Word: overburden
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...tucky's coal production, which last year reached 93 million tons worth some $500 million. The strip miners use bull dozers to flay great strips off the sur face and get at the veins beneath. This scars Appalachia's hills and flatlands with ugly detritus called overburden or spoil. As the spoil shifts and slides, the hills resound to the awful rumble of landslides shuddering down the slopes...
...Interior Department reports that Kentucky's overburden has spoiled 119,600 acres of land and polluted 395 miles of streams...
...ancient mineral-rights leases, have mined the land and simply moved on, leaving behind a fearful legacy of tormented earth. In West Virginia alone, strip miners are tearing up land at the rate of 6,000 acres a year, annually creating 240 miles of "high wall"-vertical cliffs of "overburden" (discarded earth and rock) that resist vegetation, frequently slide over onto adjacent homes and property...
...public road, stream, park, school or building. Strippers, when they apply for a mining permit, must now submit a detailed advance plan of how they intend to reclaim the mined land. They are further required to carry a minimum of $50,000 liability insurance to cover damages from sliding overburden to any adjacent property owners, who may recover three times the actual damage...
...eager to catch such big fish as Martin Bormann, Hitler's top deputy, and Heinrich Müller, a boss of the Gestapo, who are repeatedly rumored to be alive in hiding, Bonn claims that an extension of the statute would mainly net unimportant minnows at home, and overburden prosecutors who find it harder and harder to prove specific charges after 20 years. As one official puts it: "If you want to bring to court every railroad man who pulled the switches at Auschwitz, knowing that the trains were carrying Jews to their deaths, there will...