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.
Digging in. After blasting loosens the rock, shovels and drag lines taller than most city buildings attack the mountain. Once the coal is separated out, the machines leave in their wake 50-foot-high piles of broken rock. Then yellow trucks, each as high as a house, dump what once was mountain into adjacent valleys. This is known as a valley fill. Large mines may be surrounded by nearly a dozen valley fills, some 1,000 feet wide and a mile long and as much as 500 feet deep, ending with a small silt collection pond. Residents worry that these fills, whose slopes have replaced rain-absorbing woodlands, will worsen flooding. Indeed, two months ago, in the tiny community of White Oak, a flood came roaring down a "filled" valley.
White Oak lies 20 miles northwest of Beckley. On one end is a 100-year-old church with log siding painted black and white. Houses and gardens nestle near the creek as the road winds a mile back into the hollow. The tops of both forks of White Oak Creek end at mining operations a mile farther up the mountain. One side of the mountain has been prepared for mining by clear-cutting timber. The other side, which also drains into White Oak Creek, has two valley fills.
On the night of June 1, a hard rain washed away the new plantings on the sides of one valley fill and pushed rocks the size of table tops out of a drainage channel between its two ponds. Water spilled over the side of the lower pond and sped down the access road. The force of that flow coupled with raging waters inthe stream washed away the road. At the bottom of the hollow, creek water rose to 5 feet. Driving home from church, Susan Shea, a mother of three, and James Stover, her 15-year-old neighbor, left the car in a desperate attempt to reach their houses. As the road gave way, they were swept into the creek. Their bodies were found more than a mile away.
Back in 1977, when the federal law was passed, valley fills usually took the form of short, terraced steps at the start of valleys. But with the massive amount of rock being taken off in mountaintop removal operations, this design takes too much time and money. So material is simply dumped over the side of the mountain, with some drainage ditches added. Neither the state nor the federal government has taken a hard look at the long-term impact of redesigning the watersheds of entire mountain ranges. John Ailes, chief of the Office of Mining and Reclamation in the state's Division of Environmental Protection, says the spring floods have prompted the state to re-examine its valley-fill rules and enforcement and to look hard at watershed drainage designs and ditching systems. The federal office doesn't have the time or personnel to devote to this issue.
Flooding from heavy rains isn't the only damage that mining does to the state's streams and rivers. Already the fills have buried more than 100 miles of streambed, estimates Cindy Rank, an antimining activist at the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, and more will be eliminated as the mines grow.
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