia, flooding nearby communities with more than
130 million gallons of waste and killing 125 people. Nelson and
others are trying to get an elementary school in Raleigh County
relocated because it’s 400 yards from a mining site, down the hill
from an impoundment. If the dam bursts, Nelson says, the children
could die.
It’s slurry injection that has Lambert concerned. Until the early
1990s, coal companies didn’t need a permit to inject slurry
underground, so it’s hard to know how much care was paid to where
they put it. Only recently has the West Virginia Department of
Environmental Protection started studying the impact of
slurry-injection sites.
“The premise was that we’ll inject into these mines because they’re
enclosed spaces, so they’ll hold waste and it won’t matter,” says
Bobby Mitchell. “Everybody was fine with that for a while.”
Then the blasting started. Soon after a mountaintop-mining operation
started near Seth, Lambert and her neighbors noticed changes in
their water. They say the explosions are fracturing layers of earth
underground, allowing slurry to seep into their wells.
Ben Stout, an aquatic biologist at West Virginia’s Wheeling Jesuit
University, tested water in Mingo County, about an hour southwest of
Boone County, and found evidence of heavy metals, including
manganese and lead; a few wells contained aluminum and arsenic.
“Short of crawling in there, you can’t trace it back directly—it’s
underground,” says Stout. “So we’ve gone around and sampled wells
and streams to see if we can trace the pathway. It looks like these
folks have coal slurry in their water supply.”
A lawsuit is under way in Mingo County: More than 700 plaintiffs
allege that they’re sick because of slurry in their water, which
their lawyer, Kevin Thompson, says is coming from underground mine
injection sites near their homes.
Says Stout: “The thing about Mingo County that spooks me is that
those wells were good. Water doesn’t get much better than an
undisturbed Appalachian spring. Slowly they turned bad.”
Stout gets calls from Boone County all the time, but he can’t help
everyone. The state needs a place, he says, where people can send
their water to find out if it’s safe: “We have 110-plus billion
gallons of slurry tucked away in West Virginia. What happens is it
becomes the custody of the citizens of the state. It’s part of our
legacy.”
West Virginia’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has
earmarked money for residents affected by pollution from “prelaw”
abandoned mines. Those are mines built before the Surface Mining
Control and Reclamation Act of 1977, when the government started
regulating and monitoring strip-mine activity.
Prior to that, coal companies didn’t have to clean up after
themselves: They could dispose of slurry without accounting for it,
sometimes in creeks and streams. They weren’t required to reclaim
the mountaintops they’d disturbed; now companies seeking mining
permits have to present plans for reusing the land.
Because many of the companies that operated prelaw mines are out of
business, the DEP oversees the sites. If there’s proof that a
community’s water supply is being contaminated by old mines, the
department uses earmarked funds to build new water lines. The
challenge for residents such as Lambert is proving that mining is to
blame.
A few weeks after they gathered at the church last fall, Lambert,
Nelson, and others traveled to the state capital for a meeting at
the governor’s office. They showed their water samples and
photographs to an aide and to Stephanie Timmermeyer, secretary of
the DEP. They asked for emergency water.
Timmermeyer explained that a study was under way. Until the
investigation was complete, she said, there was little she could
do—the DEP is responsible only for water issues directly related to
mining.
Timmermeyer, who resigned recently, says engineers are focusing on
abandoned mines as a possible cause for the contamination. They’re
also looking at active mining sites nearby: If a coal company
knowingly damages someone’s water supply, that company has to
provide an alternative source of water.
Randy Huffman, the former DEP mining director who succeeded
Timmermeyer as secretary in May, says the department is still trying
to understand what slurry does underground, but he doesn’t think the
blasts from mountaintop-mining sites are sending liquid waste into
water wells—as Lambert and her neighbors believe.
“We’ve done research on the impact of blasting,” says Huffman. “The
shock waves—the sound waves that come off of a blast—typically
radiate laterally, and you don’t get the downward force. You don’t
get the impact directly underneath.”
Lambert and her neighbors aren’t eager to single out company names.
