Bush Rule Changes Boost Mountaintop Removal Mining
In the bad old days, rural people with limited ways to make a living were told they had a choice: jobs or a healthy environment. But even that heartbreaking choice has disappeared for West Virginia's coal country residents.Key changes in coal mining regulations by the Bush administration have fueled a boom in a devastating method known as mountaintop removal, which is not only blasting mountaintops to smithereens and wreaking environmental havoc, but is also shattering countless lives and even communities.
Despite the devastating impact on citizens in the affected areas, the Bush administration has taken a series of measures to make it even easier for corporations to continue the blasting. In March 2002, the administration re-classified mining waste and debris, and defined it as "fill"--thereby freeing the companies from restraints under the Clean Water Act.
Last spring new guidelines were promulgated to allow coal companies to dig trenches as substitutes for streams that were buried under waste. Administration officials also intervened to block a federal scientific panel from recommending limits on the size of mountaintop removal projects.
Another administration "clarification" of the Clean Water Act would exempt coal companies from a 20-year old rule barring mining from within 100 feet of a stream. Still in the works: a proposal to reduce the obligation of the federal government to monitor state mining agencies. Certain oversight duties would become "discretionary," rather than required by law.
"Mountaintop removal removes jobs and entire communities" said Julia Bonds of Coal River Mountain Watch, whose family has lived in the area for nine generations. Bonds, a grandmother who has led a grassroots effort to stop mountaintop removal, told BushGreenwatch that those who "talk about jobs... are not telling the entire truth." She noted that an underground mine used to employ 100 to 150 people, while mountaintop operations, which use massive equipment and high explosives, get by with 25.
"Show me the prosperity. I can't find it anywhere...These huge machines don't live in our communities; they don't pay taxes; they don't buy in local stores. "
Mountaintop removal isn't only starving people, it is driving them from their homes because of the constant blasting, the suffocating clouds of coal dust, the pollution in streams, contaminated well water, and life-threatening floods caused when headwater valleys are filled with rock debris, and torn-away trees no longer absorb rain.
Mountaintop mining has buried or damaged more than 1,200 miles of streams and destroyed 380,000 acres of forest, according to a federal environmental impact statement.
"My community no longer exists," Bonds said. Ten years ago a subsidiary of Massey Energy began removing the mountaintop above the town of Packsville, which was home to roughly 100 families.
As the mountaintop disappeared, the town was overrun by poisonous rattlesnakes, copperheads and hungry bears, which raided garbage and broke into houses. Bonds and her family were the last to leave Packsville.
Some who have witnessed the toll fear that people are not only losing their past, but also their future. Teresa Caruthers, a nurse who spent a year at the National Mine Health and Safety Academy in West Virginia, said the beauty of the region's forests and mountains could provide the basis for a sustainable economic future. But the local people won't even have that left.
"They literally blow up mountains," said Caruthers, who watched the process. "They turn a beautiful mountain into a barren piece of ground where nothing will ever grow again because they've removed the topsoil."