The Evils of Mountaintop Mining

Just a few facts so you will know what I'm squawking about:


Mountaintop coal removal has been called "strip mining on steroids."


Just under half of the electricity generated in the United States is produced by coal-fired power plants.



Increased demand for coal in the United States, sparked by the 1973 and 1979 petroleum crises, created incentives for a more economical form of coal mining than the traditional underground mining methods involving hundreds of workers, triggering the first widespread use of mountaintop removal (MTR). 


With an increasing call for energy independence in the U.S., as well as a growing call for coal-to-liquids and "clean coal technologies," MTR has continued to expand well into the 2000s.



The Mountaintop Mining process involves blasting the summit or summit ridge of a mountain with explosives to remove up to 1,000 vertical feet (300 m) of mountain to expose underlying coal seams.  Excess rock and soil are often dumped into what are called holler fills or valley fills, and obliterate any streams that lie in the way.


MTR is most often associated with the extraction of coal in the Appalachian Mountains, where the EPA estimates that 2,200 square miles of Appalachian forests will be cleared for MTR sites by the year 2012, 800 miles of Appalachian streams have already been destroyed by mountaintop removal. 


It occurs most commonly in West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky, in the top two coal-producing states in Appalachia, with each state using approximately 1000 metric tons of explosives per day for surface mining.


At current rates, MTR in the U.S. will mine over 1.4 million acres by 2010, an amount of land area that exceeds that of the state of Delaware.  Because coal usually exists in multiple geologically stratified seams, miners can often repeat the blasting process to mine over a dozen seams on a single mountain, increasing the mine depth each time. This can result in a vertical descent of hundreds of extra feet into the earth. Many if not all of these seams mined in the MTR method are too thin to be mined using any other method of mining.
  
MTR accounted for less than 5% of U.S. coal production as of 2001.  In some regions, however, the percentage is higher, for example MTR provided 30% of the coal mined in West Virginia in 2006.


The industry lost approximately 10,000 jobs from 1990 to 1997, as MTR and other more mechanized underground mining methods became more widely used, however the coal industry asserts that surface mining techniques, such as mountaintop removal, are safer for miners than sending miners underground.   Proponents argue that MTR is sometimes the most cost-effective method of extracting coal and provides high-paying jobs.


However one stark fact remains:  The counties that host MTR are often the poorest in Appalachia. For instance, in McDowell County, West Virginia, which produces the most coal in the state, over 37% of residents live below the poverty line. In Kentucky, counties with coal mining have economies no better than adjoining counties where no mining occurs.


We cannot continue to look the other way while thousands of acres of precious topsoil are devastated.  Please share this information and help save our mountains; I will be posting blogs every day about mountaintop removal and what you and I can do to take a stand against it. 

The ELandF project at the "end of the power grid," Venice Beach, California, will take place on One Web Day, September 22, when Tom Phillips, a Kentucky native now in L.A., will read an essay in front of the public webcam there.  Tell your friends, tell your family - learn more about what you can do - and let's protect our heritage and our natural resources.