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.
Black water. West Virginia's waterways are among the state's most valuable tourist attractions. Canoeists and fishermen come for the pleasures of rivers meandering under umbrellas of green or dancing in sunlight. On Saturday morning, June 21, John Walls was set to host a group of canoeists from Ohio on the Little Coal River, about 25 miles south of Charleston near Julian. After one look at the black water, they went home. He said he lost $2,500 in business that weekend. Two days earlier, Arch Coal's Hobet 21 mine had pumped coal slurry from the bottom of a settling pond for a coal processing plant into Slippery Gut Creek, which feeds Little Coal River. Mine officials said the drainage system malfunctioned. But former Hobet 21 employees and those who use the river say pumping from ponds into streams is a periodic practice, especially over weekends. In the past five years, records show, mines have been cited by state authorities more than 3,500 times for sediment problems and exceeding limits on discharges of silt and chemicals.
In many coalfield communities, the purity and availability of drinking water are keen concerns. Blasting and shearing mountains have added to the damage done to underground aquifers by deep mines. Some of the worst water problems exist at the head of Buffalo Creek, near Lorado. For more than a century, the Gibson and Osborne families have lived in the handful of houses that were spared in a devastating 1972 flood of Buffalo Creek when a dam broke at a 550-foot-wide coal slurry pond and swept away houses more than 15 miles downstream, killing 125 people. (This flood brought about the 1977 federal surface-mining law.) Now the area is surrounded by mountaintop mines and honeycombed with deep mines. About eight years ago, some two dozen wells that had always been adequate went dry. The mine agreed to pay for drilling some, and homeowners had to foot the bill for the rest. A representative of Eastern Associated, which owns the mines, said the company had done more than the law requires.
For Larry Gibson, even more irritating than the drying up of wells is mining close to family cemeteries. The Princess Beverly Mine is so close to his family graveyard atop Kayford Mountain that a mine worker regularly stops by to collect rocks thrown by the blasting. Looking northward at the mountaintop removal, Gibson says, "You used to look up at the hill. Now you look down on it."
Cleaning up. When the mountaintops are gone and the valleys are filled, mine operators begin reclamation. Some reclamation jobs are done better than others. A mine above one side of Buffalo Creek is an example of the "minimalist" approach to restoration. The ground crunches underfoot. Sparse grass growing on black coal shale stretches a mile on land that looks more like Kansas than Appalachia. There are no hills, no topsoil, and no trees. More comprehensive reclamation has taken place at the Arch Coal's Samples mine near Cabin Creek, where some hills have been rebuilt and ponds added for wildlife. "It used to be the public perception that mining created problems. It doesn't have to be that way in the modern time of reclamation," said Blair Gardner, Arch's assistant general counsel, while touring the mine in April. "I believe in God, so I am reluctant to say we are improving what the creator made. But more pertinent is, are we doing something inherentlygood? And I think we are."
advertisement
