Razing Appalachia

By Maryanne Vollers Mother Jones (Www.Motherjones.Com/)
Published on November 1, 1999

Hear that quiet? Larry Gibson asks as he climbs through the
highland cemetery where nearly 300 of his kin lie buried. ‘You know
they’re about to set off a shot when they shut down the machines.’
Gibson, a 53-year-old retired maintenance worker and evangelist of
the environmental cause, hunkers down with some visitors to wait
for the blast.

Gibson knows the routine by heart. After all, the Princess
Beverly Coal Company has been blowing up the hills around his
family’s 50-acre ‘homeplace’ in West Virginia for more than a
decade. When the demolition team is ready down below, the
‘Ukes’–heavy shovel trucks–back away from a line of high
explosives drilled into solid rock. Then the warning horn sounds:
two minutes.

The graveyard sits atop Kayford Mountain, a modest, leafy peak
that sticks out of the shattered landscape like a fat green thumb.
The view from the edge of the cemetery looks more like the Tunisian
outback than a West Virginia mountain range: The ground drops 300
or 400 feet into a dust bowl of raw coal and rubble, crosscut by
dirt tracks. In the distance, what used to be forested ridges now
resemble flat-topped buttes crusted over with rough grass and a few
stunted trees.

West Virginia has been mined since the mid-18th century, but
nobody has seen annihilation like this before. In the past 20
years, environmentalists claim, 500 square miles of the state have
been stripped and gutted for their coal. In the most apocalyptic
form of strip mining, known as mountaintop removal, whole peaks are
razed to extract layers of relatively clean-burning low-sulfur
coal, while the excess rock and earth ‘overburden’ is dumped into
the valleys. Hundreds of miles of streams have been buried under
these ‘valley fills,’ and dozens of mountains have been flattened
into synthetic prairies.

Now, an environmental group called the West Virginia Highlands
Conservancy and seven coalfield residents are taking state and
federal regulators to court for the first time, claiming not only
that mountaintop removal devastates the environment, but also that
existing laws designed to mitigate the damage are not being
enforced. Coal companies and their proxies say the practice is
necessary for the economy and assert that there is no proof that it
permanently damages the environment. Since last year, both sides
have been presenting their cases in a federal court. At stake are
the future of surface coal mining in West Virginia, the economies
of several counties, the way of life of thousands of people, and,
environmentalists contend, the ecological health of the entire
northern Appalachian watershed.

Whatever the outcome of the lawsuit, most of Kayford Mountain is
destined to be strip-mined one way or another. But Larry Gibson
won’t let the coal companies take it all. He represents a large
extended clan that owns that 50-acre parcel atop Kayford, the
remnant of a mountaintop farm dating back to the 18th century. It’s
one of the rare private holdings in West Virginia’s southern
highlands, where most land is owned by corporations and then leased
to coal companies. Millions of dollars worth of coal lie beneath
the picnic ground and vacation cabins now located on the spot, but
the family trust won’t sell.

‘The man from the coal company told me, ëWe haven’t seen
anything we can’t buy,’ ‘ Gibson recalls. ‘I said, ëYou’re not
buying this land.’ If we sell, we sell our heritage. We have no
past after that. Where can we show our family where their roots
are?’

As we watch, a huge explosion wallops a coal-streaked bench
below the cemetery, flinging up plumes of yellow dust and sending
cascades of dirt and shale overburden into the valley. The hillside
shudders with the shock wave.

‘That warn’t nothing,’ observes Gibson’s cousin Carl ‘Red’
Fraker, a 70-year-old retired miner who lives in a half-deserted
village along Cabin Creek, below Kayford. ‘The big ones roll the
ground like an earthquake.’

Fraker was born on Kayford Mountain, and he intends to be buried
here some day, but most of his friends and neighbors have moved on.
Explosions shower dust and rocks on people who live below the
mountaintop mines. The foundations of their houses crack and their
wells dry up. Whole towns are disappearing.

Thousands of people once lived in simple wood-frame houses along
Cabin Creek. Now the road that follows the streambed is lined with
ghost towns with names like Red Warrior and Acme and White Row,
casualties of the conversion from underground mining to strip
mining and now, finally, mountaintop removal. Machines do almost
all the work in these modern mines: The coal miners and their
communities have become an inconvenience.

