Shear Madness
In pursuit of the nation's highest-grade coal, vast mining operations are taking the tops right off of West Virginia's mountains. Mining companies say this is good for the state, but people who live near the mines have a different view.
Damages severe. But the costs are indisputable, and the damage to the landscape is startling to those who have never seen a mountain destroyed. Topographic and landscaping changes leave some regions more vulnerable to floods. Thirty floods have occurred in the past two years in areas where watersheds were bared and redesigned, and several people have lost their lives in such floods. A 1994 survey by the state Department of Water Resources found that all but 24 percent of the state's streams and rivers are polluted. Much of this--no one knows exactly how much--is caused by surface mining. One federal mining expert says that virtually every stream at a mountaintop removal site becomes contaminated with sediment from the mine. The impact on wildlife is incalculable. And state employment records suggest the jobs argument is not very compelling. Mountaintop removal accounts for only 4,317 workers in the state--less than 1 percent of its job force. Overall, mining employment in the state has fallen from 130,000 in the 1940s and 1950s to just 22,000 last year.
Whatever the role of mining in the state's overall economy, its impact on nearby communities is devastating. Dynamite blasts needed to splinter rock strata are so strong they crack the foundations and walls of houses: Homeowners filed 287 blasting complaints with the state in the past year. Trucks full of coal rumble past some people's front porches at the rate of 20 an hour, 24 hours a day. Mining dries up an average of 100 wells a year and contaminates water in others.
Exactly 20 years ago, President Jimmy Carter signed the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act. The nation's most important mining law, it nonetheless is largely silent about mountaintop removal. When written, it was designed to prevent contamination of water and damage to houses from blasting done in strip mining, which then only skimmed small swaths off the sides of mountains. (Strip mining removes veins of coal already near the surface; mountaintop removal can involve removing 500 feet or more of the summit to get at buried seams of coal.) The 1977 statute also requires that mined land be restored to its previous use and contours, but waivers are often given. When the law was written, some West Virginians, like then Rep. Ken Hechler, tried to prohibit mountaintop removal, arguing that it would destroy the landscape. Their efforts failed, and an amendment allowing it, if granted a variance, was added by Sen. Wendell Ford of Kentucky, where small-scale mountaintop mining was commonplace. But no one anticipated the enormity of mountaintop operations in the 1990s.
Mountaintop removal began on a small scale in West Virginia in the late 1960s. But it has become the dominant coal-mining technique there in the 1990s for several reasons: Americans' demand for electricity has jumped 70 percent in the past 20 years; the demand for clean-burning, low-sulfur coal by utilities shot up after Congress passed the 1990 Clean Air Act; and the development of massive "drag line" equipment has made it possible to shear off mountaintops to get at multiple seams of coal (graphic, Page 34). The amount of coal extracted from West Virginiaincreased from 131 million tons in 1986 to a record 174 million tons last year. And the value of this coal last year--$4.4 billion--was greater than that of coal mined in any other state.
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