Officials say coal companies providing opportunity by reshaping landscape

VANSANT, Va. – Imagine living in a place without land for a school, hospital, factory, shopping center or even a home.

Imagine being 100 miles from the nearest emergency room and without a direct highway to get there because the mountainous terrain makes road building cost prohibitive.

Imagine finally finding a way to enter the 21st century – but being told by the federal government that you might not be allowed.

For residents of Buchanan County – with its steep, severe, beautiful landscape a short 350 miles from the sprawling suburbs of Washington, D.C. – there is no need to imagine such difficulties. They’ve lived them, right down to the push for stricter mining regulations that threaten to eliminate future development projects like Southern Gap, a 1,100-acre mixed-use development park on a flattened mountaintop.

In a county that, until recently, has never seen a piece of usable land that exceeded 5 acres, Southern Gap will allow for a little bit of everything – from industrial sites to a residential subdivision.

“We’ve been looking for this since I’ve been here,” said Craig Horn, the county’s director of economic development, “and I’ve been here for 20 years.”

So when Buchanan County officials talk about surface mining reshaping the landscape, they’re referring to the way coal companies are providing opportunity.

Horn said the county’s economic survival depends on Southern Gap and projects like it. Because without help from mining, moving mountains is simply cost prohibitive.

“We don’t have subdivisions,” Horn said. “We have a whole group of [professional] people we don’t retain anymore. They move to other areas and drive in to work.”

Or they just leave to work somewhere else.

Horn said there simply is no place to build a house or a small business unless you have plenty of cash. On U.S. Highway 460, the main highway that runs through the county, an acre of buildable land goes for more than half a million dollars.

But in Buchanan, the median income is $26,571, putting it among the poorest counties in the nation, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

“It’s all supply and demand,” Horn said. “It’s been like that for the last 30 years.”

Southern Gap could change all of that.

A big selling point: From the top of a flattened mountain, the opportunity offers an incredible view, and reasons for businesses and brains to stay.

An even bigger selling point: Unlike most of the county’s buildable land, the mountaintop is not in a floodplain.

Eventually, this reclaimed mine site will connect with the Coalfields Expressway, a 116-mile highway being built in conjunction with mining. The expressway will run through what’s now a stretch of daunting terrain, across the coalfields from U.S. Highway 23 near Pound, Va., to the West Virginia Turnpike.

“We move more material in one month than the largest VDOT [Virginia Department of Transportation] project does in a year,” said Roman Lawson, chief engineer for the stretch of highway road bed that Alpha Natural Resources, an Abingdon, Va.-based coal company, is building in Virginia.

“Once we put it on a truck it doesn’t matter where it goes, so why not put it on a road?”

The road – like the mine – is carefully engineered, Lawson said, with structures in place to handle rainwater until construction is complete.

On its Web site, VDOT calls the expressway “an economic lifeline” expected to boost commerce and tourism in “the entire multi-state Appalachian region.”

“We’re proud of what we’re doing now, the road we’re building,” said Arlie Collier Jr., superintendent of the Hawk’s Nest Surface Mine, operated by Alpha subsidiary Paramont Coal Co. “Ten years down the road, when there’s a superhighway here, we can say, ‘I built that.’ ”

As the expressway takes shape, in the sparsest region of a cash-strapped state, the hope for more mountaintop development sites in the future is dwindling.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is imposing new mountaintop mining restrictions that threaten to halt the practice altogether.

The new rules also pose a problem for development that has nothing to do with mining, because they’re drawn from the Clean Water Act.

“Do you know any way you can build a road in this country without affecting a stream?” Horn asked. “Everything is straight up and down.”

Case in point is the $250 million in state and federal money being spent to flood proof and build a four-lane highway through the county seat of Grundy, a project that included blasting a 13-acre site out of a hillside for a new downtown.

With projects like Southern Gap and Grundy backing his argument, Horn has an answer for those who oppose mountaintop mining: “If you lived here, you’d have a different point of view.”

dmccown@bristolnews.com | (276) 791-0701