Coal mining ravages Appalachia mountains

They’re ripping the tops off mountains in West Virginia coal country to feed our insatiable appetite for power. It’s cheaper that way. And the trees and the animals and the flooding? It may not be pretty, but we’ve got all those dishwashers to run

Feb 23, 2008 04:30 AM
Catherine Porter
Environment Reporter

CHARLESTON, WEST VIRGINIA–When you flick on the lights this evening, think of Kayford Mountain. Or what was Kayford Mountain, but now is a sprawling, muddy, trembling construction site 100 metres below Larry Gibson’s home.

Three years ago, Gibson hunted wild boar here, picked gooseberries and peaches, and sat under the shade of white oaks and hickories so thick he couldn’t see the sky.

“Now, you can see the sky below your feet,” Gibson says.

The boars have long scurried away. The trees have been reduced to a heap of pulp. The gooseberries have been bulldozed, replaced by rows of explosives. Just past the “Do Not Enter” sign, the mountain has been brought to its knees – cut down like a giant tree. Instead of gazing 200 metres up to its peak, as Gibson once did, you peer down at its rubbly remains, clawed at by giant shovels and trundled off by bucking yellow dump trucks.

There are no birdsong or rustling leaves – just beeping and grinding, and sounds like a 747 taking off.

A small sliver of the former mountain slumps to one side of the construction, like the last piece of Black Forest cake left amid the deflated balloons and streamers. On top are the trees and soil, then sandstone and shale, and at the bottom, a thick chocolate layer – coal.

“They say they can make the land better than it originally was,” says Chuck Nelson, gazing down sorrowfully from his friend’s property, hands in his pockets. “Who can do a better job than God? This land will never be no good for nothing.”

Except of course, electricity.

Which is why all this is happening.

This is the new face of coal mining in Central Appalachia. It is called mountaintop removal. Instead of extracting coal the old-fashioned way, by burrowing, the mountain is extracted from the coal – blown up sequentially to reveal each black seam. Everything left over – trees, soil, plants and rock – is considered “overburden.” It’s dumped into the valleys below, filling them up.

Some say as many as 470 mountains in West Virginia, Kentucky and Virginia have been flattened this way. For the industry, it’s a financial jackpot – fast, cheap and thorough. But for the mountains, and the communities nestled between them, it’s war.

Their homes have been flooded, walls cracked, wells poisoned, streams polluted; their jobs have been forfeited, cemeteries unearthed and communities abandoned. Many suffer from early-onset dementia and kidney stones. And they’ve lost their ancestral home.

“We’re mountain people. You don’t understand our connection with the land,” says Gibson, who traces his heritage back 120 years to this very spot. He had never ventured beyond the company store, halfway down the mountain, until he was 11. “We didn’t live on the land, we lived with it.”

People who live here think of themselves as collateral damage – accidental victims of a war to feed the nation’s insatiable demand for energy.

What does this have to do with you? This is where Ontario gets 40 per cent of the fuel powering its coal-fired power plants. That means every day you run your dishwasher, you are connected to one of world’s oldest mountain chains, 900 kilometres south of Toronto, which is slowly being flattened, one peak at a time.

“When you go home and flip on your lights,” says Nelson, looking down at the devastation, “do you think of this?”

Most people in the GTA have likely never even seen coal. In southern West Virginia, it’s inescapable.

Within minutes of driving out of the capital, Charleston, a glistening black pyramid flashes before the windshield. Giant silos spit out coal in piles beside the road. Conveyor belts loop down from the sides of mountains like roller-coaster tracks, shuttling coal to massive processing plants. The clapboard houses dotting the valleys are coated with its dust.

A set of flashing lights bars the way as an 80-car train passes, each car brimming with coal. Automobiles share the road with 10-wheelers loaded with it.

From the gold-domed Capitol building itself, coal can be seen on barges, bound downriver.

The state motto is: “Mountaineers are always free.” But it could be: “The coal capital of North America.”

Coal mining began in this region before the American Revolution; for more than a century Central Appalachia was the leading producer in the country – a distinction it lost a decade ago to the Powder River basin in the West. Some call it the state’s blessing. Others call it a curse.

“If you don’t mine coal, you don’t do nothin’,” says Nelson.

Nelson is 52, and a mining veteran, having spent 30 years underground before cashing in his pension and converting to environmental activism. “This is a mono-economic state. We’ve been that way for 200 years.”

