AUDUBON
May/June 2001, pp. 36+
Reprinted with permission from the author.
MOUNTAIN MADNESS
by Ted Williams
West Virginia's Coal Companies Are Altering the State's Very Surface, and No
One Seems to Have the Power--Or the Will--To Stop Them.
Mountaintop removal is a quick, cheap method of
mining, suddenly popular in Appalachia (at least with the coal industry).
Twenty years ago the industry could cut only about 150 feet down into a
mountain. Now that it can cut down 600 to 700 feet, the Appalachians really
aren't in the way anymore. So instead of taking the coal from the mountains, it
takes the mountains from the coal. If you drive over the coal seams of West
Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, or even if you live
on them, you can catch only glimpses of mountaintop removal because roads and
communities are sealed in valleys and because the industry spares no effort to
keep the public away from active mining sites.
So on the bright, mild morning of February 7,
Susan Lapis of SouthWings--a group of volunteer pilots who show journalists and
others the footprints of industry as they exist on the face of the earth
instead of on the pages of glossy promos--packed me into her Cessna 182 and
punched a GPS line to the coal fields of southern West Virginia. Nowhere in the
nation are the effects of "mountaintop mining," to use the coal
industry's euphemism, more obvious.
But even "mountaintop removal" is a
euphemism. It connotes a neat pruning operation, a single mountain separated
from its peak the way you'd clip a rose from a bush. This is more like using a
rototiller on the whole garden. What I saw was mountain-RANGE removal. Fifteen
minutes out of Charleston's Yeager Airport, the most diverse and productive
temperate forest on earth gave way to sprawling brown ulcers strewn with black
piles of slate spoil and dingy pits full of half-frozen slurry--a toxic brew of
water, coal dust, mercury, lead, arsenic, copper, and chromium. There are 600
such pits in Appalachia. Last October one of them--created largely by
mountain-range removal by A.T. Massey--ruptured, spilling 250 million gallons
of slurry into the Ohio River system in southeastern Kentucky and burying or
poisoning 90 miles of stream; polluting public water supplies; clogging
water-treatment plants; shutting down schools, restaurants, laundries, and
power generation; and wiping out fish, snakes, turtles, frogs, salamanders,
mussels, and other aquatic fauna. It was God's fault, declares Massey's legal
team--His "act."
At 4,200 feet we could smell the smoke from the
last scraps of forest being scorched off doomed mountains. For almost an hour
at an airspeed of 140 knots we saw other mountains in various stages of removal
radiating from all compass points. White-rimmed drill holes, spaced like
bristles in a hairbrush, marked the spots where the next chunks of mountain
would be blown off the coal seam. Where charges had been detonated,
draglines--20-story-high shovels with maws as wide as football fields--consumed
pieces of mountain in 130-ton bites. Ad writers for Arch Coal proclaim that
"mountaintop mining is good for West Virginia, and it's the right thing to
do."
On the "reclaimed" sites, topsoil,
roots, and stumps had been dumped onto streams, along with "overburden,"
as the industry calls broken mountains. The steep, triangular faces of recently
buried valleys had been terraced like highland rice paddies. Down their centers
ran straight, rock-lined gutters--the new streams. Rubble had been bulldozed
and seeded with native and alien vegetation. A few trees had been planted in
tiny squares. It all looked as if God had rested on the first day and
subcontracted the rest of creation to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
In 1977 Congress outlawed this kind of coal
extraction when it passed the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act
(SMCRA). The act requires that only a small area be disturbed at one time, but
in the mountains that's not possible. So the Interior Department's Office of
Surface Mining (OSM) and the state regulatory agencies it has authorized to
enforce SMCRA--such as the West Virginia Division of Environmental Protection
(DEP)--looked the other way. SMCRA requires that there be no surface mining
within 100 feet of a stream, but in the mountains there's no place to dump
overburden EXCEPT on streams, so the agencies looked the other way. SMCRA
requires that each site be restored to its "approximate original
contour," but you can't put a mountain back together, so the agencies
looked the other way. If a site is NOT restored to its approximate original
contour, SMCRA requires that it be converted to a "higher and better"
use, a shopping mall or an airport or some such development--but who would pick
their way through Appalachia to do business on a remote mountain stump? So the
agencies looked the other way. Rules that weren't ignored were done away with
by changing definitions. For example, if a "valley fill," as the
industry calls its spoil dumps, contains less than 80 percent non-degradable
rock (rock that won't break under pressure), fill must be trucked in,
compacted, and large material used to make a drain. But it's cheaper to drop
everything onto a stream, so the regulators declared all rocks, EVEN SHALE, to
be non-degradable.
