Coal mining practices that destroy, not just the land, but entire communities

APPALACHIA, Va. – Dorothy Taulbee points out the place where her house once stood – where she thought she’d live until her last days. Along with the rest of her neighborhood in the century-old community of Stonega, Taulbee’s home was razed to make way for a surface mine.

“They were blasting, removing the mountain,” she said. “Every time they would blast, it busted your foundation, and you’d look, and all this dust comes in your house. ... The porch posts were broken all to pieces, and inside was all busted – the new walls that had just been built.”

Taulbee said she and her neighbors had no choice but to move.

The coal company said the residents were not forced to move. But when they did, Cumberland Resources bought their homes and land.

Now, beside the road that ran through the community, stained-glass windows from a church lie crushed into piles of rubble. Splintered, whitewashed wood, broken concrete and shattered glass surround the twisted wreckage of a house nearby. Across the road, the mounds of debris are larger. That’s where community buildings once stood.

“It was so peaceful and quiet and lovely,” Taulbee said. “It was beautiful up here, beautiful in Roda [a nearby community], all these hollows were beautiful. Now they’re destructed and gone. It’s not right.”

Mountaintop mining, a form of surface mining that involves blasting away ridgelines and pushing excess dirt and rock into adjacent valleys, has become a topic of national debate as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency – involved at a unprecedented level even by its own description – spearheads an effort to overhaul the permitting process.

Environmental and community activists contend that this efficient method of extracting coal is just as efficient at wholesale destruction of the environment, the landscape and the communities.

Yet community leaders and coal companies point to jobs, development opportunities and electric power.

Pressure over the debate has been building for more than a decade, and while the EPA states its goal is merely better environmental protection, proponents and opponents of surface mining both view the federal agency’s involvement as a step toward shutting down the industry.

“We really hope the election of [president Barack] Obama will finish the job that we started here,” said Joe Lovett, executive director of the Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment and a man who has waged a legal battle against mountaintop mining for the past 12 years.

“We really hope EPA and the department of the interior and the Army Corps of Engineers will stop the destruction of Appalachia.”

Disappearing communities

Like many in Southwest Virginia, Taulbee was raised in a coal camp, one of the mountain boomtowns built more than a century ago as industrialization took hold of the United States. In the early 20th century, when coke ovens lining the road symbolized the nation’s industrial progress, men from around the world swarmed into the coalfields.

Now, Taulbee said, the kind of mining overtaking the region doesn’t need such a large community of workers – and the big machines tearing through the mountains won’t let these history-laden places stand in their way.

After the blasting began near Stonega, a tiny trickle of a stream near Taulbee’s home was suddenly wide as a car, she said. And she worried that a sludge pond on the mountain behind her might let lose and wash away her home.

Phillip Mullins, director of permitting and environmental affairs for Cumberland Resources, said Taulbee, whom he considers a personal friend, has been misled by an environmental movement eager to prove its cause.

The blasting was more than half a mile from her home, Mullins said, and the seven households and one church that remained in Upper Stonega when Cumberland bought them out all chose to leave.

Taulbee was paid eight times what her house was worth, Mullins said, and he personally spent so much time helping her find a new home it became a running joke at the office that he was “Driving Miss Dorothy” around town.

“I basically treated her like my own mother,” Mullins said. “I was really taken aback by her recent attitude.”

Mullins said Cumberland Resources went to a lot of effort to preserve the neighborhood’s history with pictures and video before the buildings were demolished for safety reasons – and Taulbee, like the other residents, was happy with her new home.

The Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy, the state agency that regulates mining, investigated Taulbee’s complaints about the blasting, but no violations were noted.

Mike Abbott, spokesman for DMME, said thousands of complaints about mining have been lodged over the years, but violations are rare. The agency’s data shows that the number of complaints has shrunk over the years, from 622 in 1989 to 151 in 2008.

Abbott attributes the drop to better compliance by companies, regulators’ efforts, residents’ greater familiarity with regulations, the fact that most mining operations are away from populated areas and “good neighbor policies” by companies.

Threat to life and limb?

In Virginia, much of the recent controversy over surface mining has centered around Ison Rock Ridge, which sits beside Andover, another old coal community just outside the town of Appalachia.

Gary Bowman, who lives downslope of the proposed surface mine, said he has been threatened and harassed since his involvement in a federal lawsuit that forced a halt to logging on the site.

“We’ve been called communists, we’ve been called radicals,” Bowman said.

He now won’t plant or harvest a garden in his yard because he fears the return of the watermelon-sized rocks that have tumbled onto his land. “They don’t have the right to come in here and keep me from doing what I would do on my property,” he said.