Coal is as much part of hillbilly culture as moonshine, banjos and muskrat barbecues. Everyone you meet has a grandfather who worked in the mines. But not this kind of mining. Until two decades ago, coal mining meant crawling underground in metre-high tunnels. Old mine entrances still gape like caves on the mountainsides.

This type of mining isn’t about digging, but blasting. When a site is finished, no trees or holes are left. In most cases, there is no mountain. It’s as though it were a 600-metre-high soft-boiled egg; with the top third cracked open to scoop out the yolk.

First, workers cut down all the trees and rip up the soil with bulldozers. Then, they drill holes a dozen metres or so down and fill the rows of holes with ANFO – ammonium nitrate/fuel oil. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it is the same stuff Timothy McVeigh used to blow up the Oklahoma City federal building.

That causes an explosion of dust, smoke and boulders – some the size of Volkswagens have landed on Gibson’s property. Next, giant machines carry the debris away. The biggest is called a “drag-line.” It’s basically a 20-storey crane with a bucket capable of carrying 45,000 kilograms of debris – about 30 Honda Accords. The first to arrive in the region was trucked in by 57 tractor- trailers.

The method makes mountaintop mining more efficient and replaces thousands of human workers. While West Virginia hauls out as much coal now as it did 55 years ago, only 21,000 miners work in the state today, compared with 120,000 in 1950.

“They say we are a threat to their jobs,” Nelson says. “But, the industry is taking our jobs by eliminating them with heavy equipment.”

The top third of the mountain is chiselled away, exposing as many as 18 seams of coal in sequence. Whatever is left over is pushed into valleys and compacted by huge bulldozers, like coffee grounds in a giant filter.

These “valley fills” are taller than most Bay Street buildings. From the road below, they look like dams. Some stretch as long as three kilometres and hold 760,000 cubic metres of rubble. Pour down that many boulders off the Bloor Viaduct and you’d fill the Don Valley right to the brim for almost 40 metres.

The remaining two-thirds of the egg is supposed to be rehabilitated. A jail sits atop one former mountain, and a golf course spans another. According to Bill Raney, the state’s reigning coal industry lobbyist, most are turned into wildlife habitat and blend back into the scenery so well, “you typically would not pay attention to them after they were completed.”

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to see them without formal permission. And there are no tours until the spring, once the government session is over, he says, leaning against a limestone pillar of the Capitol building, where he’s spent the morning meeting with a senator.

The rehabbed mountains have been compared to display condominiums put on show by a shady rogue developer – falsely advertising premium fixtures like blooming wildflowers and groves of black locust trees. Most are simply sprayed with fertilizer and grass seed and left, says Erik Reece, a Harper’s magazine journalist who spent a year documenting the levelling of one mountain in Kentucky.

“This is the most biologically diverse forest in America,” he says. “Now there’s no topsoil, so many of the trees can’t grow back.”

No one knows exactly how many mountains have been mowed down. The only government document extensively analyzing the practice in the region is based on data collected before 2001 – just as mountaintop mining was taking off, critics say. By then, the Environmental Impact Statement says, 150,000 hectares of forest had already been destroyed by mountaintop mining in Appalachia and almost 2,000 kilometres of valley streams affected by their waste. That’s about the distance between Toronto and Winnipeg.

More than 42 million tonnes of coal came out of West Virginia’s mountaintop removal mines in 2006 – more than a quarter of that year’s bounty. Raney says that translates to only one per cent of the state’s mountaintops. But most are in the southwest pocket, where activists say as many as one in five mountains have been levelled.

“We’re the ones getting blasted. We’re the ones getting flooded and breathing in coal dust, ammonium nitrate and silica,” says Judy Bonds, a former Pizza Hut waitress who leads the Coal River Mountain Watch – an outspoken citizens group. “These mountains are above our heads.”

Part of the problem is the terrain. Most sites are invisible from valley roads. To get a sense of the destruction, you have to fly over it. Four minutes south of Charleston, brown rolling ridges give way to an eerie moonscape of black coal and white rock. Whole ridges have disappeared.

The biggest underground mining permit issued in West Virginia in 2006 was 25 hectares. The biggest mountaintop removal permit was 19 times that size. A handful now span 4,900 hectares – about 30 times the size of High Park.

The pilot points out Gibson’s property. From the plane window, his row of cabins set in trees seems like a small island in Georgian Bay. The view from his property reveals only a small portion of the mine site. From above, you can see it stretches for kilometres around. The remains of old mine sites look like Scottish moors – round grassy plains, treeless.

