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.
Unseasonably cool air had already settled in the hollows of Blair, W.Va., when flames shot from a small white house one Sunday evening in mid-April. Firefighters arrived, but no one rushed in to save belongings. There weren't any.
As the fire burned, high on the mountain above appeared another glow--the lights from a giant shovel with an arm 20 stories high. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, the $100 million machine gobbles up the mountain to unearth coal deposits. Within three years, the top third of the 840-foot-high peak will be sheared off.
Tommy Moore, Johnny Rollins, and Charles "Mushie" Bella Jr., who live nearby, watched the house burn. It was easy for them to see a connection between the burning house and the giant shovel. The mining operation has bombarded the houses below with dust, noise, and occasional rocks. So rather than fight constant complaints from homeowners, Arch Coal Inc., the mine's owner, has bought more than half of the 231 houses in Blair through a subsidiary. Vacated and quickly stripped, at least two dozen have been burned down by one or more arsonists.
Seventy-six years ago, Blair Mountain was a battleground in the bitter attempt to unionize underground mines. Now the descendants of those miners are fighting a new battle. They are losing their mountains and valleys. An aerial inspection suggests that 15 percent of the mountaintops in the south-central part of the state--and perhaps 25 percent in some places there--are being leveled in massive strip-mining operations with the straightforward name of "mountaintop removal." The valleys between them are filled with the debris. Permits have beengranted by the state for 512 square miles of West Virginia to be surface-mined. Most of that--though no one knows exactly how much--is for mountaintop removal. State survey maps show huge swaths permitted for surface mining. Indeed, if the mining continues unabated, environmentalists predict that in two decades half the peaks of southern West Virginia's blue-green skyline will be gone.
Mountaintop removal is also practiced in southeastern Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, southwestern Virginia, and western Pennsylvania. But the impact has been especially intense in West Virginia. Its southern mountains are loaded with the low-sulfur coal that electric utilities seek because it burns efficiently and produces less pollution than other coal. The state's weak environmental laws and lax regulators are a magnet for mining--and have made its effect more profound.
The coal companies do not dispute that their practices are changing the landscape. They say, essentially, that they are doing the least-destructive job that they can to extract a resource the whole world craves. They note that once they have flattened the mountains and filled in the adjacent valleys, they reclaim the scarred landscape in accordance with environmental laws. The ground is smoothed, and grass, shrubs, and small trees are planted. In the best reclamations, the land is contoured and waterfowl ponds added. Moreover, the coal companies and some state officials note that strip mining provides high-paying jobs--weekly pay averages $922. And some contend that West Virginians are better off with their mountains flattened--several dozen buildings, including four schools and three jails, have been built on them so far.
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.
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.
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.
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."
Hardly any mining firm's reclamation projects abide by regulations requiring that the land be returned to its premining use, usually hardwood forests on steep hillsides. The law says waivers to that rule should be granted only if there are exceptional circumstances that make it hard to restore the original mountain contour. But waivers that allow mining companies to change the use of the land to "wildlife habitat" and forgo rebuilding the mountainside are routinely granted. Coal lobbyist Greene acknowledges that growing hardwood forests is very difficult, since seedlings have trouble taking root in the reconstructed land.
Coal-field residents look to state and federal agencies to protect them from environmental ravages. In fact, West Virginia's Division of Environmental Protection has increased the number of mine inspectors it employs from 48 in 1988 to 100 now. However, critics argue that chronic abuses by mining firms persist because the DEP's regulations are outdated, its enforcement muscle is puny, and it is constantly reacting to problems rather than heading them off.
Low fines. Perhaps the most striking example of these problems is the DEP's performance in fining the mining firms that violate federal and state laws. An examination of violation and complaint files for all West Virginia mines shows most fines to be low, even for seemingly serious violations. The average fine is about $800. While the maximum can be $5,000 per incident, nearly 80 percent of fines recommended by inspectors are reduced by DEP assessment officers after mines protest. One mine, Arch Coal Inc.'s Apogee Mine, was initially assessed a $4,054 penalty after a blast loosened a boulder, which rolled into a house near Buffalo Creek and caused it to burn to the ground. After the firm appealed, the fine was reduced to $1,013. The mining company paid for the residents' belongings; it owned the house.
