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Mountain Top Coal Removal

Imagine living in a community where beautiful mountains once stood and now all you see is demolished, dusty land. Places such as West Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee have to deal with this without their word or safety mattering. Mountain Top Removal is the cheapest way to obtain coal. Instead of digging below the surface, mountains are dynamited swiping out more then intended. Miners are selfish by demolishing mountains completely to gain the coal they need even if that means harming near communities and environments of animals and plants.

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency mountain top removal is, “…a mining practice where the tops of mountains are removed, exposing the seams of coal. Mountain top removal can involve removing 500 feet or more of the summit to get at buried seams of coal. The earth from the mountaintop is then dumped in the neighboring valleys.” Coal mining in the Appalachian started in the 19^th century. Soon companies wanted bigger and better. Bigger machines started being used to scoop out as much coal as possible without consideration to any of the environment. McQuaid says, “Behemoths called draglines can be more than 20 stories tall and use a scoop big enough to hold a dozen small cars.” These were the machines replacing workers in order to be more profitable. According to The Beehive Collective today there are fewer then 15,000 coal miners compared to the once 150,000. The cheaper they gain the coal, the more they can consume when they sell the coal products, considering a lot is powered by coal still.

Mountain top removal is the lazy way out of gaining the coal needed. Producers obtain coal for such benefits as shipping it to Asia and Latin America to produce goods. According to the Bee Hive Collective, an organization trying to get their story out about MTR using a mural with animals representing a story line of mining history, goods such as hair driers, I-pods, X-boxes, plasma screen TVs, and college diplomas are all coal-powered. Even if you are against the mountain top removal, it is hard to find yourself using a product in some way coal produced. Bee Hive Collective mention all the bad things that Mountain Top Removal causes and hope that eventually something will be done about it.

Everything that goes into gaining the coal needed harmfully affects the communities surrounding the mountains. Mountain top removal is intruding on human’s lives and health. MTR Companies are a nuisance to the community as they make themselves at home by forming large potholes with their huge trucks and dumping their waste into water supplies. Living in such areas as a parent would be emotionally shattering having to worry about your child as they are in school. Take for example Marsh Fork Elementary School, which is located 400 feet below a 2.8 billion-gallon waste dam. If there were to be a spill, which is likely, there would definitely be deaths. Safety should be more of a concern then having the best machinery to dangerously blow up entire mountains. Surrounding families have to deal with problems such as: lack of water supply, blasting, and sludge dams. Careless MTR leads to the drying up of wells and contamination of others. Blasting occurs close enough to 300 feet within homes. Blasting can last 24 hours a day and is an interruption to the community. Also, it can lead to cracks in wells and foundations. Pieces from the mountains fly all over and regularly land in streets and homes. Sludge dams are used to store the waste used to wash the coal, and are very unreliable. Often, sludge dams leak into people’s water supplies putting people at risk of illness. (“end mountain top”) Mountain top removal companies take over people’s homes and intrude on their daily lives, even causing deaths and illnesses. Many suffer from asthma and other related diseases caused from toxins in the air.

Processing the coal releases toxins and greenhouse gases out into the air, which have a large leading effect on global warming. In fact, The Beehive Collective (TBC) mentions a former NASA scientist, James Hanson who, “…estimates that 80% of the problems associated with climate change could be avoided today, simply by leaving the coal in the ground.” Due to many problems that were caused, the Clean Air Act was formed. The clean air act requires coal to be washed before it is burned to get SOME of the toxins out. TBC says, “…the deadly rinse water has to go somewhere- usually, back up the mountain into unlined, open air pits held back by some of the largest earthen dams… This “sludge” is even injected into old under- ground mines, (where it leaches and leaks into aquifers and wells), or illegally dumped into waterways,” Therefore in the end just causing another problem needed to be handled with polluted water supplies.

Just to get the little amount of coal effects the entire environment in a great way.

If trends continue the way they are now John McQuaid talks about the Environmental Protection Agency who say, “…by 2012, two decades of mountaintop removal will have destroyed or degraded 11.5 percent of the forests in those four states [West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky], an area larger than Delaware. Rubble and waste will have buried more than 1,000 miles of streams.” Companies are practically killing life when they carelessly blow up mountains and trees and surrounding land. Once the mountains are blown up nothing is ever the same. In 1977 the Surface Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA) was formed in order to try and get the mountains back to how they were after the removal of coal. Companies are careless and do not seek to make the land what it once was, “The former mountains remain as barren plateaus, and any regeneration will take centuries. Reclamation efforts are scattered and largely pitiful, because the ‘industry-ready’ flat land is left both polluted and inaccessible”(Motavalli). Mountain top removal is not concerned about saving the beauty the mountains once had to offer, the money saved is all that matters to some. Chuck Nelson, who once was a minor says he, “watched his industry transition rapidly from underground extraction to MTR, which he says is ‘quicker and cheaper, and employs fewer people’”(Motavalli). Many people lost their jobs due to the industrialization of the coal mining industry.

Beautiful environments are being destructed every day from mountain top removal. Area that cannot be replaced is getting blown up without a thought. Blasted land is dumped in valleys and streams. Toxicity is then in the streams causing harm when fishing, swimming or drinking (Gaworecki). As mountains are blown up animals are left with no habitat to come back to. Although sites are supposed to be brought back to their original content that would take years, and are instead replaced with cheap grasses. The Appalachia is known to have the prettiest mountains and diverse forests’. And the damage that has been done is done and it will never be replaced to the same beauty it once was. Environments and animals habitats need to be thought about first before the extraction of entire mountaintops.

Obama’s administration is taking steps towards trying to end mountain top removal. First, limiting the amount of MTR practice within a time period is being limited. Valley filling is taken into deep consideration as pollution of water is getting out of hand. New limits are being set on the “conductivity” of the streams. Conductivity is tested by, “measuring the salinity, or salt content, of the stream. Conductivity is an effective way to gauge the concentration of pollutants in a stream” (Gaworecki). Recent trends of valley dumping would not meet the regulations therefore it would have to be cut down to pass. Organizations are also coming together trying to get their word out such as: The Sierra Club, Mountain Justice, I Love Mountains, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, and Appalachian Voices (Chhotray). Organizations are important because one persons word is not going to do much, it takes a lot to fight against the mountain top removal companies because coal IS a common source that is used in many situations.

There is too much being taken for granted as we destroy the mountains in order to gain cheaply produced coal. Everyone needs to speak out with the communities around the Appalachia that have their lives and health at risk. Surrounding communities, forests, and animal habitats need to be taken into account before mindlessly blowing them all up and causing destruction.