The big business of cross ridge coal mining is costing our region dearly
by Joe Tarr
Charles Blankenship grew up next to Zeb Mountain in Campbell County, where his family lived for 200 years. Most of his family worked in the coal mines, including his dad and uncle.
“When I was a kid, I used to go up to the mines and kind of help out. We had cars we used to pull out and I’d work the coal or the separator. I was just a little guy. I wanted to go up there with my uncle. I thought that was exciting,” he says. “All of my family made their living in the deep mines.”
When strip mining came to area in the late ’50s and early ’60s, Blankenship watched as his favorite fishing stream was polluted from runoff and the fish all died. Many of his neighbors’ drinking wells were contaminated.
Blankenship himself worked in factories. Retired now, he hears blasts early in the morning from a different type of mining.
“I hear it and feel it, about every two or three days,” says Blankenship, who is a member of Save Our Cumberland Mountains. “We’ve had one severe blast. It knocked the telephone lines out. That was like 5:10 in the morning.”
The new type of mining is mountaintop removal, or its variant, cross ridge mining. Instead of tunneling into a mountain to get at the seams of coal, the seams are simply unearthed with heavy machinery. It requires few workers. Environmentalist say it destroys the mountain, polluting streams, causing floods and making it difficult for anything to grow back, leaving a lifeless blotch on the landscape.
When you see the effects and what remains, it’s hard to feel good about this type of mining. Yet all of us contribute to it, consuming the electrical power generated at coal-burning plants.
Coal mining has not had a major presence in Tennessee in recent years, and the state is far from a major player. But mining here is on the rise, with production topping 3 million tons in the last two years. Even if it doesn’t become a major presence, the consumption of coal at power plants is creating problems in other parts of the country.
Our appetite for power—and coal—is enormous. TVA alone burns about 45 million tons a year; all U.S. power plants burned 976 million tons in 2002. Until alternatives are found, places like Zeb Mountain will continue to be unearthed.
How It’s Supposed to Work
The coal industry avoids the term mountaintop removal, which refers to the practice of removing mountaintops to get at coal.
“Cross ridge mining” is a more benign-sounding variety of this technique in which soil is replaced once the coal is removed. Doug Siddell, who works in the Knoxville office of the federal Office of Surface Mining, which regulates most aspects of it in Tennessee, describes it this way:
“I’ll try to paint this picture for you. As a surface mine moves across the landscape, they’re going to timber in front of them. Any shrubs and trees they don’t log, the company’s going to clear and grub what vegetation is there. Then they’re going to pick up what topsoil is there.
“Then they’re going to start excavating down to the coal seam. You have to open up a certain amount of area to make it economical. Now you’re going to blast and excavate down to the coal seam.”
Continuing the explanation, Siddell says, “Let’s say the hole they create could be 100 feet deep, 300 feet long, and 100 feet wide. So they’ve got this big hole here. They’ve taken out the coal. Now what they’re going to do when they take their next cut in front of them, they take that dirt and rock and put it back behind them. They fill in the hole.”
They keep going this way through successive cuts until they’ve finished the area they want to mine. The company’s engineer has to calculate how much dirt he needs for the final cut, in order to return the mountain to its original contours.
But there’s always too much spoil—excess dirt and rock—created in the mining process. “Go out in your backyard and dig a nice square hole and then put the dirt back into it,” Siddell explains. “The dirt is going to be mounded up because what you did is fluff it up and mound it up.
“You’re going to have spoil. You’re going to have to put that somewhere. Usually, it’s put in a permanent fill somewhere.” The fill is most often located somewhere near the mine, and the dirt remains there. Some mines in West Virginia have enormous fills—50 million cubic yards—but Tennessee’s are smaller, on the order of 3 million cubic yards, Siddell says.
After the land is mined, the company is supposed to “reclaim” it, by returning topsoil, planting trees and vegetation—in theory, returning it to a more natural state. “Typically they’ll plant shrubs and trees. We’ll see various hardwood species, pines, shrubs that are favorable to wildlife.”
Government inspectors will check in on the process, Siddell says, doing statistical analysis to make sure the reclamation is sufficient. If the coal companies don’t pass their inspection, they risk losing the bond they must put down before mining.