Some residents are quick to say they aren’t coal-bashing. A teacher
says coal companies do a lot for her school—fixing up parking lots,
supplying computers, and giving out holiday gift certificates for
staff. She doesn’t want trouble. “In coal country, they will take
you to court and sue you good if you talk about their business in a
slanderous way,” says one resident.
Terry Keith, whose house is ten minutes from Lambert’s, is worried
about her grandchildren. She lives with her son and daughter-in-law.
She babysits their two-year-old triplets every day while they’re at
work. Before she knew better, she was using tap water in their
formula. She still cooks and does dishes with the water because it
costs too much not to.
Someone from the local health department came to test Keith’s water
but checked only for coliform bacteria and E. coli; testing for
metals is too expensive. Keith says the woman who came over told her
she wouldn’t bathe babies in the water. “What are we supposed to
do?” says Keith, who lost her husband in a mining accident 20 years
ago.
The Boone County Commission, a government agency, is supplying city
water at a community center about ten miles from Keith’s house;
residents bring their own jugs. She says she can’t just pack up the
triplets and drive 30 minutes for water. What about the elderly, she
asks, and the people who can’t afford cars?
When they met with the local water company in January, some of the
Prenter residents were told it could take at least three years to
get access to city water. Lambert held up her water sample and asked
a company employee if he’d like a drink.
Lambert and her neighbors waited months to hear from the DEP. The
testing found no direct link between coal mining and their water
problems.
DEP secretary Randy Huffman visited Lambert’s home in May. He
brought someone from the Department of Health and Human Resources
with him.
“In their frustration, they are looking at the state and saying,
‘How can you not help us when you know we have a problem and you
know there’s coal mining close by and you know there’s underground
injection close by?’ ” he says. “We’re not finished with our
investigation. . . . We’re actually trying to make that connection.”
If they keep looking, Lambert says, they’ll find something.
A friend of Lambert’s, Patty Sebok, gives residents tips on writing
letters to politicians and newspaper editors. Check your grammar and
punctuation, Sebok says, and tell your story.
“I read that there is a lot of money appropriated for water
projects. I pray—and I do mean pray—that they see it in their heart
to send some of it our way,” Lambert wrote to Congressman Nick
Rahall. “It is getting worse every day.”
Rahall, whose office said he was unavailable for an interview for
this article, replied to Lambert that he had contacted the West
Virginia Public Service Commission and the Bureau of Public Health
on her behalf. Lambert says she got a similar response from Senator
Robert Byrd, who said, “Coal turns on the lights in the Capitol!”
during a 1999 rally on the Hill after a court ruling against
mountaintop mining.
George Davis of Marshall University says politicians in West
Virginia have always worked hard to make sure mountaintop-mining
regulations weren’t strengthened any more than they had to be. “It’s
a balancing act between doing what’s right for the environment and
the people who live there and for economic development,” says Davis.
“Coal is still the biggest game in town. They’re not going to do
anything that’s going to in any way hamper that industry.”
That doesn’t mean politicians don’t care about the environment.
Congressman Rahall spearheaded legislation to expand the Abandoned
Mine Reclamation program, which helps protect citizens affected by
abandoned sites. Senator Jay Rockefeller, whose staff said he was
unavailable for an interview, is pushing for federal investments in
research on and commercial deployment of carbon capture and
sequestration, technology that would allow coal-fired power plants
to inject CO2 underground rather than release it into the
atmosphere.
But if they want to be reelected, Davis says, they’ll do what’s best
for coal.
“They’re all going to say, ‘We want the Clean Water Act enforced’ or
‘We want the toughest pollution regulations possible,’ ” says Davis.
“But when an instance comes up where they have to make the decision,
are we going to listen to the citizens who say their water’s
polluted or the businesses that say they’re providing jobs for West
Virginia? More often than not, the latter win.”
Lambert and her neighbors think the situation is simple: Their water
is contaminated, and people are sick. She recently sent out an
e-mail that included an invitation to her congressman: “Dear Mr.