Up above, when the dust clouds settle after the latest blast,
the Ukes start chugging up the hill to scrape out the exposed coal.
Red Fraker takes another look out at the black wasteland below.
‘What’s gonna happen to West Virginia when all the coal’s gone?’ he
asks. ‘Ain’t no timber on it. No dirt left. Nothin’. What’s it
gonna be?’

That was precisely the question members of Congress were asking
when they passed the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act,
SMCRA (familiarly known as smack-ra), back in 1977. The gist of the
law is this: If you mine the land, you have to restore it. The law
also provides detailed regulations designed to reduce the
environmental impact of destructive surface mining. SMCRA bans
strip mines, including mountaintop mines, within 100 feet of active
streams unless it can be shown that the streams won’t be damaged.
The law further requires ‘contemporaneous reclamation’–meaning
that soil replacement and reseeding must occur soon after coal is
removed. The land must be returned to its ‘approximate original
contour,’ or AOC. The permit holder can be granted a variance from
the AOC rule only after submitting a detailed plan for post-mining
flatland development, such as a school, airport, or shopping center
that would benefit nearby communities.

West Virginia’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) is
charged with enforcing SMCRA, overseen by the federal Office of
Surface Mining. Unfortunately, there has been very little DEP
regulation–its ranks are filled with former coal-industry
employees–and even less outside supervision from the weak and
understaffed federal agency.

Ironically, stricter environmental laws increased the demand for
West Virginia’s low-sulfur coal in the first place. More than 80
percent of America’s coal is consumed by coal-burning electric
power plants, which in turn provide the nation with 56 percent of
its electricity. Passage of the 1990 Clean Air Act forced power
plants to reduce the sulfur content of smokestack emissions, which
react with the atmosphere to cause acid rain. Some of the purest
and hottest-burning coal in the nation is found in thin seams high
in West Virginia’s southern mountains. Rather than mine this coal
out of the mountains, industry accountants found, it’s cheaper and
faster to take the mountains off the coal.

In recent years, the state has kept up with the demand for
low-sulfur coal by granting permits for more and bigger surface
mines. Since 1995, DEP has approved permits subjecting 27,000 new
acres to mountaintop removal. Anywhere from one-tenth to two-thirds
of the permits issued in 1997 (the number depends on whether you
consult state regulators or newspaper reports) are for
mountaintop-removal mines, which account for 16 percent of the
state’s coal output. Environmentalists assert that some mountaintop
mining areas are now 10 miles wide, and that the largest will
eventually gobble up 20,000 acres.

But it is not just the size of a given mining area that’s
worrisome; nobody has studied what the cumulative impact of so much
disruption will be on the environment of northern Appalachia. ‘It
might be a different story if it was a 200-acre plot here and 500
acres in another county,’ says Cindy Rank of the West Virginia
Highlands Conservancy. ‘But mountaintop removal is spreading and
connecting all through the areas where there are coal reserves.’ If
permits continue to be approved at the pace set over the past
decade, environmentalists say, half the peaks in some southern
counties could be lopped off.

Despite assurances from coal companies that the land can be
reclaimed, environmentalists say they worry about increased acid
runoff from these giant gashes. They fear the loss of groundwater
in the land below flattened mountains that were once laced with
natural springs and aquifers. And even though coal-industry
technicians insist that the gargantuan valley fills behave ‘like
sponges’ and are actually a form of flood control, other experts
remain skeptical. ‘What you see in a lot of these valley fills has
no engineering method to it at all,’ says Rick Eades, a former
mining-industry hydrogeologist. ‘Nature will cut those valley fills
right out of there, given time. And there’s no way that the
mountains can heal in a way that will resemble the original ability
of the land to hold back the water during heavy rains, hold back
sediments, and retain groundwater.’ Two West Virginia conservation
groups notified DEP in January 1999 of their intent to sue the
agency for not assessing the ‘cumulative hydrological impacts’ of
mountaintop removal during the permitting process.