“If they don’t meet the success standard, they’ve got to go out and do more vegetation work. If they refuse and just default, we’d forfeit and collect the bond,” he says.
“There were a fair number of forfeitures in the late ’80s and early ’90s,” he says, but not too many companies forfeit these days.
A Different View
That’s how proponents of this type of mining say it works, anyway. The process looks a lot more dangerous to Freda Williams, who lives in Boone County, W.Va., where she lives in the middle of the coalfields in the southern part of the state.
“We don’t consider it mining,” Williams says. “We just call it mountaintop removal.”
Like many of the fiercest critics of mountaintop removal, Williams grew up in a coal mining family. Her father fought in the 1921 Blair Mountain battle of the mining wars, when miners took up arms against company detectives and the National Guard—people on both sides were killed during the several-day standoff, which ended after federal troops were brought in.
Williams became concerned about mining practices in 1968, when strip mining came to the area. “It was scarring the mountains and there was no reason for it because the coal they were after could be deep mined,” she says. “I’ve always lived in and around coal mining. When I started speaking out about strip mining, I had no idea it was going to escalate to where it is today.”
Mountaintop removal began in West Virginia in the late ’70s, according to Vivian Stockman, spokeswoman for the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, a group that advocates environmental issues in West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky. Because it has a low-sulfur content, the coal of Southern West Virginia is becoming more valuable as air pollution regulations tighten. Some of the coal could be mined through traditional underground methods. But other seams are too small to be accessed that way, Stockman says.
Aside from the ugliness of tearing up a mountain, there are several environmental problems caused with the practice. Streams and drinking water are being polluted, floods caused, and forest and others lands are being destroyed. This is not just the opinion of leftist environmentalists, but the federal government.
The Office of Surface Mining, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Fish and Wildlife Service released a joint environmental impact statement last year on surface coal mining in Appalachia, covering portions of West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky.
The study found that 724 miles of streams were buried by spoil fills between 1985 and 2001 and that surface mining has the potential to damage 1,208 miles of streams in the next 10 years. Mining has destroyed 380,000 acres of forestland, or 3.4 percent of the area studied, and could eventually destroy 1.4 million acres, or 11.5 percent of the study area. And 350 square miles of mountain land has been flattened so far by the practice.
But the agencies recommended no new regulations to mitigate the dire predictions. Deputy Interior Secretary J. Steven Griles—a former mining lobbyist—reportedly wanted the study, which started under the Clinton administration, to focus on streamlining the coal mine permitting. And regulations are in the works to eliminate the requirement that there be a 100-foot buffer zone between mines and streams.
Although it has been running less than a year, the Robert Clear Coal Company has already violated its mining permit at Zeb Mountain. Alan Leiserson—head of the legal department at Tennessee’s Department of Environment and Conservation, which overseas water runoff—says the company polluted nearby Dan Branch with sediment. The pollution was killing stream wildlife. TDEC fined the company $5,250 and ordered it to clean up the stream within five months, or face another fine of $9,750. TDEC also restricted the company’s work area. (Robert Clear Coal Company did not return several phone calls from Metro Pulse.)
The company submitted a new water control plan to TDEC, which will require a period of public comment.
The Zeb Mountain mine is hard to see from any roads, and because of the blasting, driving up the mine road is forbidden without permission from the company or the escort of a government inspector.
Kathy Bird, a SOCM member who lives near Zeb Mountain, says she toured the mine last summer with an OSM official based on a citizen’s complaint. “I was really impressed with how raw everything was,” she says. “So much exposed dirt, huge rock, huge machines.”
She also noticed cracks in the company’s sludge pond.
“Acts of God”
People living in coalfields probably fear floods the most. Sludge ponds—created as the coal is processed—can break and flood communities, destroy streams, property and drinking water supplies.
Such disasters have already happened. In 1972, after days of rain, a sludge pond burst in Buffalo Creek, W. Va., releasing 130 million gallons of sludge, which emptied into Buffalo Creek and swept through several communities. The flood—which reportedly created a 30-foot-high rush of water—killed 125 and left 4,000 homeless.