The same company, A&G Coal Corp., seeking to mine Ison Rock Ridge was cited for violations after a half-ton boulder loosed by a bulldozer tumbled down a hillside and killed a sleeping toddler in 2004.

Amid the controversy over Ison Rock Ridge, the mining permit for the project was delayed. In May, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced that the 1,300-acre project’s valley fill permit, which had been granted, was suspended.

For some residents of Andover, where old cars and pickup trucks line the narrow street between rows of aging railroad houses, it was cause for celebration.

“I went around and talked to the neighbors,” said Judy Needham. “A few of them are former coal miners and a lot of them don’t want to get involved … but I don’t know of anybody in Andover that would support [mining] Ison Rock Ridge.”

Needham said the Corps’ decision is a sign that the people are being heard.

“The coal companies, I guess they say it’s their property,” she said, “but they don’t care about other people’s property.”

Daily sacrifice

Beyond the catastrophic damage residents attribute to mining near their homes, others point to the impact on their everyday health and quality of life – from respiratory troubles caused by dust, to nervous conditions from the blasting and the incidence of cancer.

Michael Hendryx, an associate professor in community medicine at West Virginia University, has spent years studying the health of coalfield residents and has concluded that health is worse in coal-mining areas than non-coal areas. Even when adjusted for such factors as age, poverty and education, he said, coal-mining counties have higher cancer rates, especially among women.

“You can’t sit on your porch anymore,” said Mary Pace, of Roda. “We’ve got no squirrels, we’ve got no rabbits, we don’t even have fish in the creek.”

Kathy Selvage, vice president of the Big Stone Gap-based nonprofit Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards, said mining operations in Stephens robbed her elderly mother of mornings with the Lord on her front porch.

“She would go out there and take her cup of coffee – there’s still a ring on that seat where she would sit down her coffee cup – and she would drink her coffee and read the Bible,” Selvage said. “What she looked at directly across the road was blown up right before her eyes.”

Selvage said her mother is the one who taught her God has a purpose for every creature, even the tiny ones that live in the soil and are rarely seen. Those, Selvage said, are killed by the millions when a mountain is destroyed.

“There are some people who think you can destroy the earth and you can go into a laboratory and fix it,” Selvage said. “I don’t believe that we should be destroying nature. I believe that we should preserve it.”

Along with its creatures and scenic beauty, Selvage said, a mountain blown up also loses potential in other ways: for development of tourism, wind farms and other sustainable activities.

“Every time we blow up another mountain, we destroy another future economic development opportunity,” she said. “Coal River is another example of that because of its potential … to produce energy from a non-polluting source.”

Coal River Mountain is a ridgeline in southern West Virginia thought to be an excellent location for a wind farm – but if the ridge is lowered by mining, it will lose its wind energy potential forever, according to Coal River Mountain Watch.

The road here

Surface mining didn’t really take off in Virginia until the 1960s – and current practices until the 1980s – but the history of the debate begins more than a century ago, said Steve Fisher, a longtime scholar in Appalachian studies.

When coal was discovered in central Appalachia, speculators were sent to buy the rights to it – and the people who lived here had little means of understanding the contracts presented to them.

“People didn’t have any idea what was going on, and so a lot of people signed that stuff for a couple bucks an acre, and then oftentimes when people began to understand, and then the local lawyers and local people began to stand up and protest, there were some that were killed,” said Fisher, who lives in Washington County.

“Ownership of the land [changed] during this period, around 1880 until around 1910. In some counties, two-thirds of the land was owned by two or three corporations. ... The people had to live down in the flood plains because a lot of the land up above was owned by coal companies.”

In the 1960s, when the Tennessee Valley Authority sought inexpensive ways to provide electricity, a lot of those old land contracts were dusted off, Fisher said, and TVA started investing in surface mines.

“People began to get knocks on their door from coal companies saying, ‘Your great-granddaddy signed this deed that gives me the right to come in and get what’s under the land,” Fisher said, adding that companies used stereotypes of backwardness to justify poor treatment of the population in the name of development.

Still, the surface mining that took place through the 1960s was on a much smaller scale than it is today, said Cindy Rank, mining committee chairwoman for the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy.

At that time, Rank said, it was “basically stripping ribbons around the hillsides,” and without the huge equipment that exists now, the language allowing “mountaintop removal” was “a fairly limited exemption.”

Other restrictions also applied to mining companies, she said: “First of all, they weren’t allowed to fill streams.”

With those methods, the mining industry thought it was done stripping in this part of the world after the 1970s, she said, but technology continued to develop, and the imposition of clean air regulations drove an increased demand for the relatively cleaner-burning coal found here.