Rahall, I would like to invite you to dinner at my home. I am
cooking a wonderful meal with our well water.” When Bobby Mitchell
went door to door, 20 of 35 people using wells reported digestive
problems—cramping, internal bleeding, intestinal disease. One man
said a doctor found arsenic in his blood and asked if the man’s wife
could be poisoning him. Mitchell says a nurse is looking into the
number of miscarriages in the area.
But a direct link is hard to prove. West Virginia isn’t known for
its healthy habits: The state has the nation’s second-highest
obesity and smoking rates. And lots of people have spent years in
the mines. When epidemiologists research health-related
“clusters”—cases suspected of being related—they often find that the
apparent association disappears.
“It’s never quite as simple as it looks,” says Tee Guidotti, chair
of George Washington University’s Department of Environmental and
Occupational Health. “There are very often underlying risk factors
that are at play in the community, all of which have to be
examined.”
Patty Sebok didn’t realize how much went into an epidemiological
study when she asked Celeste Monforton, a research associate in
public health at GW, for help. Monforton, who used to work in mine
safety, was sympathetic to Sebok’s struggle. She started asking
questions: How long had the people with brain tumors lived on their
property? What type of tumors did they have? When were they
diagnosed?
She’d give Sebok guidance, she said, but she couldn’t do a study
herself. She didn’t have the resources—including a hydrologist,
geologist, and statistician. She’d need to investigate the water in
other mining communities, too, for comparison.
“I’d love to have the money to really get to the bottom of it,” she
says. “The question is who would pay it.”
What Happened to the Mountains?
Night in the coal fields is pitch-black. To get to Maria Gunnoe’s
house, Chuck Nelson pulls into a long, muddy drive and parks when
the road ends at a creek. He walks across a bridge and follows the
train tracks before walking up a hill to a small ranch-style house.
At night the mountains loom in silence, and every day there are
earth-shaking blasts over the ridge line. Since the coal companies
began mountaintop mining several years ago, Gunnoe, the 39-year-old
activist, decided she wasn’t going to sit back and allow the
destruction. She was proud that her father and grandfather were coal
miners, but this kind of mining was different—they were taking the
tops of mountains off, not digging underneath them.
Gunnoe has testified in court against the practice despite physical
threats from men working at nearby mining sites. “It’s bad because
her kids got to go to school around here,” says Nelson.
A friend of Gunnoe’s 12-year-old daughter was forbidden to visit
their house. In coal country, Gunnoe and Nelson are considered
“extremists.” For protection, Coal River Mountain Watch, one of the
groups Nelson works with, keeps its office doors locked if someone
is working alone.
In Gunnoe’s garage, an old TV set plays live video feeds of her
house. One of Gunnoe’s dogs was shot by a disgruntled miner, she
believes.
“Right here is an aerial photo of my home,” she says, pointing to a
picture of a small house tucked into a hillside. Over the ridge,
there are no trees, just a moonscape—holes in the earth as far as
the eye can see: “That was called Island Creek Mountain.” She points
to a ridge line where she and fellow activists stopped one valley
from being filled. But Gunnoe can’t keep up—she says she saw about
40 mountaintop-mining permits listed in the local paper last week.
“This place was paradise,” she says. “They’ve turned it into hell.”
Maria Gunnoe’s property has been flooded nine times since coal
companies started blasting near her home in 2000. In 2003, the tiny
creek that flows down from the mountains grew into a 70-foot-wide
wall of water.
“It sounded like a train coming with ten more behind it,” she says.
In heavy rains, Gunnoe and her family go to sleep dressed. The time
it takes to put on shoes can make a difference between life and
death. During the 2003 flood, the Gunnoe family was trapped in the
house for 15 hours. When the water subsided, they found their front
yard had washed away.
Gunnoe has lived in this modest house all her life—she left only to
attend college—and her grandfather lived there decades before that.
Southern West Virginia has always been prone to floods, but not like
this.
After the flood in 2003, Gunnoe followed the stream up the hollow to
see where all that water had come from. Close to the stream’s
headwaters, her path was newly blocked by a big wall of rock and
dirt. “I had no idea what was going on,” she says.
