Sylvester, WV
Appalachian Wilderness Under Threat from Mining
by Sandra Sleight-Brennan
“It’s a tragedy, an Appalachian Tragedy, what is happening in the coalfields now,” said Julia Bonds, a member of a group of West Virginia residents called Coal River Mountain Watch. “You drive the main roads and you see a mountain to the left and a mountain to the right. The problem is that you can’t see what’s behind that mountain.”What’s behind is a different story entirely. The landscape changes from lush, tree-covered mountains to a barren moonscape - the result of a mining practice called mountaintop removal.
Julia’s home, in the southern West Virginia coalfields, is one of the places where such mining is most common.“See those trucks down there?” said Virginia Rorrer, another resident, pointing into the distance at a group of six dumper trucks, looking like miniature toys. “Those trucks have tires that are almost three meters tall.” The scale made it almost impossible to comprehend.
To date, approximately 162,000 hectares, an area half the size of Luxembourg, have been flattened by mountaintop removal, or, as the mining industry now wants it to be called, ‘mountaintop mining’. Hundreds of metres of mountain are blown away in order to get at the thin seams of coal underneath. Once the coal is removed, the excess debris is dumped into nearby valleys and streams. Hundreds of thousands of hectares and over 700 km of streams have been covered by this ‘valley fill’.All this is done with the approval of the US Army Corps of Engineers and the state’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), the two regulatory agencies charged with protecting the state’s air and water and carrying out federal laws.
West Virginia is home to some of the richest mineral resources in the Appalachian mountain chain. The mountains here have been mined for over 100 years. Most families here have several generations of miners; many can trace their roots back to nearly 200 years. In the late 1800’s, their mineral rights to vast tracks of land were bought by out-of-state industrialists for a few dollars. Many people became miners to make a living and thousands died of miner’s diseases - black lung and silicosis. Deep mining, where shafts are dug into the ground, was replaced in the 1950s and 60s by strip mining, where large machines and blasting are used to eat into the side of a hill to get at the coal. For the past 20 to 30 years, companies have been required to reclaim and restore to the original contours the area they strip-mine. Yet even after all that time it is rare to see trees growing on this ‘restored’ landscape.
West Virginia is one of the poorest American states: it ranks 49th out of 50 states in household income, and many argue that this is partly due to an over-reliance on extractive industries such as coal and timber, and absentee ownership of those industries. The coal industry claims that mountaintop mining is benefiting the mountain-locked region by creating flat areas to bring new businesses and industries to this poverty-ridden state. Yet in the 30 years that coal companies have been levelling mountains only two per cent of the sites have been used for any development. Residents argue that in any case they are paying too high a price - their communities, homes and water supplies are being irreversibly damaged. The blasting is fracturing aquifers and the water table is dropping. And dust is coating the landscape. When it rains, inches of rock dust turn hard and kill vegetation.
Two years ago, citizen’s groups hauled the DEP and Army Corps of Engineers to the court, and in May the Federal District Judge ruled that the agencies must stop issuing new permits for mountaintop mining when there is no use designated for the valley fill associated with it. The ruling stated that the permits ran counter to the Clean Water Act’s goal to restore and maintain the chemical, physical and biological integrity of America’s waters. The coal industry denounced the ruling, saying it would mean the loss of 32,000 miners’ jobs in Kentucky and West Virginia over the next five years. “It used to be that when a coal company came in the community boomed,” says Larry Gibson, a Coal River area resident. “Now they move everybody out. They make it hard for people to live there. The community aren’t getting the profit; it’s just a handful of people at the top.”In fact, the people in the coalfields see less money from mountaintop removal than do their neighbours in the larger cities of West Virginia. Coal companies pay a severance tax on coal, which is collected by the state and then distributed to communities on a per capita basis. This means that the larger towns, which are typically farther from the coalfields, see more of the money than do the small communities who live with the disruption on a day-to-day basis.
Take for instance the town called Sylvester (population 300), where a coal-preparation plant crushes coal brought in from the surrounding mines.
Pauline Canterberry, 72, says that by August this year, the town had received only $300 from the severance tax. Yet in the past two years, Sylvester has lost its well water and is now coated with dust. “The state thinks it can’t do without it and they’re permitting a part of the state to be destroyed for the economy of the state,” she says.In March, the national Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) privately briefed US President George W Bush’s officials on the issues surrounding mountaintop mining. The contents of the briefing were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by Trial Lawyers for Public Justice and the Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment. The documents say the area is home to “some of the best forest habitat in the world” and goes on to describe wholesale deforestation, toxic pollution, burying of streams and other environmental destruction being caused by mountaintop mining.
A scientific study by the EPA states, “Mountaintop mining operations in the Appalachian coalfields involve fundamental changes to the region’s landscape and terrestrial wildlife habitats.”
Larry Gibson of Kayford Mountain knows these changes well. His ancestors have been there for over 200 years - now he is the only resident, his 30 hectares of land virtually surrounded by more than 5,000 hectares of mountaintop removal.
“I was born in 1946; this mountaintop farm was thriving then,” he says. “All this land was filled with corn and sweet potatoes and that bank right there had honeybees. My daughter was born in 1987. When she was born, the mountains were gone.”
Sandra Sleight-Brennan writes for the Panos Institute
