Word: mountaintop
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Loud blasting began years ago. Massey and other large coal-producing companies like Patriot Coal, in St. Louis, employ a particularly destructive form of excavation called mountaintop mining, which exposes entire coal seams by blowing off a mountain's summit; used mostly in Appalachia, such mining produces 130 millions tons of coal in the region per year. It's less popular in other coal-rich spots such as Texas, where the coal is deeper underground and requires a different kind of mining to unearth. Coal companies say mountaintop mining is also cheaper than traditional mining: rather than burrowing under...
More than 100 representatives of community and environmental advocacy groups showed up in Washington earlier this month to lobby for stiffer government regulation of the mining industry and a ban on mountaintop mining. Recently, representatives of the U.S. Office of Surface Mining visited Appalachia to study the effects in the area. Such mining is devastating the environment, "polluting our streams, poisoning our air and destroying our culture and heritage," says Judy Bonds, co-director of the West Virginia-based Coal River Mountain Watch...
...course, clean coal technology does not diminish the environmental costs of extraction - to flora and fauna, and also to human well-being - say critics. Mountaintop mining destroys the natural habitats of many local species, whether endangered ones such as flying squirrels or flourishing ones like salamanders. Further, mountaintop debris that is dug up or displaced by explosions is dumped in the valleys below, burying headwater streams, killing the aquatic species that live in the waters and impacting downstream water supplies. About 1,200 miles of streams have been buried in this manner in central Appalachia, according to a 2003 federal...
What can be measured are chemicals like arsenic, lead, mercury, magnesium and selenium that leach into water sources from mining waste. Toxins have been found in high concentrations downstream of mountaintop mining sites, killing fish and threatening human health, according to biologist Dennis Lemly of Wake Forest University. Some residents of the Lindytown area rely only on bottled spring water for drinking. "No, ma'am, we do not dare drink the tap water here," Bonds says adamantly...
...through the Clean Water Protection Act, which is currently sitting in the House. The bill would close a loophole in the Clean Water Act of 1972 and halt the burying of streams with coal debris, which would block further contamination. The EPA does not have the authority to regulate mountaintop mining, but it is responsible for preventing the practice from affecting water quality, said EPA administrator Lisa Jackson at the National Press Club in Washington. The EPA will "try to minimize, if not end, any environmental degradation to the water" caused by mining, she said. "We fight for clean water...