A large part of the problem is that the
regulators and the coal moguls are frequently the same people, flouncing
between offices in a perpetual game of musical chairs. Regulators come from the
coal industry (as did the three previous directors of the West Virginia DEP,
for example). And when these officials step down, the industry clutches them to
its breast. In April 2000, OSM director Kathy Karpan was removed from her post
after she unsuccessfully negotiated with the National Mining Association about
assuming its presidency.
A survey of eastern coal states by the U.S. Fish
and Wildlife Service--incomplete because some mining regions weren't
evaluated--turned up 897.2 miles of streams buried by mountain-range removal.
In West Virginia the service checked only 5 of 13 coal counties but still found
470 miles of obliterated stream. Parts of the Little Coal River that once
supported commercial barge traffic are now so choked with mining waste they're
not even navigable by canoe.
While mountain removers traditionally violate
SMCRA by interring streams that flow for more than six months of the year, the
law does allow the sacrifice of streams that flow less than that. But, if
anything, such streams are MORE important, argues Ben Stout of Wheeling Jesuit
University in Wheeling, West Virginia. Stout is working on the
environmental-impact study resulting from a successful citizens' lawsuit
against the DEP and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that held that their
stream-filling permits violated both SMCRA and the Clean Water Act. "The
coal industry prefers to call these streams 'dry washes,'" he says.
"But at 175 permit-application sites in West Virginia and Kentucky, we
found all 8 orders of aquatic insects we were looking for--in all, 80 taxa, including
perennial species. The biological community begins in watersheds as small as
six acres. In fact, the most diverse communities start right up there at the
spring seeps. The majority of taxa we found are leaf shredders; when they shred
leaves the particles feed the whole downstream community. And emerging insects
export this energy back to the forest in a form that's available to
salamanders, frogs, fish, and birds. An intermittent stream is the link between
a forest and a river. Fill it, and you break that link."
Once a rivertop gets buried, the rest of the
system is not only starved but poisoned. "The runoff from the toes of
these valley fills is laden with aluminum, iron, and manganese," says
Stout. "It's nasty, nasty stuff."
So species such as forest-interior birds, most of
which depend on the insects that billow out of rich forest streams, lose their
food at the same time their habitat is destroyed and fragmented. Warblers, for
example, are being devastated by mountain-range removal. Among the many victims
is the cerulean warbler, a blue jewel whose core breeding area overlaps the
Appalachian coal fields and whose population is down an estimated 70 percent,
having declined at a rate of about 4 percent a year since 1966. Audubon, the
Southern Environmental Law Center, and 26 other environmental groups have
petitioned for it to receive threatened status. "The cerulean is leading
the decline of warblers that depend on old, extensive forests," comments
Chris Canfield, director of Audubon's North Carolina office. "If we can
protect its habitat, lots of species lower down on the watch list will also
benefit."
Many birds, however, thrive in fragmented
forests, as the coal industry's PR ministers tirelessly point out. While we're
not running out of these species--wild turkeys, killdeer, cowbirds, etc.--the
message is that mountain-range removal is a blessing, creating habitat for
wildlife and people alike. Without "mountaintop mining," say the
ministers, Appalachia would be too hilly for such social benefits as the prison
scheduled to be built in Logan County. According to the president of Princess
Beverly Coal, land is "200 percent better" after the company removes
mountains. Appalachian schools welcome the PR ministers and the literature they
tote, such as COAL MINING COUNTS, a coloring book in which a sentient rock
truck named Smiley declares, "Let's slice the mountain and look
inside....After we mine the coal, we must put back the rocks, dirt, and plants.
This is called reclamation."