Forests are also a concern. William Maxey, West Virginia’s
former chief forester, says that more than 300,000 acres of
hardwood forest so far have been destroyed by mountaintop removal
and that the mining industry’s preferred reforestation methods are
‘totally superficial and will not work.’ After Maxey failed to
convince DEP to require adequate reforestation of mountaintop
mines, he resigned from his job in disgust.

In March 1998, the Charleston Gazette obtained 81
DEP-issued mining permits, which it then reviewed against federal
laws. The investigation revealed some startling facts: DEP didn’t
keep complete records of how many permits it issued, so there was
no way to track the cumulative effects of mining. The U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers routinely granted general ‘nationwide’ permits
for valley fills that should have required more rigorous individual
permits. And in almost all cases, mountaintop-removal AOC variances
were issued without post-mining development plans. When plans were
submitted, most were for ‘timberland’ or ‘wildlife habitat’–uses
not recognized by SMCRA.

The Office of Surface Mining conducted its own investigation,
which essentially confirmed the newspaper’s findings. In other
words, for 20 years DEP had been stretching the law to please the
coal companies, and the U.S. government had allowed it to
happen.

In response to an increasing public outcry over mountaintop
removal, Governor Cecil Underwood, a former coal company executive,
appointed a task force to investigate. It came up with
recommendations for more studies and increased vigilance by the
regulators.

Meanwhile, Arch Coal, the country’s second-largest coal company,
was trying to push through a 3,100-acre mountaintop-removal permit
to expand its giant Dal-Tex mine in Logan County. It would be the
largest permit ever granted–amounting to about five square miles
of what DEP calls ‘total extraction.’ The Dal-Tex mine had already
filled in dozens of hollows on the west side of the Spruce Fork
River. All but 40 of the 200 families that once lived in the hamlet
of Blair had already moved away. That was when James Weekley, a
58-year-old grandfather and former miner, began to fear that Arch
Coal wanted the rest–including the headwaters of Pigeonroost
Branch, in the leafy hollow where he and his family have lived for
generations.

Weekley and nine other coalfield residents joined with the West
Virginia Highlands Conservancy in July 1998 to sue DEP and the Army
Corps for ignoring SMCRA, the Clean Water Act, and other laws.
(Three of the original plaintiffs have since dropped out.) Although
no coal companies were named in the suit, its purpose was to make
sure the mines comply with the law.

The plaintiffs decided in December 1998 to settle part of the
case against the federal government. They agreed that the Army
Corps, in conjunction with other federal and state agencies, would
conduct a two-year environmental impact study to assess and deal
with the cumulative damage caused by mountaintop removal in West
Virginia. Meanwhile, new permits and permits already in the
pipeline would be subjected to closer scrutiny to ensure compliance
with existing regulations and standards. But the federal defendants
argued that the Dal-Tex permit should be exempted from new,
stricter scrutiny, and that mining should be allowed to begin. The
company, they argued, had made significant changes in its permit
application–including reducing the lifetime of the Dal-Tex
expansion mine from 12 to 5 years and scaling back its proposed
valley fills–in response to pressure from the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency that was unrelated to the lawsuit.

But Weekley and the other plaintiffs balked at exempting the
Dal-Tex mine. They asked U.S. District Chief Judge Charles Haden
for a preliminary injunction to delay the permit until the rest of
the lawsuit could be resolved in a trial.

To the astonishment of almost everyone, the conservative
Republican judge–who had visited Pigeonroost Hollow and flown over
the coalfields–granted the preliminary injunction. In doing so, he
cited the ‘imminent and irreversible’ harm that would be done to
the Weekleys, and to the stream flowing through Pigeonroost Hollow,
if the mining were to proceed, and he also distinguished it from
the ‘purely temporary economic harms’ that Arch would endure from
the delay in its operations. The judge then noted that the other
legal questions the plaintiffs had raised regarding the conduct of
mountaintop removal would be addressed in the future trial.
Meanwhile, Arch Coal would have to wait for its permit.

The coal company responded to the ruling by laying off 30 miners
at the Dal-Tex mine and promising to shut down its operation and
put 300 more employees out of work by summer. The loss of jobs and
tax revenues would poleax the economy of Logan County, one of the
poorest counties in a poor state. Less money would be available for
schools, police–everything would be affected. The president of the
Logan County Commission declared, ‘It’s a war!’ and the commission
vowed to fight to keep the mine open. Days after Judge Haden’s
decision, 1,500 miners, along with union and business leaders from
Logan County, marched on Charleston in protest.

