For over a century, coal mining in these hills has fed the people and anchored the towns while gutting the mountains around them. Imagining life without mining was a nightmare to some, a dream to others.
But a federal court ruling may sharply reduce coal mining in Appalachia. That prospect has revealed a divide throughout the region between those who say the weary landscape can bear no more mining and others who wonder how they would survive without it.
“No one likes to see the mountains destroyed,” said Sandra Stover, 59, who cooks breakfast at a diner for dozens of drivers whose coal trucks rumble through this valley town every morning. “But if mining dies, this town dies.”
At issue is the future of so-called mountaintop removal, a profitable and drastic method of extracting high-grade coal by decapitating peaks. Its use has reshaped American mining over the last two decades as dramatically as it has altered the landscape of West Virginia.
In a decision last month that stunned coal companies and their White House allies, Chief U.S. District Judge Charles H. Haden II in West Virginia all but barred the coal industry from filling in Appalachian rivers and valleys with rock and dirt from the mountaintop mines.
While readying their appeal, coal companies warn of potential ruin for an industry that generates $6.3 billion in revenue and employs 28,000 miners across West Virginia and Kentucky. The decision could affect 62 of 123 proposals for new or expanded mines in West Virginia and most of 526 such applications in Kentucky, according to federal court filings.
The Bush administration, which has backed coal as a key component of its energy policy, is urging the judge to stay his decision, warning in legal briefs of “severe economic and social hardship” and “a tremendous cloud of uncertainty over all future coal mining in Appalachia.” The two sides involved in the case disagree on whether the ruling also applies to mining in Tennessee and Virginia.
Setting the stage for a political battle, Haden also rebuked the White House for having regulators rewrite mining rules to facilitate mountaintop removal just before his decision. The change, Haden concluded, “was designed simply for the benefit of the mining industry and its employees” and was “contrary to the spirit and the letter of the Clean Water Act.”
Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.), who heads a subcommittee of the Environment and Public Works Committee, has scheduled a hearing for Thursday to examine the circumstances surrounding the rules change.
The issue of mountaintop removal pits coal companies and the Bush administration against an emerging coalition of environmental and citizens groups. The critics contend this method is spoiling wildlife habitats and pouring millions of tons of “valley fill” onto quiet hollows that were once home to Appalachian mountain communities. Residents from West Virginia to southern Pennsylvania have sued coal companies in recent years, blaming mountaintop removal for fouling their drinking water and aggravating flooding, among other things.
New hope for tourism
But the issue also separates neighbors throughout this valley, where prosperity is legendarily scarce. Here, 30 miles south of the capital city of Charleston, the debate over land use reflects deep tensions as the Mountain State strains to recast its priceless terrain as a destination for tourists as well as a home to miners.
“The right to mine coal here ends where it endangers our health and safety,” said Judy Bonds, 49, a coal miner’s daughter who works for Coal River Mountain Watch, a local environmental group. “You may have your job tomorrow, but what do you tell your kids? That you wasted the future of these mountains?”
That future is being threatened by mountaintop mining, according to a recently released federal impact study. At least 560 miles of streams have been lost under valley fills since 1985 in West Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee, according to a draft of the study by the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal regulators. Before the court decision, the study had predicted that another 230,000 acres of forestland would be eliminated by mining in coming years.
“Valley fills destroy stream habitats, alter stream chemistry, impact downstream transport of organic matter, and affect thermal and flow regimes available to downstream biological communities,” the study concluded.
The coal industry defends mountaintop mining as ecologically responsible. What environmentalists call a “mountaintop” is “overburden” in the language of coal mining. The industry denies that flooding can be tied to its operations–a state-sponsored study is examining the issue–and argues that the vast treeless plateaus they create are useful in a state with little flat land.
“We’re confident that we have an environmentally sound and financially stable process,” said Bill Raney, president of the West Virginia Coal Association. “Over time, these sites will either mature to look more like surrounding vegetation, or they can be left to provide developable space for airports, prisons and the like.”
Coal also fuels services
The industry also points to tens of thousands of other jobs supported by mining, from electricians and contractors, to gas-station attendants and diner cooks.
The dependency on coal is not abstract to Gordon Eversole, president of the Boone County Commission, which manages 500 square miles around Whitesville. Even as he strongly argues that coal companies must curtail environmental damage, he recognizes that 75 percent of the county’s $10 million budget for ambulances, firefighters and other services comes from mining companies.
“If that money dries up, we might as well turn off the lights in the county office and go home,” Eversole said. “We’d be done.”
But critics of the coal industry charge that it vastly overstates the economic consequences of limiting mountaintop removal. Indeed, critics note, mining jobs in this state have been disappearing for a half-century, down from 140,000 in the 1940s to 15,000 today. They represent just 3 percent of jobs statewide, while mechanization has allowed production to keep rising.
“They are creating the impression of a false economic crisis, while producing no evidence at all,” said Joe Lovett, director of the Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment in Lewisburg, W.Va. He is co-counsel on the suit brought by Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, a policy group, that led to Haden’s ruling May 8.
“There would certainly be a period when the industry would have to adjust to the ruling,” Lovett said. “But there is plenty of time if the industry would agree to the ruling.”
There may not be as much time for Larry Gibson, 56, a former autoworker who is the last remaining resident atop Kayford Mountain northeast of Whitesville. Sixteen years after mining began here, Kayford is a mountain in name only. Mining has erased thousands of acres of ridgelines, peaks and streams, leaving it a flat and denuded plateau. In the middle is Gibson’s 50-acre ancestral home, with the graves of some 300 of his relatives, which he hopes he will not have to abandon.
“Do you see that sky there?” he said, angling a hiking stick 45 degrees into a patch of pale blue. “That used to be a mountain. It is gone. And you’re going to tell me any job is worth that?”