The PR ministers at Arch Coal and A.T.
Massey--the companies responsible for most of what I'd seen from the air--said
they couldn't help me when I asked to be given a ground tour of their most
beautiful reclamation. Instead, they referred me to one Bill Raney, president
of the West Virginia Coal Association. "Winter," averred Raney,
"is the absolute worst time" to look at reclamations. "If you're
interested in doing a balanced story, you need to come in May." When I
informed him that this would not be possible, he offered to supply AUDUBON with
photos made when the reclamations had been more presentable. Basically, the
deal was that he'd show me a reclamation if I got AUDUBON's art department to
let him illustrate my article. "Let me tell you," he exclaimed, "we
have entertained and opened ourselves up to everybody in the last two years,
and all we ever see from these publications is a picture of an active mining
site. That's why I'm so insistent; as a matter of fact, I'm about
three-quarters pissed about the whole thing."
"Have there been any balanced stories?"
I inquired.
"They all promised to be balanced coming in,
but they're not."
"You mean not even ONE publication has
printed a balanced story on mountaintop removal--EVER?" He paused, then
allowed that maybe some local ones had, but he couldn't name one.
"No," he said emphatically when I asked if he'd meant THE CHARLESTON
GAZETTE, which had investigated 81 permits issued by the DEP and found that
only 20 had been written legally.
Later in the day, and still seeking to be shown a
good reclamation site, I called the West Virginia Mining and Reclamation
Association. Bill Raney picked up the phone there, too. "We done some
research on you," he intoned. He'd read a piece on mountain-range removal I'd
written for a fishing magazine called FLY ROD & REEL. He said it wasn't
balanced.
So I went to see Larry Gibson, who maintains the
Stanley Heirs park and cemetery in Kayford--the only place in West Virginia
where nonindustry people can legally inspect reclaimed and active
mountain-range removal sites from the ground. Gibson's great-great-grandfather
Crockett Stanley settled this hollow in 1820.
The only thing in heaven, hell, or this world
that frightens Larry Gibson is a dragline. A year ago three men ran his truck
into Cabin Creek, then stood on the bank, laughing at him. Maybe this and other
such incidents have something to do with his "unbalanced" bumper
stickers, all of which are still in place: "If nothing grows on it, it
must have been mined"; "Almost level--West Virginia"; "Stop
Mountaintop Removal"; "Tax coal"; "Real miners do it deep
in the dark." People who imagine that Gibson has deprived them of job
opportunities slash his tires fairly regularly, smash his windows, knock over
the park's outhouses and signs, and shoot up the buildings. Two years ago he
wore out four pairs of tennis shoes on a 540-mile "walk for the
mountains" across West Virginia, this a week after undergoing angioplasty
and the insertion of two stents.
As a child, Gibson lived on Kayford Mountain,
planting corn, tending bees, milking cows, churning butter. If
"mountaintop mining" has been "good for West Virginia," it
hasn't been good for the town of Kayford. The farms are gone; the church is
gone; the school is gone; the town--all 800 houses--is gone; and the mountains
to the west and north are gone. Nine years ago Gibson talked his 538 relatives
into not selling out to the coal industry and, instead, making their 50 acres a
public park. "I told the guy from Massey he couldn't buy this land,"
says Gibson, "and he looks at me and says, 'We ain't seen NOTHING we can't
buy.' Well, he has now."
In the cemetery Gibson showed me
"flyrocks" dropped by nearby blasting; one I couldn't lift. I righted
Patricia Fraker's headstone, which had been knocked off its base by recent
blasting. A sharp-shinned hawk shot low over the graves, heading east toward
richly forested mountains slated for removal. Five hundred feet below us lay
the stumps of mountains that 10 years ago had been at our level or higher.
Before the mountains were removed they had been clad in red, black, and sugar
maple; pignut, mockernut, and shagbark hickory; cucumber and umbrella magnolia;
red, black, and scarlet oak; black birch; beech; ash; butternut; yellow poplar;
black gum; sourwood; princess tree; white chestnut; black locust; sassafras;
basswood; ironwood; viburnum; pawpaw; redbud; and dogwood, to mention just a
few of the species.