In 2000, a 72-acre coal waste pond burst in Martin County, Ky., releasing 250 million gallons of coal waste into Big Sandy River. Thirty times more liquid was released in the disaster than in the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and many environmentalists considered it as bad if not worse than the infamous Alaskan spill.
No one died in this flood, but it destroyed 24 miles of streams. The coal company later dismissed it as an “act of God.” (Playing off the God-themed billboards, the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition paid for one last year that read, “Stop Destroying My Mountains.—God”.)
In West Virginia, Williams lives near an active sludge pond, which is scheduled to eventually reach 9 billion gallons, containing some 60 different chemicals. A mountaintop mine is also in the works above two abandoned deep mines, which are filled with water.
“Until mountaintop removal is stopped, the people are living with hazardous conditions that could erupt at any time,” Williams says. “It will flood not only me, but the entire community. If it happens from blasting, it could happen at any time. It could happen on a warm sunny day.”
Flooding also results when heavy rainfall runs off surface-mined areas—with most of the vegetation gone, the water simply runs down the hills. “We’ve had homes destroyed and property that is ruined [from floods],” she says.
Reclamation doesn’t work the way the industry claims it does, Williams says. The companies have one site that they use as a model, which includes a golf course, where they’ve planted non-native trees. But it’s far from the norm, she says.
The grass that the companies plant is sprayed on and will grow even on utility poles for a short period, she says. But its roots are only about an inch long and the grass doesn’t survive, she says. “The scrub trees that they plant on there, they survive for three or five years, and then die.
“On a couple of sites they’ve built prisons, but all these buildings they put on these sites are breaking apart,” she adds. “There’s one site about 17 miles from where I live. That site remained abandoned for 15 years, and they finally came in and did a little reclamation.”
Even if reclamation is successful, the land will never be what it was, Stockman says. “Reclamation is not possible if you’re talking about returning the land to its former productivity. We’re talking about some of the most biologically diverse hardwood forests in the world.”
Cheaper Method
This new form of mining is relatively cost-effective for coal companies. It’s machine-intensive, so it requires few workers. West Virginia’s coal mines employed around 100,000 people in the 1940s; today the figure is around 16,000.
In 1978, the industry employed 144,000 in underground and surface coal mines nationwide, according to the Department of Labor. In 2002, the number was 75,000—even though production climbed from 631.7 million to 1 billion tons. Only 619 people worked in Tennessee’s mines in 2002.
People who live in mining areas have mixed feelings about the employment opportunities. Blankenship knows about five people who work at Zeb Mountain. “One guy works at the processing plant. Another guy is a night watchman,” he says. “They’ve got jobs that are close to home. They don’t like the work, because it’s miserable work. It’s a dirty, nasty filthy job. But the work is close to their homes.
“We have one factory located in the valley and every job is important,” he adds.
Williams says not many people in West Virginia benefit. “[Mountain top mining] has caused a little town in Boone County to all but close down. The little buildings are all dilapidated. There’s no business. Most of the people they hire are not local people, they’re people from outside areas,” she says. “You can see license plates from North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio or Tennessee. They come in for their shift on Monday and leave on Friday.”
Fuel for the Fire
It may be tempting to blame the problem on greedy capitalists sucking the life out of the land and people to make a buck. But mine operators are meeting a demand. Just about everyone contributes to mountaintop removal when they flip a power switch.
Coal is the major source for electric power in the Tennessee Valley.
Richard Rea, manager in fossil fuels for TVA, says that the utility company doesn’t consider how the coal it buys is mined. However, TVA does consider the track record of permit violations. “If someone is not within their permit requirements, we require them to remedy,” he says. “We don’t make any distinction. We look at their performance on the permit.” TVA relies on the state and federal agencies to police those vendors for violations.
It buys coal from about 10 states, he says. About 40 percent comes from the Midwest, including Illinois, Indiana and Western Kentucky. Twenty-five percent comes from central Appalachia, including West Virginia, Southwest Kentucky, and a little bit of Tennessee. Twenty percent comes from the Utah, Colorado area, and 15 percent from Wyoming.
In terms of coal production, Tennessee is a figurative midget. In 2002, the state’s 20 mines produced 3.1 million tons of coal. That same year, the country’s biggest mine, the North Antelope Rochelle Comple mine in Wyoming, yielded 74.8 million tons. (The country’s 10 biggest mines are in Wyoming, a state that produced 373 million tons of coal in 2002.)