The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) found itself in a
terrible position. The stark reality of labor in West Virginia is
this: At the end of World War II there were more than 100,000 union
coal miners in the state. Now, of the fewer than 19,000 miners who
remain, only 40 percent belong to the UMWA. The union’s president,
Cecil Roberts, perceived as a moderate on the issue of mountaintop
removal, had already come out in favor of protecting communities
from the technique’s excesses. But the imminent loss of one of the
biggest union mines in the state was more than he could take.
Roberts called for observation of April 2, 1999, as a ‘memorial
day’ without pay for the nation’s 35,000 union miners to protest
the situation in West Virginia. He was hoping that up to 10,000
would attend a rally in Charleston. Perhaps because it was the
Easter weekend, only about 500 miners and family members showed up
at the capitol.

Roberts, a wiry, bearded native West Virginian, shouted like a
preacher at the modest crowd that day, telling them they’d all been
‘kicked in the teeth again by the environmental community. We’re
fed up and we’re fired up!’

Some West Virginians have accused Roberts of stirring up an
already volatile situation in the coalfields. He says he’s been
reasonable for the past year, trying to negotiate a solution to
mountaintop removal. ‘We were working to find a compromise for
workers to keep their jobs and at the same time protect the
environment. I believe you can do both,’ he told Mother
Jones.
‘We argued that we shouldn’t eliminate mountaintop
mining at that moment. It wasn’t fair to the workers, wasn’t fair,
quite frankly, to the companies that had invested literally
millions and millions of dollars in West Virginia.’

West Virginia Secretary of State Ken Hechler, who has a long
history of supporting the UMWA, is disappointed by Roberts’ stance.
‘Like all wars,’ he says, ‘a war against the mountains creates
employment. But you don’t keep fighting just to supply jobs. In any
event, we ought to start diversifying our economy early on instead
of [accepting] such a heavy dependence on coal, which pollutes the
streams, pollutes the politics, and is a finite resource.’

The coal hasn’t quite run out yet. In fact, recent years have
set new records for the state’s coal production: 182 million tons
were extracted in 1997 alone. Most of the mining jobs eliminated
over the past half-century were lost to mechanization of the mines
and conversion to surface mining–not a decline in coal
production.

But Hechler is right: The coal will run out some day. And the
big lie of Big Coal is that West Virginia depends on mining for its
prosperity. Skeptics ask: What prosperity? West Virginia is 49th
among the 50 states in household income. And in this very poor
state, the poorest counties are the ones with the most coal
mines.

‘No state has given more to the American Dream and gotten less
back from it than West Virginia,’ says Norm Steenstra, director of
the West Virginia Citizen Action Group and a former coal operator
himself. ‘The corrupt political system, the dead streams, the
severed mountains, the fraud, the dust, the noise, the air
pollution–what for? All to supply the voracious American appetite
for cheap electricity.’

It’s a risky business calling up a coal company and saying
you’re with Mother Jones. But Arch Coal spokesman David Todd
is a good sport, and he agrees to a tour of the Hobet 21 mine near
Madison, West Virginia. The mine is a cousin of the Dal-Tex
operation 40 miles south of here, and a showcase for mountaintop
removal.

We climb into a 4×4 truck to have a look at a section that was
mined 20 years ago. In fact, the reclaimed parts of Hobet 21 are
quite handsome. There are rolling, grassy hills, stands of small
trees here and there, a number of ponds where ducks like to nest.
To my eyes, it looks more like western Nebraska than West Virginia,
but to Todd and to the regulators who approved this reclamation,
it’s a fine example of restoring the approximate original contour
of the land. ‘The hills are smaller but with similar rolls as the
original mountains,’ says Todd, sweeping his hand across the
pastures to the forested bumps on the horizon. ‘This is just more
manicured-looking.’

Before we wrap up the afternoon tour, Todd wants to get
something off his chest about the mountaintop-removal controversy
and the Dal-Tex permit problem.