"When are they going to reclaim this
section?" I asked, stepping onto sparsely grassed rubble furrowed by
runoff.
"They already have," he replied,
pointing to a single black locust sapling protruding from the slope like a
toothpick in a stuffed mushroom. "In spring," Gibson continued,
"we used to lose the sun at 5:00 P.M. Now we don't lose it till 8:30. The
industry calls that an improvement.'" The cemetery is sloughing onto the
mountain stumps like a wave-cut beach into a rising tide.
Frank Gilliam, a professor of biological sciences
at Marshall University, in Huntington, West Virginia, found it
"amazing" that the industry thinks it can take a mountain apart,
reassemble some of it, and bring back the ecosystem. "It's like taking
apart someone's clock, then 'restoring' it by stuffing some of the parts into a
box." So Gilliam and one of his graduate students drove to Kayford and
collected buckets of busted mountain. Then they prepared three batches of
planting material--one pure rubble with the big pieces discarded (thereby
biasing the experiment in favor of industry), one rubble with 25 percent
topsoil, and one 100 percent topsoil. In each medium they planted three native
trees--a black cherry, a yellow poplar, and a black locust. Then they
cultivated the saplings under the same conditions for four months. Pure rubble
or rubble with 25 percent topsoil added resulted in minimal growth at best. In
the 25 percent mix, stems of black locust seedlings, a favorite of the industry
because they fix nitrogen, were only a third as thick at their base as those grown
in the pure topsoil. And in the pure rubble the stems actually lost a
millimeter. "The stuff just doesn't retain water," says Gilliam.
"You can get a downpour, and it will be arid the next day. It's a desert
in the rain." Recently, a coal mogul told Gilliam that his experiment was
"soft science," then handed him a study funded by Arch Coal that
hadn't been peer-reviewed.
Arch funded another study, in 1997, to assess the
biological productivity of headwater streams to be buried in the proposed 5-square-mile
expansion of its 13-square-mile mountain-range-removal operation along the
Spruce Fork of the Little Coal River. On the Pigeonroost Branch, three benthic
invertebrate sampling stations yielded only 3, 5, and 6 taxa, indicating that
this rivertop was basically a dry wash.
The Pigeonroost Branch didn't look like a dry
wash to me. I hiked along it with Jim Weekley, who has lived beside it for all
of his 61 years and who talks like a Grand Ole Opry singer except without
trying. Charged by snowmelt, the icy little rill hurried through a lush hollow
where mourning cloak butterflies sucked minerals from wet duff and song
sparrows caroled from ancient walnut trees. Where Arch wants to put one of its
valley fills, half a dozen wild brook trout hovered over clean gravel, their
flanks orange as a mountain sunrise. Weekley used to catch them here when he
was a kid. Now his grandchildren do. Arch used to say they didn't exist. After
Arch had finished surveying the Pigeonroost Branch, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service checked it out for itself. At the same stations where Arch had found 3,
5, and 6 taxa of benthic invertebrates the service turned up 30, 13, and 24.
If mountain-range removal has been "good for
West Virginia," it hasn't been good for Pigeonroost Hollow. Twenty-six
families used to live here; now it's down to Weekley. When his neighbors sold
out to Arch they had to sign agreements that they'd never protest mountaintop
removal. Weekley says Arch offered him more than a half-million dollars for his
seven-tenths of an acre, but that it ain't for sale.
From a high, rocky bluff we looked down on what
used to be mountains, a vista no smaller and no easier on the eyes than the one
from the Stanley Heirs cemetery. Perched on the bald slope like a heron on a
diving raft was the $100 million dragline they call Big John, motionless these
past two years.
Half a mile west rose Blair Mountain, leased by
Arch and Massey, where even 80 years ago coal was king. In 1921, when 15,000
miners waxed rebellious about working conditions, the industry engaged them in
a gun battle, then requested and received help in the form of U.S. Army troops,
which turned up the heat with machine guns and bombs. The Battle of Blair
Mountain, the second largest civil conflict in American history, lasted 12
days, cost the lives of about two dozen miners, and knocked down union
membership from 50,000 to 600. Now Weekley is leading a drive to make the
mountain a national historical park.
