Appalachia's Best Hope for Ending Mountaintop Mining

Follow the Appalachian Mountains by plane from West Virginia to Tennessee, and you’ll see the scars left by mountaintop mining – huge gray gouges where coal companies stripped away the trees and blew off the tops of mountains to get at the coal inside.

These once lush ridges are now bereft of economic resources. The natural vistas that could have drawn tourists are gone, and what remains of the mined mountains and filled-in valleys are too heavily damaged to support reforestation, communities or jobs.

Families who have lived in these valleys for generations have been left to suffer the consequences as unearthed minerals and heavy metals, dumped into stream beds as mining waste, leach into their drinking water and poison their wells.

"People around here are swiggin’ down contaminated water all day long,” says Maria Gunnoe of West Virginia. “Our soil’s contaminated. A garden that we’d gardened for all the 37 years that I’ve been there is now covered with coal slurry. You can’t grow food in that. My yard was completely washed out. My fruit trees are gone."

In three decades of mountaintop mining, coal companies have flattened more than 1 million acres of Appalachia. They pushed the “overburden” into the valleys, filling more than 700 miles of streams and degrading hundreds of miles more with traces of nickel, lead, cadmium, iron and selenium.

Yet, lawmakers in these states are heavily pro-coal and resistant to restricting the industry.

For the fourth year in a row, Kentucky ended its legislative session on Friday with a bill that could protect the state’s streams still sitting untouched in the House Natural Resources and Environment Committee. The committee chairman who decides which legislation goes to a vote, Rep. Jim Gooch, has been a member of the Western Kentucky Coal Association.

In Tennessee, Gov. Phil Bredesen has publicly said that he can't ban mountaintop removal.

Appalachia’s best hope for ending mountaintop mining may have to come from the outside.

Three states – North Carolina, Maryland and Georgia – are turning up the pressure this year with legislation that would ban or phase out the purchase of any coal from mountaintop mining operations.

Opponents of mountaintop mining are also counting on the Obama administration and Congress.

Calling for Federal Action

This week, more than 140 Appalachia residents are in Washington, D.C., lobbying Congress to pass the Clean Water Protection Act, which would limit how coal companies could use mountain streams as waste dumps. They are also asking supporters elsewhere to call Congress today and urge their representatives to sign on as co-sponsors of the act.

The Clean Water Act of 1977 should have protected the streams – it allowed some fill material in waterways, but not waste disposal. But in 2002, the Bush administration’s Army Corps of Engineers changed the definition of "fill material" to include mining waste.