With demand growing, Rank said, the companies were back – this time with technology that had outgrown the regulations. In the 1980s, draglines developed for Western coal mining – in places with thick coal seams and relatively flat topography – were brought East.

“What has happened over the course of the years is that companies and technologies and the desire to get every bit of coal that you can has overtaken those limitations” imposed by federal law, Rank said. “Now the protection of the environment and the communities while you’re mining has been taken over, turned upside down.”

Today, she said, some surface mines cover more than 20 square miles, comprised of a series of permits adjoining one another.

“The pressure of industry on the agencies to loosen the regulations year after year, both on the state level and the federal level, have allowed this kind of imbalance that the original act I don’t think ever envisioned,” Rank said.

Opposition grows

Matt Wasson, director of programs for Appalachian Voices, another group opposed to mountaintop mining, said the 1977 Surface Mine Control and Reclamation Act actually opened the door to larger-scale mining.

“That very narrow exemption that was provided for in there for mountaintop removal became just a loophole that the companies were able to drive a million acres of destruction right through,” Wasson said.

When large-scale mountaintop mining began, Wasson said, it outraged people living in the immediate areas, but it took years for the message of their suffering to get to the larger population.

“It just had enormous impact on a few people who by and large weren’t wealthy or politically connected,” Wasson said. “The coal industry has had just such an iron grip in all of these states historically.”

While a few small, scattered organizations formed in opposition, they didn’t coalesce into a more organized movement until the late 1990s, Wasson said, when litigation temporarily stopped the permitting of valley fills in West Virginia.

Efforts to stop mountaintop mining hit a lull during the Bush administration, because environmental groups viewed major change as unlikely, but during that time, the movement picked up a host of new organizations.

“Groups like SAMS [Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards] formed … local people across Appalachia that have come together and decided they were going to do something, and they developed the confidence that they actually could stand up to the coal industry,” Wasson said.

Over the decades the network of organizations has launched a war of ideas – through lectures, films, pamphlets and books. Their message has an undercurrent of the downtrodden, of little people risking themselves to stand up to monied interests – and of indignation toward the sins of the past underlying evils committed in the present.

Coal-fired environmentalism?

Harry Childress, government affairs agent for Cumberland Resources, said those who were wronged in the past are the great-grandparents of the people who still make a living in the coalfields. And besides, he said, today’s attacks on coal companies – and efforts to stop mountaintop mining – can’t rectify what happened years ago.

“We are environmentalists,” Childress said, referring to the miners who live and hunt and fish in Appalachia. “We live here.”

Bill Raney, president of the West Virginia Coal Association, said people naturally take care of the environment around them for their own benefit – and he doesn’t like the feeling that people in Washington, D.C., think they know what’s best for people in Appalachia.

“Everybody wants to talk about the water and the air,” Raney said. “But think about the environment of the family, and think about the safety and conveniences that we have today. ... We’ve become dependent on electricity.”

Coal fueled America’s industrial revolution and its prosperity, said John Paul Jones, director of environmental affairs for Abingdon, Va.-based coal company Alpha Natural Resources.

“If you don’t get to the point of affluence in your society,” Jones said, “you don’t have environmentalism.”

Who opposes mountaintop mining?

 The Alliance for Appalachia – Charleston, W.Va.
 Appalachian Voices – based in Boone, N.C.
 Coal River Mountain Watch – based in Whitesville, W.Va.
 Earthjustice – based in Oakland, Calif.
 Kentuckians for the Commonwealth – based in London, Ky.
 Mountain Association for Community Economic Development – based in Berea, Ky.
 Natural Resources Defense Council – based in New York, N.Y.
 Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition – based in Huntington, W.Va.
 Rainforest Action Network – based in San Francisco.
 Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards – based in Big Stone Gap, Va.
 Sierra Club – based in San Francisco
 Southwings – based in Asheville, N.C.
 West Virginia Highlands Conservancy – based in Hillsboro, W.Va.

Who conducts mountaintop mining?

 A&G Coal Corp. – based in Wise, Va.
 Alliance Resource Partners – based in Tulsa, Okla.
 Alpha Natural Resources – based in Abingdon, Va.
 Arch Coal Inc. – based in St. Louis
 Cumberland Resources – based in Norton, Va.
 International Coal Group – based in Scott Depot, W.Va.
 Massey Energy – based in Richmond, Va.
 Patriot Coal Corp. – based in St. Louis
 Red River Coal Co. – based in Norton, Va.
 Rhino Energy LLC – based in Lexington, Ky.
 TECO Coal – based in Corbin, Ky.
 United Coal Co. – based in Bristol, Tenn.

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