The 1977 law that set up the federal Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement [OSM] was drafted in a way that was supposed to shore up lax enforcement of environmental laws by states. But OSM has been hampered by cuts that trimmed its operating budget by 30 percent and prompted the West Virginia office to cut its staff of inspectors from 11 to eight. Records show inspections dropped from 700 in 1994 to 314 in 1996.
It is a fact that coal companies have been a political power in West Virginia for generations. They gave nearly $500,000 to Gov. Cecil Underwood's campaign last year. A study by West Virginia Citizen Action Group found that all 17 state senators elected last year got some campaign money from mining firms. Fifteen got a substantial amount, including Senate president Earl Ray Tomblin, who received 16 percent of his campaign funds from coal interests. This support often translates into favorable legislation, environmental lobbyists say, such as this year's cut in the tax on sales from thin seams of coal. And what coal interests don't get in the legislature, they can sometimes get administratively. On the last night of this year's legislative session, for example, the Senate didn't have time to schedule a vote that would reduce from $200,000 to $100,000 an acre the payments coal companies had to make for covering streams with a valley fill. But Greene is lobbying the DEP director hard to make this change administratively.
Nowhere are the failings of the regulatory apparatus clearer than in arson-plagued Blair. The drag line can work within 300 feet of homes. Blasting raises clouds of dust. Even when DEP officials stiffened the dust rules, state records show, the dust continued, leading residents to complain. "It's intolerable; I don't blame them," DEP's Ailes said. "If we knew then [when we gave the mine permit] what we know now, we could have dealt with it better. . . . We may end up limiting areas of mining in the future."
The future, however, will be too late for Charles Bella Jr. The 68-year-old saved his salary from working in the mines to build a new ranch house with blue siding on Blair's main road. But months of black dust on his white porch were too much. He sold in early April to the real-estate subsidiary of Arch Coal--and agreed not to protest the coal firm's application to mine yet another mountain nearby. "I wish I hadn't done it," he said as he watched his former neighbor's house burn that April night.
West Virginia coal mining [Map is not available.] Areas of coal mining: Julian, Blair, Wharncliffe, Beech Creek, Cabin Creek,(r)NJ¯ Montgomery, Kayford Mountain, White Oak, Beckley, Lorado (Buffalo Creek) Source: Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement
Taking the mountaintops Coal has been mined in West Virginia for more than a century. In the late 1800s, many landowners sold the rights to the rich minerals beneath their property for several hundred dollars an acre. Since then, coal has been extracted through mineshafts, by auger and contour mining, and now by mountaintop removal.
Deep mining: 1860-present Digging deep. Originally, coal was mined by digging into the sides of mountains to reach the horizontal seams. This underground mining--first done with pick and shovel and now with machinery--still produces at least half the coal mined today.
Auger and surface mining: 1970s-present Augering in. In the 1970s, miners used bulldozers to dig around mountainsides, creating ledges as platforms for operations. Then augers drilled deep inside to bore out the coal. An auger at work. Augers drill up to 250 feet into a coal seam. Auger holes can be up to 4 feet in diameter.
Mountaintop mining and draglining: Present Mountaintop removal. Today, mining companies use a powerful machine called a dragline that can be as high as 20 stories to remove completely the top of a mountain to get at the coal below. The dragline. This $100 million machine weighs 8 million pounds and contains enough steel to build 2,700 cars. An enormous extension cord feeds it up to $50,000 worth of electricity a month. The bucket. The dragline's bucket could hold 26 Ford Escorts. It bites off 110 cubic yards of earth in a single scoop. Blasting out the coal. Once the topsoil is removed, the rock above the coal seams, called overburden, is blasted into pieces and removed by a dragline and dump trucks. The exposed coal is then blasted and removed. Acid mine pollution. During mining, minerals in rocks oxidize and release iron, manganese, and other metals, which can drain into streams, turning them orange. Valley fill. Excess rock and earth are dumped into valleys, covering the streams. Serious flooding can result from the runoff of unforested hillsides.
Reforestation. Bared hillsides are supposed to be reseeded with trees. But some say it is difficult to grow hardwoods on the mined land. More success has been found with softwoods.
[Illustration labels]: Coal; Bulldozer; Auger; Dragline; One-story house and dragline to scale; Topsoil; Rock For more information, see U.S. News Online (http://www.usnews.com).
This story appears in the August 11, 1997 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.