‘If you detect a level of frustration, sometimes even anger, I
don’t deny it,’ he says. ‘Because, dammit, we’ve done everything
and more that people have asked us to do throughout the years.’ He
says Arch Coal has bent over backward to get the right permits and
keep the mine running, in the process taking a loss of $1 million a
month since September 1998. ‘All we ask is, tell us what the
standard is, how we should comply with the law, the permits we
need, and we will do that!’ he cries, throwing up his hands.
‘Meantime, shutting us down and costing 300 jobs at Dal-Tex is
unconscionable.’

It’s touching to hear a coal executive so concerned about the
loss of jobs. In the past year, 900 union miners have been laid off
in West Virginia as a result of reduced domestic demand (after a
pair of mild winters) and consolidation in the coal industry.
Nobody marched on Charleston when those cuts were announced, and no
corporate vice presidents expressed their anger and frustration
about the lost jobs. Most of the coal-mining jobs are moving to the
Powder River Basin of Wyoming, where there are no unions, and where
seams 75 feet thick lie right below the gentle, rolling surface of
the land. Arch Coal recently purchased Atlantic Richfield’s giant
strip mine there and, a few days after Judge Haden’s decision,
began to dismantle one of its 340-ton coal shovel trucks to ship to
Wyoming.

Ricky Light of Sharples, West Virginia, used to drive that
truck. Light, 32, who has a wife, three young daughters, and
payments to make on a new modular home, was one of the first to be
laid off at Dal-Tex. He used to make $55,000 a year; now he
receives unemployment income of $1,200 a month, though his bills
amount to $1,800, not including groceries. He and his wife,
Samantha, may be shutting off the phone soon, and they’re
considering moving in with her mother. ‘We planned our life around
15 more years of mining,’ says Light, a slender, dark-haired man in
a Nike swoosh cap. ‘I didn’t believe it’d go this far. I thought
they’d get the permits.’

Light says he has a ‘few good possibilities’ for another job.
He’s been told he could relocate to Arch’s new mine, near Gillette,
Wyoming, but he doesn’t want to leave his hometown. Like the
business leaders in Logan, Ricky Light doesn’t fault Arch Coal or
the grim realities of mining for his predicament. He blames the
people who brought the lawsuit, some of them his neighbors.

‘There’s a lot of hard feelings here,’ he says. ‘It’s just
getting started. ‘Cause you don’t take things off people’s tables.
You don’t mess with people’s livelihoods.’

Pigeonroost Hollow is just a mile or so east of Blair Mountain,
the site of the biggest union battle in the history of West
Virginia. That was in 1921, when a young firebrand named Bill
Blizzard–whose great-nephew happens to be UMWA president Cecil
Roberts–led 15,000 men on a march to unionize the southern
coalfields. Famed organizer Mary Harris ‘Mother’ Jones herself
tried to stop the confrontation, but she couldn’t turn them back.
The union men met the sheriff’s private army on the slopes of Blair
Mountain. As many as 20 people were killed; nobody knows the exact
number. Blizzard ended up in jail. It took another decade and still
more blood to organize the West Virginia mines.

Another war is now being fought in the shadow of Blair Mountain.
The barriers seem harder to define, and the sons and daughters of
those union foot soldiers are dug in on both sides of the line.
It’s a battle over jobs and the environment, tradition and
change–a fight that is going on here in the coalfields, and out in
the redwood forests of California, and in the copper mines of
Montana, and overseas where the natural resources are running
dry.

There used to be a historical marker at the foot of Blair
Mountain describing the great union war. But somebody stole it, and
the sign was never replaced. Soon the mountain itself will be gone,
consumed by shovels and trucks and converted into an artificial
pasture big enough for a hundred future Wal-Marts, although, if the
mines go through, there will be hardly anyone left to shop there.
There may not even be a marker to commemorate the battle, or the
times when Mother Jones walked up the creeks to organize the coal
camps because the coal company owned the roads. The creeks
themselves will be buried under tons of dirt and rock, buried like
the mountain and the memory of a time when the people of the
coalfields and their union knew which side they were on.

Maryanne Vollers is an author and journalist
living in Livingston, Montana. From Mother Jones (July/Aug.
1999). Subscrip-tions: $18/yr. (6 issues) from Box 469024,
Escondido, CA 92046-9024.

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