This article originally provided by The Lexington Herald-Leader

January 2, 2008

Coal mines' neighbors live, sleep in fear

E. KENTUCKIANS HAVE ENDURED ENOUGH

By Rick Clewett

Many of us will go to bed tonight with every reason to think that we will have a good night's sleep and that the world we wake up to tomorrow will be substantially the same as the world as we experienced it today.

Sure, we may wake up in the night because of a stray pain or take a while to go to sleep because we have to let go of the stress of a hard day. But we do not expect to be awakened during the night by the sound of blasting or the noise of large, overloaded trucks barreling down the road in front of our houses.

We do not take into our dreams a huge, steeply angled valley fill looming over our houses. We are not endangered by a huge pile of dirt, rock and, too often, trees bulldozed off the mountain over the last three months so that coal could be removed in the cheapest, quickest way. Nothing will break loose and threaten to bury us while we sleep.

We do not stay awake fretting that the slurry pond at the bottom of the fill is leaking at a rate of 5 gallons a minute, and that its restraining wall may some day give way, flooding our narrow valley, as has happened in recent years in Martin County and elsewhere.

We do not have to wonder whether some of the employees of the coal company who pressured our neighbor into selling his mining rights will make loud noises just beyond our property line in the middle of the night to harass us into selling out, too.

If we drive along U.S. 80 between Prestonsburg and Hazard and happen to see some evidence of mountaintop removal or contour mining, with its strangely flat places and its sudden, sheer walls left where part of the side of a mountain was simply lopped off, we may feel disconcerted. But we are not really seeing most of the problem.

If we go on one of the mountaintop-removal flyovers that Kentuckians for the Commonwealth arranges, we may come back feeling much more strongly the devastation being done to regions of Appalachia. But we still will not understand much of the problem.

It would never occur to those of us living in Lexington, Louisville, Bardstown, Paducah or Owenton that much of what is called deep mining in Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia is actually done above the level of the valley floor, that is, above stream level.

Long stretches of the mountains that look so solid as we drive the roads of southeast Kentucky, if we ever do, have been hollowed out to mine coal.

And many people live in the valleys above which these mountains loom. It would certainly not occur to us that the mining companies that hollowed out those mountains often were not content to obey the law and leave the specified distance between the surface of the mountainside and the point where they stopped mining.

You would have to have a miner who had worked in such a mine tell you about it to believe that companies often have their miners dig until they come to the roots of trees on the inside of the mountain, leaving only, perhaps, 20 or 30 feet between the surface of the mountain and the mining shaft.

That is a story I heard recently from a miner who lives in the narrow valley below the mountain he helped hollow out. That old deep mine is now partly filled with water, and a surface mining company wants to blast part of the top and side of that mountain to turn the coal that can be retrieved that way into quick, easy dollars.

Now that miner wonders at night if the mountainside will hold when they start drilling or blasting. If it doesn't, well, that's the stuff of nightmares.

What I have begun to understand about the complexity and pervasiveness of the coal mining-problems in Appalachia is not helping the quality of my sleep.

And that is good. Enough of us living in the rest of the state and the rest of the country are going to have to become distressed about this for change to happen. The pain and the anxiety experienced by many of the residents of southeast Kentucky will have to become ours.

The problems the people in Appalachia are left with after the coal is gone can be compared to the problems of dealing with nuclear waste after the supposedly cheap electricity has been consumed. Both sets of problems are severe and long-lasting.

It almost wouldn't be surprising if someone suggested that all the nuclear waste in the country should be collected, shipped to Appalachia and stored in empty mines.

After all, it would just be one more injustice, one more source of anxiety and outrage for people who have already had more than their share.