And then there are the slurry impoundments glistening in the sun – giant black lakes, built to contain the toxic dishwater left from cleaning coal. The biggest – just over a ridge from Gibson’s lookout – holds enough sludge to fill 8,000 Olympic-sized pools.

“You could fly until you were out of gas and you’d never run out of mines,” says pilot Susan Lapis, who even after 10 years of flying famous activists like Robert Kennedy Jr. and Woody Harrelson over the mines is still surprised by new sites she spots.

“If we come back in six weeks, that ridge will not be there,” she says pointing down.

From this vantage point, you’d think this would be the biggest story in America. Or at least West Virginia. But even in the capital, 50 kilometres away, few people speak out about it.

Raney says that’s because the mines provide employment and are environmentally sound. Activists say it’s because the industry has its hands deep in the pockets and around the throats of state politicians.

“Our government is a banana republic,” says Nelson.

But even he didn’t know about it until nine years ago, when the company he worked for blew off the top of a mountain above his home.

With all that coal, West Virginians should be richer than Tar Sands engineers. Instead, after Mississippians, they are the poorest in the U.S.

Poverty is everywhere. The bungalows crowding valley towns are dilapidated, roofs sagging and rotting, metal fences rusted. Most of the stores on the main streets of towns like Whitesville are boarded up. The churches look haunted.

West Virginians are also among the least educated. According to New York Times Magazine journalist Jeff Goodell, the literacy rate in West Virginia is “about the same as Kabul’s.”

“This is an area where people can easily be manipulated,” Reece says. “They’re poor and not well-educated.”

The local activists aren’t driven so much by principle but by necessity. All were forced into it, out of survival. For Gibson, it was the explosions that started in the distance and caused the dishes on his shelves to clatter.

For Nelson, it was the coal dust that coated his kitchen table, exacerbating his wife’s asthma.

For Maria Gunnoe, it was a rainstorm one spring afternoon five years ago. Ten centimetres fell in less than an hour – a lot, even by local standards. But instead of bloating the small creek running by her modest home, it transformed it into a three-metre wall of black water that smashed through her bridge, pulled down the power poles, dug up her septic tank and snapped her concrete sidewalk, sending one five-foot piece up in the air.

“My dog was washed out of his collar,” says Gunnoe, a 39-year-old mother of two who waded through the waist-deep water to fetch her then 9-year-old daughter Chrystal from a neighbour’s home. “My barn washed out. We were all trapped up there in the house.”

In the morning, she found her home no longer sat on a grassy hill. It now perched on the edge of the muddy crater that’s still there today. The concrete driveway that once held eight cars was gone. Everything was covered with black sludge.

“We lost five acres of land that day. It turned into mush and washed away,” says Gunnoe, kicking at the blown-out side of her barn that once held chickens, horses, cows and pigs. The only residents now are streambed rocks – mementos from the floods that have become a regular springtime event.

There have been eight floods since then, and Gunnoe has grown used to finding her daughter fully dressed, sitting on the edge of her bed at night, ready to bolt at a moment’s notice.

“My definition of flooding has changed each time I’ve seen it,” says Gunnoe, whose family has lived here more than 50 years.

She links the flooding to the mine atop one of two mountains that used to shade her home. Since 2001, its peak has been cut down by 180 metres – and the slopes she camped and played on as a girl have been blown up and pushed down into the valley about three kilometres uphill from her home. Where the headwaters of her little creek once lay, now rises a 300-metre earthen rock wall.

Where once trees soaked up the rainfall, now barren rock ledges funnel it into the valleys, she says.

“I’ve lived here 39 years. I know what four inches of water does. It does not turn this valley into a torrential river,” says Gunnoe. “I don’t need a scientist to tell me what’s going on here. How much common sense do you need to figure out this is not a good idea? They created a canyon atop the mountain.”

An Environmental Protection Agency study supports her theory – reporting the runoff from mountaintop mining sites can be three to five times greater than in pristine areas. But the mining industry’s Raney rejects that, stating that the mines are built with water retention structures to mitigate runoff. And the director of mines for the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection – the body that issues permits for the mines – says since the valley fills are porous, they can “help prevent flooding.”

Flooding isn’t Gunnoe’s only problem when it comes to water. Her well is contaminated.

