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.
Outdated limits. West Virginia's coal lies in horizontal seams between the rock, not unlike the fudge of a many-layered cake. To extract it, a mountain's rock has to be split with dynamite. Blasts are made with the same mixture of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and fuel oil used in the bomb that killed 168 people in Oklahoma City two years ago, but the mining explosions are 10 to 100 times stronger. Most of the time they do not exceed legal limits, which are supposed to prevent damaging vibrations at the house nearest the mine. Experts say the limits are outdated because they do not take account of geological differences that can make some houses susceptible to blast damage while similar houses nearby are unaffected.
This problem can be costly and annoying to those living near mine operations. In the southernmost part of the state, between steep mountains containing some of the state's best low-sulfur and high-heat-producing coal, lie the tiny communities of Wharncliffe and Beech Creek. Five years ago, the only mines in the area were a small number of underground shafts. In the era of mountaintop removal, that has changed. Some half-dozen mammoth mines circle the communities' homes, which are a mixture of 50-year-old white and gray cottages, Spanish-style and Tudor houses, and new, double-wide trailers. In these hollows, blasts sound all day, sometimes answering one another from mine to mine.
Mary Farley, 71, lives on $504 a month in a small white house she and her first husband built 47 years ago. It sits at the base of the Mingo Logan Coal Co. mine in Wharncliffe. Farley, who is recovering from open-heart surgery, was delighted when her son installed a new kitchen floor a year ago. Then the blasting began. First the kitchen wall above the sink separated from the ceiling in a 1-inch crack. Next the floor dropped 6 inches in one corner. "I thought the house was coming down on me," she said. State inspectors checked the seismograph records at the mine. "They have the audacity to tell me they are within the legal limits," she says. A spokesman for Mingo Logan also said no violations were found.
Across the mountain in Beech Creek, Freda Simpkins put $100,000 in savings from teaching and her small, local TV franchise into a new brick home with white columns. She has been told by inspectors that the blasts shaking her house are within allowable limits. Shortly after blasting began, however, her well went dry, and the sides of a new well collapsed while being drilled. By the time the replacement was finished in January, she had spent $4,000 on it.
A task force of state and federal mining officials has looked at revising blasting regulations, but its preliminary report suggested no changes should be made. Citizens protested, so the task force is re-examining its position. Ben Greene, president of the industry's West Virginia Mining & Reclamation Association, noted that the regulations were written with 20-year-old technology, and smaller blasts, in mind. "Maybe it's not the best in 1997," he says.
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