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February 19, 2008

Mountaintop Removal Mining: Like a Third-World Autocracy

David Roberts

The Nation -- Mountaintop-removal mining -- known rather antiseptically as "MTR mining," or by the industry itself as "mountaintop mining" -- is the kind of thing most people think only happens in dystopic Third World autocracies. I can't count the number of times I've described it to people only to be told they "can't believe it happens in America."

Well, it does -- the resource curse is just as true domestically. Here's how it works:

Mountain ridges and peaks are clear-cut, stripped of all trees and other flora. Explosives are buried underground, and enormous blasts dislodge millions of tons of rock, dirt, soil, and animal and plant life. That "overburden" is then carted away or dumped into the stream and creek beds in the mountain hollows below, destroying or polluting thousands of miles of running water. Huge 20-story-tall draglines pull away the rock to expose coal seams. Similarly huge machines then yank the coal out and dump the remaining waste down into those streams.

This has all, unsurprisingly, been accelerated by President Bush, who received enormous contributions from the coal industry in his 2000 race and has fought unstintingly for it every since. After judges smacked down the notion that hundreds of tons of waste counts as "fill," the Bush administration issued a new rule (in violation of the Clean Water Act) to redefine it. The legal issues are up in the air now, but Bush got what he wanted: eight more years of mining.

So, yeah: we are literally blowing up the Smoky Mountains -- the oldest mountain range in the US.

We're also destroying some of the US's oldest indigenous communities in rural Appalachians where families have been on the same patch of land for generations. They are showered with toxic dust. Their water is polluted. Occasionally, "slurry ponds" -- standing pools of toxic sludge produced when the coal is cleaned -- break out of their walls and flood towns below. Here's one such slurry pond, perched precariously above Marsh Fork Elementary School (you can see it in the lower left):

Marsh Fork Elementary
(photo: Vivian Stockman)

Their houses shake as huge coal trucks careen up and down narrow mining roads. If they protest, they are bullied and intimidated by coal companies and often their own neighbors. Mining execs, like the loathsome Don Blankenship, buy off state judges and politicians.

And despite coal company rhetoric, residents of rural Appalachia are not compensated with jobs or economic development. The heavy use of explosives and large machinery has steadily reduced the number of jobs in the mining sector, and every community that's hosted it has been left poorer, not richer, when the coal is gone.

This is all done in the name of cheap electricity. Your cheap electricity. Feel good about that?

Anyway, I could go on (and on and on). If you're interested in learning more, here are some resources:

And -- finally! -- for your amusement, I bring you some commercials aired recently in rural West Virginia by Walker/Cat, a company that makes heavy machinery for coal mining operations.

Here, Miss Bug explains that heavens no, blowing up mountains, dumping the rubble in streams, and covering the result with a thin layer of soil and grass monoculture doesn't "bug" her at all, ha ha!

In fact, life fairly blossoms in the wake of MTR!

Miss Bug's husband Mr. Bug is "bugged out" about activist judges. After all, he doesn't need electricity. Do you?

Miners are almost artistic in their use of equipment to blow up mountains and dump the rubble in streams.

After all, you dirty hippies don't even know where your electricity comes from!

That's only scratching the surface. There are more.

 

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 Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition

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 Coal River Mountain Watch

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 Concerned Citizens in Mingo County