She lugs drinking water in from town every week. It costs her about $250 a month – which is why she can’t afford to rebuild her property, including the bridge she once drove across to get to her garage. (She walks the 100 metres now.)

Dead fish floating in her tank were the first sign something was wrong. Next, a rust-coloured stain appeared on her sink and clothes emerged grey from her washing machine.

The well had been her family’s drinking source for generations; Gunnoe figured the change had to be linked to the mine.

A biologist found high levels of heavy metals, including lead, aluminium, manganese, chromium and selenium in her water. But that was better than many wells in the area – water “you just don’t want coming into your house,” let alone drink, says Ben Stout, biology professor at Wheeling Jesuit University, in the northern part of the state. After a rainfall, he has seen the toilets in some homes flush back particles that under a microscope proved to be coal.

Half the wells Stout tested in one county were heavily contaminated with the same metals found in coal slurry. He links that water to mountaintop removal mines that funnel huge quantities of coal down to the preparation plants to be washed. The resulting slurry is sent back up to the mountains for storage in toxic ponds that he thinks are leaking.

If mountaintop removal mining continues at this pace, Stout says, contaminated water will make southern West Virginia uninhabitable within two decades.

By then, he figures, many more people will have fallen ill from bad water. A local doctor attributes the rising rates of early-onset dementia, gastrointestinal cancer, kidney stones and thyroid problems she’s seeing to polluted well water. Three hundred families are suing a coal company for polluting their well water with coal slurry.

Soon after the flood, Gunnoe joined a local organization that is fighting the mining through the courts. The decision has come at a high cost. The brake lines on her truck were cut. Her dog was shot and left at her 17-year-old son Jessie’s school bus stop. Last October, 200 bullets coming from the mountainside splattered around her in her yard, she says. She gardens now in a bullet-proof vest.

“The term environmentalist is a dirty word around here,” she says, walking past workers installing the metal posts for a fence around her property. “They’re up there doing illegal things. The regulatory agencies obligated to protect me aren’t doing their jobs. It forces me to do it myself.”

But Raney says the water running off the mines meets water quality standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency and checked monthly by state officials. At all sites, ponds are dug to collect water and filter out particles, before it runs downstream. The sites are engineered, he says, so they are more environmentally sensitive than their underground predecessors.

“You’re in complete control of all the material. You know where it’s all going and you’re putting it back. Every drop of water goes through a drainage culvert system. It’s planned from the very beginning,” Raney says.

“The guys on these jobs are the best practising environmentalists in the world.”

He doesn’t mention a recent $20 million settlement by the state’s largest coal company, Massey Energy Co., for thousands of water pollution violations – some containing 40 times the legal limits of heavy metals like iron and manganese, according to the EPA – across southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky.

Just as no one can say exactly how pervasive the practice of mountaintop mining is in Central Appalachia, no one seems to know exactly when it started. All agree it was sometime in the 1980s, after then-president Jimmy Carter’s administration introduced a surface mining act meant to regulate the industry. It stated that mining companies didn’t have to return the land to the exact same condition if they could prove it would be put to “higher or better uses.”

This gave the mining industry a way out. The practice, though, has exploded since George W. Bush entered the White House. Given the post-9/11 emphasis on energy security, and coal companies’ close ties to Washington, they’ve been given even more leeway than before, says New York Times Magazine journalist Goodell.

“As long as American soldiers were dying in the oil-rich Middle East, it seemed downright unpatriotic to oppose coal,” Goodell writes in Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America’s Energy Future.

Today, it is occurring at breakneck speed. Some permits have been granted in less than three months. Within a year, a whole mountain can be disassembled.

The only brake to the momentum has come from local citizens’ groups launching a barrage of lawsuits and an environmental lawyer, Joe Lovett. Over the past decade, he’s continually sued the government for not abiding by its own laws. For the most part, he has won. But every time, the government has appealed the ruling. Or simply changed the law.

That’s what happened after a judge, in 1999, agreed with Lovett that the government was breaking its own rules by permitting mining activity within 30 metres of a stream. Two years later, the same judge ruled dumping mine waste into streams was illegal. But Bush’s deputy secretary for the Department of the Interior – a former coal industry lobbyist – stepped in. Mine debris was reclassified from “waste” to “fill.” That made it suitable for streams.

“It’s preposterous to allow our streams to be used as giant garbage cans,” says Lovett, executive director of a small agency called The Appalachian Center for the Economy and Environment.