That's one of the reasons he was hanged in effigy
in the town of Logan, and one of the reasons he had a cocked pistol held to his
head near the town of Madison. On August 27, 1999, when Weekley, Gibson, and a
dozen of their friends reenacted the Blair Mountain protest, a pro-mining mob
drove 50 miles from Logan to assault them. Placards were ripped from their
hands and destroyed. They were tripped, kicked, choked, spat upon, pelted with
cans, eggs, and tomatoes, and informed that they would be killed if they didn't
go "back to Charleston where they belonged." Gibson ripped a man off
the back of Ken Hechler, then 85 and West Virginia's secretary of state. Last
November, campaigning largely on a pro-mountain platform, Hechler was defeated
in a second bid for the U.S. House of Representatives, where he had served from
1959 to 1977, laying the groundwork for SMCRA.
Negotiating with the police and clearly the mob's
"spokesman," according to Hechler, Gibson, and Weekley, was Art
Kirkendoll, president of the Logan County Commission. Last January Governor
Robert Wise hired Kirkendoll to oversee economic development in the southern
part of the state. "Wise's staff satisfied itself that Kirkendoll was not
'directly involved' in the pushing, shoving, bullying, and egg-throwing,"
wrote John McFerrin, West Virginia assistant attorney general, in THE
CHARLESTON GAZETTE. "From this the governor concluded that while he might
not want a thug on his staff, an assistant thug was acceptable." So it
goes in coal country.
Still, it's astonishing what a few fearless
mountain defenders can accomplish. Big John sits idle because in July 1998,
Weekley, nine other citizens, and the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy sued
the DEP and the Army Corps of Engineers on the grounds that filling streams that
run for more than six months of the year is a violation of SMCRA and the Clean
Water Act. In March 1999 the plaintiffs won a preliminary injunction against
Arch Coal's proposed expansion near Pigeonroost Hollow. The company responded
by laying off 30 workers and vowing to put 300 more out of work by shutting
down the adjacent operation, a promise it kept. Fifteen hundred miners marched
on Charleston. "It's a war!" brayed Kirkendoll. "It seems that
the judge...is more interested in preserving a tadpole than he is in the people
of Logan County." Most of the case was settled, including a provision that
requires that topsoil be retained and sites replanted only with native
vegetation.
Then, in October 1999, U.S. District Court Chief
Judge Charles Haden found for the plaintiffs on the issue of burying streams.
"Because there is no stream, there is no water quality," he wrote in
his 49-page order. Later in the month, citing "a shrill atmosphere,"
he granted the defendants a stay pending their appeal, which at this writing is
under way.
So mountain-range removal continues pretty much
unchecked, and the future doesn't look bright for people who fancy Appalachia's
original topography. If Haden's decision is overturned, they won't have many
options. If it's upheld, they can look for a push led by Senator Robert Byrd
(D-WV) to rewrite federal law so that valley fills are legal.
While trudging the perimeter of the eroding
Stanley Heirs cemetery, I'd stopped to read the inscription on the grave of Earl
Williams: "Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal." Whether or
not it has one now, his casket is about to follow the long shards of sod down
the slope onto the mountain stumps. A mine cave-in killed Earl in 1909, when he
was 14. Like the mountains that used to tower over him, like the mixed hardwood
forest and the wildlife it sustained, like the valleys and the rich streams
that carved them, he was a waste product of Big Coal. Now, apparently, his
remains are, too.
* * *
WHAT YOU CAN DO
Educate your legislators about mountain-range
removal. For your representatives, log on to www.house.gov and click
"member offices." For your senators, log onto www.senate.gov. You may
download this column from the AUDUBON web site (http://magazine.audubon.org)
and attach it to your letters. For more information, call the OHIO VALLEY
ENVIRONMENTAL COALITION at 304-522-0246, the COAL RIVER MOUNTAIN WATCH at
304-854-2182, or the WEST VIRGINIA RIVERS COALITION at 304-637-7201.
* * *
Ted Williams reported on strip-mining violations
in the November-December 1992 AUDUBON.