Gunnoe had discovered a valley fill, waste from mountaintop mining
that “fills” the space between two mountains. SouthWings, a
nonprofit conservation organization, flew her over the mining site.
Gunnoe couldn’t believe her eyes. Behind her home, 1,100 acres of
mountains had been stripped. She could see the fill and two sediment
ponds. “The drainage for this entire hollow is coming off of a
mining operation,” she says.
Gunnoe didn’t think the flooding was an act of God, as mine
engineers like to say; she believed it was manmade.
Bill Raney, head of the West Virginia Coal Association, says that
those who think mountaintop mining is destroying the environment
need to take a closer look.
“The fellows that are doing that kind of mining grew up in the
vicinity of where they’re mining—they’re not going to do anything to
affect the streams they fished in as young men,” Raney says.
“They’re certainly not going to do anything to affect the mountains
they hunted on.”
Raney says people don’t understand that coal companies spend months
doing geological testing and collecting water data before they mine
mountaintops. The problem, he explains, is that environmental groups
often publish photographs of active construction sites, instead of
reclaimed mountaintops, to draw on people’s emotions.
“What you have to do,” he says, “is look through the operation and
say, ‘What is that site going to look like when they finish?’ ”
Raney says that every mining site is reclaimed—a process that starts
immediately after coal removal. Some are reforested or revegetated;
others become development opportunities—schools, housing, shopping
centers—in turn creating jobs.
Some residents want the mountains they’ve always known. And
activists such as Gunnoe argue that coal companies can never truly
restore the land they’ve mined. Appalachia is one of the most
biodiverse regions in the world; the temperate hardwood forest is
filled with reptiles, birds, and aquatic insects. According to
Ilovemountains.org—a Web site maintained by seven grassroots
organizations including Coal River Mountain Watch—when mountains are
reclaimed, most sites receive “little more than a spraying of exotic
grass seed.”
Raney sees it differently: “It’s somewhere between 1 and 1½ percent
of the land mass of West Virginia that’s been disturbed by mining,
and all that land is reclaimed. We have more forest land today than
we did 20 years ago. We’re getting so much better at
reforestation—we’re doing it with a variety of species.”
Raney admits that there are times coal companies make mistakes. He
says those are fixed quickly: “The ultimate intent is that when
you’re finished mining, you will probably not know it’s been
mined—and the water quality will be every bit as good as before.”
Coal companies require a permit authorization from the US Army Corps
of Engineers before they can discharge dredge or fill material into
US waters. Until 2003, the corps routinely used “nationwide 21”
permits, developed by corps headquarters, which are distributed when
a proposed project is expected to have a minimal impact on the
environment. Now most surface-mining operations require individual
permits; some smaller projects, with less of an environmental
effect, still receive nationwide 21 permits.
Jim Hecker, an attorney with DC-based Public Justice, was shocked
when he saw what was happening with the permitting process in West
Virginia in the late 1990s: “They were claiming that these huge
mountaintop mines—which cumulatively covered 50 or so square miles,
destroyed thousands of acres of forests and hundreds of miles of
streams—had no significant impact, which was ridiculous.”
Hecker and a young lawyer in West Virginia, Joe Lovett, began
challenging the permitting process in US District Court—a legal
fight detailed in Michael Shnayerson’s Coal River—charging that
dumping mining waste into streams was a violation of the Clean Water
Act. The lawyers said companies were given permits to fill valleys
without preparing a thorough environmental-impact statement. Hecker
remembers a deposition in which a permit supervisor testified that
his agency had processed thousands of permits for the industry—and
not one surface-mining permit was denied.
Hecker discovered what Maria Gunnoe already knew: It was hard to
stop a coal company in West Virginia.
Says Hecker: “Except for former secretary of state Ken Hechler, we
have not had a single elected individual in West Virginia support
our case in the last decade.”
The courts have handed some victories to Hecker and Lovett. The duo
stopped a permit for the largest mine proposed in the state, a
5,000-acre tract that would have filled several miles of streams.
The EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers volunteered to conduct a
thorough environmental-impact study of mountaintop mining as part of
a settlement agreement in a permit-related lawsuit. The lawyers have
made it harder for coal companies to get large-scale mining permits.
But the industry has flexed its muscle in return. Its lawyers don’t
have to think twice about an appeal, making it easy to exhaust a
nonprofit attorney’s budget. Appeals go to the conservative Fourth
Circuit Court in Richmond, where many of Hecker and Lovett’s
favorable rulings have been reversed. Several judges on the Fourth
Circuit have had to recuse themselves because of ties to the coal
industry.
Some residents say Don Blankenship, the CEO of Massey Energy—the
largest coal producer in Central Appalachia—is more powerful than
the state’s governor. After rulings unfavorable to the industry a
few years ago, Blankenship helped fund a lawyer’s campaign to unseat
a judge who’d often ruled against him. Blankenship’s candidate won.
The coal industry gave more than $380,000 to George W. Bush’s
presidential campaigns, according to the Center for Responsive
Politics. Before the environmental-impact statement on mountaintop
mining was released, Hecker says, the administration tinkered with
it.
“There’s a lot of good science in the statement,” says Hecker. “But
none of the science worked its way into the recommendations and
conclusions. Unfortunately, it was totally corrupted by the Bush
administration, who took it over and turned it into a document to
streamline permitting rather than one controlling environmental
damage.”
Valley fills are a part of mountaintop mining. If you blast apart a
mountain, you need a place to put the dirt. Geologist Alan Stagg
says that if valley fills are constructed correctly, they’re
engineering marvels that filter rainwater into terraces, slowing
down its movement.
But valley fills are worrisome to some residents. Above Maria
Gunnoe’s home are two sediment ponds, standard wastewater sites used
in mountaintop mining. The ponds are formed when a dam cuts off a
stream and collects the water before sending it downstream. Waste
sinks to the bottom before the water is flushed out—in Gunnoe’s
case, she says, down the creek in front of her house. A heavy rain
may fill a sediment pond higher than capacity and cause it to
overflow.
When she was a kid, Gunnoe would drink straight from the creek in
front of her house. Today she says she sometimes sees murky black
water flow by.
The EPA says in its environmental assessment of mountaintop mining
that “mining-related flooding issues were generally found to be the
result of problems associated with implementation and maintenance of
the approved mining plan and not the mine plan itself.” In other
words, valley fills work as long as they’re done correctly.
Who makes sure valley fills are done in accordance with
surface-mining laws? West Virginia’s Department of Environmental
Protection—which admitted in January that a computer glitch had
prevented the department from receiving coal companies’ discharge
monitoring reports for five years. In that period, Massey Energy had
violated the Clean Water Act 4,100 times. The company had been
discharging elements into rivers and streams at levels that violated
the act.
“The state just stopped enforcing the Clean Water Act for five
years,” says Hecker.
The EPA stepped in, fining Massey $20 million in January, the
largest civil penalty for wastewater-discharge permit violations in
the EPA’s history. Massey also promised to spend $10 million to
enact safety measures so such violations wouldn’t happen again.
As of mid-July, Massey stock was trading at more than $82 a share—up
from nearly $36 a share at the end of 2007. The company produced
more than $2.4 billion in total revenue last year.
Hecker and Lovett decided early on that the only way to stop
mountaintop mining was to stop valley fills. In March 2007, working
with attorneys at DC’s Earthjustice law firm, they won a victory. US
District judge Robert Chambers ruled that the Army Corps of
Engineers’ method for issuing permits for valley fills violated the
Clean Water Act. The corps had argued that if you erased a mile of a
stream, you could resurrect it elsewhere. Chambers ruled there was
little evidence to support that theory. In October, the case was
appealed to the Fourth Circuit in Richmond. An expected May argument
was postponed until September.
If Chambers’s ruling is upheld, the Army Corps of Engineers would
have to apply stricter standards to protect the environment from
stream filling, which could mean fewer valley fills.
Maria Gunnoe, who is involved in the suit, won’t be able to erase
the fill in her hollow, but she can rest knowing that no more
mountains will be destroyed.