“It’s hard to imagine that West Virginia coal companies are allowed to self-regulate. But that’s exactly what is happening. This is drive-by permitting,” Lovett says. “The Army Corps of Engineers is allowing the mining industry to destroy one of the oldest mountain ridges in the world. It’s absurd.”

Lovett’s most recent success came last year. A judge ruled the government had not fully evaluated the potential environmental damage of mountaintop removal mines before approving permits. He also ruled that that sediment ponds broke the Clean Water Act. The federal government, state governor and affected mining company appealed the decision. The case will return to court this May.

Lovett and activists not holding their breath.

“The Army Corps is not deciding to comply with the law, I assure you.

“They’re trying to figure out how to get around it,” says Lovett. “That’s why we need to get a new administration that actually enforces the laws, rather that gets around them.”

In most cases, the government and coal company’s defence has had little to do with the environment. It’s been economic. Any stop to mining means job losses – not popular in a state where the median household income is $37,000.

The industry says it’s justice working its way through the system. Activists say that system is rigged by coal company money.

The chief executive officer of the region’s biggest coal operation, Massey Energy Co., spent $1.7 million funding the campaign of a lawyer running for the five-seat West Virginia Supreme Court. He won, and has since refused to recuse himself on cases involving Massey Energy, even voting in its favour. In 2006, that same CEO was photographed vacationing in Monaco with another Supreme Court judge.

Federally, the coal companies are funders of the Republican machine. Raney himself was credited with helping bring Bush to power in 2000, after West Virginia went Republican for the first time in three-quarters of a century.

“People say `How could you let this happen?'” says Gibson, who put his 20-hectare property into a trust to keep companies permanently at bay. “We didn’t let this happen.”

Meanwhile, coal production marches ahead in West Virginia. Despite the lawsuits, companies are producing as much coal as ever, Raney says. About half of the coal exported from the United States comes from West Virginia.

The biggest importer of American steam coal? Canada.

Ontario Power Generation is a big buyer from West Virginia, Kentucky and Pennsylvania. Company spokesperson John Earl says 40 per cent of its coal comes from there.

The coal is used to stoke burners at its two biggest coal-fired plants, Nanticoke and Lambton. While Nanticoke buys 16 per cent of its coal from Central Appalachia, the Lambton plant in Sarnia buys all its coal there, according to a plant manager who has worked at both.

Taken together, that amounts to almost 5 billion kilograms of coal from the region every year to run Ontario’s fridges and pot lights, especially during early evenings and hot summer afternoons when the coal-fired plants are pumping vigorously, supplying as much as 22 per cent of our electricity.

Does it come from mountaintop mines? The company won’t say. That information – which companies and which mine sites specifically provide Ontario’s coal – is “commercially sensitive,” says OPG spokesman John Earl.

“We purchase coal from a number of coal mining companies in the Northeast. We contract with the companies for a quantity and quality of coal,” Earl says in an email. “The companies involved have operations that utilize a variety of mining techniques from a variety of locations to build their stock.”

It’s a moot point, as most companies in the region do both mountaintop removal and deep mining, activists say. In West Virginia, nine companies produced more than three-quarters of the state’s total production. Eight have cut off mountaintops.

To buy from any of them would be like boycotting The Gap because of its past child-labour practices, but shopping at Old Navy. Your money is still funding the practice.

Raney says Ontarians should be thankful for the coal they get from West Virginia, and happy to know it funds local jobs. “I think we’re doing a fabulous job at it,” he says.

Larry Gibson and his fellow activists say we should boycott it.

“You should realize what it’s really costing,” he says, preparing to drive back up to the small spot on Kayford Mountain he’s managed to save, albeit barely. In places the earth is starting to crack and form deep fissures. He thinks, now that all the surrounding land is gone, it is starting to cave in. One of the many bumper stickers on collaging the back of his white truck states “Coal keeps the lights on in West Virginia’s Funeral Homes.”

He and the other activists peg their hopes on two things – the upcoming election and rising concern about global warming. Coal-fired electricity plants, after all, are responsible for 40 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gases.

The more governments turn to greener technology, the less coal that will be mined in West Virginia – above the mountains or below them. Recently, Gunnoe and other activists has been meeting with the corporate landowner of a local mountain slated for cutting, proposing a 220-turbine wind farm for their land instead.

“We’re destroying our homes and culture to supply America’s energy needs,” she says. “We’re smarter than that.”

Source: The Toronto Star