Of the surface mines, three are in Anderson, eight in Campbell, nine in Claiborne, and one each in Cumberland, Fentress and Scott counties, according to the Energy Information Administration’s annual coal report. The state’s active mines are running at about 76 percent capacity, employing 619 people.
In recent years, TVA has been buying more coal from Wyoming and Montana, because it has lower sulfur content, and the utility has been under pressure to reduce pollution. But since it’s been installing scrubbers at its power plants—to trap a lot of sulfur that would otherwise be released—the utility might start buying more coal from the Eastern states.
“If they’ve got the scrubbers on they don’t have to pay the transportation cost to ship the low-sulfur coal from out West,” says Stephen Smith, executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, which pushes for cleaner power generation. “I think we’re going to see a shift back toward Eastern coal. We may see increased mining in East Tennessee. Which means we’re going to see more of what we could call mountaintop removal.”
Rea said the pollution controls at least give TVA the option to buy coal from many different areas. He predicted the utility would buy more coal from the Midwest. “Tennessee’s coal reserves are highly variable in their thickness. Mining coal in Tennessee is a pretty tough proposition,” he says. “As the scrubbers come on line, I don’t see [Tennessee] being a big player at this point.”
TVA is now conducting an environmental impact statement on what effect coal extraction—both underground and surface—would have on the 53,000-acre Royal Blue Wildlife Management Area in Campbell and Scott counties, where TVA owns the mineral rights. Including Braden Mountain, the area—called Koppers Coal Reserve—is estimated to contain 70 million tons of coal, or about $140 million worth. Surface mining would be required to get 42 million tons of the coal. It’s high sulfur coal, but TVA wrote in its statement of intent that its new pollution controls will “allow TVA and other utilities to burn higher-sulfur coal from coalfields like Koppers while still meeting emissions limits and reducing the amount of SO2 released.”
The potential mining of Braden Mountain is what got Bird involved. “Some of the water that comes by my house comes out of the holler they were intending to fill,” she says.
Another Way
Environmentalists aren’t na�ve about the need for power. “If all the lights go out, I can’t run my computer,” Bird says.
“SOCM is on record saying we’re not against all mining. But we are against mountain top removal because it’s so damaging. We’re interested in seeking alternatives,” Bird adds.
Southern Alliance has been encouraging TVA to switch from traditional turbine coal power plants to coal gasification, a technology that Eastman Chemical uses. With coal gasification, the coal is chemically separated, a process in which many pollutants are removed, and then a gas is created. It’s more efficient than turbines (thus, creating more power with less coal) and causes less air pollution, he says.
“I’m not saying I’m an advocate of burning coal. But I’m enough of a realist to know that coal will continue to play a role,” he says. “We see it as an environmental step forward. We’d like to see a shift to renewables. But we see coal gasification as an incremental step.”
All the environmental groups are pushing for alternatives to fossil fuels.
“We’re thinking that as a society as a whole, we need to be moving out of the carbon era,” Stockman says. “Just today we got a Swiss insurance company saying we have to take action on global climate change because we’re approaching catastrophe. With mountain top removal, it kind of slaps you in the face in what we’re able to tolerate in terms of cheap energy. We’d like to see an Apollo-type plan enacted—a project to revamp the infrastructure and bring in alternative energy.
“It’s not a matter of should we do this, it’s we have to do this,” she adds. “We need to be transitioning out of the carbon era as quickly as possible, because our lives depend on it.”
Hanging On
The Robert Clear coal mine in Campbell County has yet to get to Blankenship’s side of the mountain.
“When they get on this side of the mountain they’ll work on the creek that goes through my property,” he says. “I don’t know what’s going to happen here. What has happened is the same thing that happened before. Companies come in and tell you they’re going to do a good thing. But you still have the same problems you did with strip mining.”
Retired now, he has little choice but to live with the mining.
“It’s in the blood. It’s not something you just pick up and take off. I might have to, but I’m going to stick around as long as I can.”
March 18, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 12
© 2004 Metro Pulse
| 