“An elder in my community was a veteran of World War II,” she says.
“He tells the story of the pilot that dropped the bomb from the
Enola Gay. He says the pilot looked back and said: ‘Oh, my God—look
at what we’ve done.’ Well, when the politicians look back on what
they’ve allowed to happen to the state of West Virginia, they’re
going to look at this place and say, ‘Oh, my God—look at what we’ve
done.’ ”
Taking the Fight to Washington
Chuck Nelson is walking near the US Capitol on a rainy day in April,
wearing his West Virginia baseball cap. He’s in DC for Mountaintop
Removal Week, when about 100 people from around the country gather
to lobby on the Hill. They wear pins with slogans such as stop
slurry injection and carry photos of the destruction in Appalachia.
“The decisions that control our life are made right here,” Nelson
says. “It makes me a little angry. They have the ability to change
things, and they’re not.”
He’s hoping to help find more cosponsors for the Clean Water
Protection Act, which was introduced in the House of Representatives
last May. The bill would amend the Clean Water Act, clarifying that
fill material cannot include waste. Coal companies would no longer
be allowed legally to pollute waterways. The bill has 146 cosponsors
so far but not one from West Virginia.
Nelson, his wife, and a few others have come from a meeting in
Senator Robert Byrd’s office, where a framed photo on the wall
describes a young Byrd as a “child of the Appalachian coalfields.”
Any meeting in Byrd’s office is big: While the senator can’t
cosponsor the House bill, he has the power to gather support for it
or initiate a companion bill. He’s one of the people residents such
as Maria Lambert are always trying to reach.
The senator wasn’t available today, but Nelson spent more than an
hour with his legislative director, who allowed only West Virginia
residents in the room.
“We get the same answers every time: ‘We’ll talk to Senator Byrd and
see if he can do anything about it,’ ” says Nelson. “They know
what’s happening. It’s just that they’re buddying up with the coal
industry to let them mine the cheapest way.”
Nelson says he told Byrd’s aide that residents in the Prenter area
had well water that looked like coffee—he didn’t bring a sample
because he didn’t think it would get through security—and that
people were dying.
“He’s wanting to know, ‘What can we do to get these people clean
drinking water?’ ” Nelson says. “It’s simple: Quit polluting our
water source.”
Later he finds himself explaining why West Virginians need help from
other parts of the country. “You have to understand how West
Virginia is,” Nelson says. “The industry runs our state.”
Maria Lambert remembers being overwhelmed with emotion when she was
a little girl and the state song, “The West Virginia Hills,” came
on. She also loved hearing “America the Beautiful.” That was when
she thought she was living in the perfect place—when kids played in
the creek and gardens grew. That was when the mountains were an
escape.
When she’s asked why she doesn’t move away, why she stays in a place
that’s causing her so much grief, tears fill Lambert’s eyes. “This
is my home,” she says. “It’s where I was born.”
She’s traveled as far west as Colorado and as far north as Maine,
but she and her husband have never found a place to which they’ve
wanted to move. And they’ve never felt they should have to. “Why
should we leave so they can come in here and destroy everything our
families have worked for our whole lives?” she says.
Nelson says the connection between the people and the land in West
Virginia is something not everyone can understand. Citizens recently
fought to have the state’s welcome message changed from “Open for
Business”—a phrase that Governor Joe Manchin started using on
highway signs a few years ago—back to “Wild and Wonderful.” A
billboard on a mountain road reads:
In God’s hands are the depths of earth
and the mountain peaks also belong to God.
One of Nelson’s friends, Larry Gibson, owns 50 acres that sit on
39 seams of coal. The land is worth millions, he says, but he won’t
sell. He lives in a tiny solar-powered cabin at the top of his
mountain with no running water. His family has been there for a
century—relatives are buried in the soil.
“We’ll get you off this mountain,” he’s been told. “We’ll give you
prosperity.”
There are things, the man says, that are too precious to be bought.
This article first appeared in the
September 2008 issue of The Washingtonian. For more articles
like it, click
here.
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