Watersheds are the most severely impacted by MTR. Mining runoff is also extremely detrimental to human health. The runoff transports dissolved metals from coal mining activities. The runoff affects water supplies such as well- water, municipal water, and affects food sources through eating metal contaminated marine life.
In addition to the obvious effects of surface mining to human health, there is an environmental justice impact rarely considered by lawmakers. The communities that are dependent on coal mining show higher mortality rates, total poverty, and child poverty than non-dependent communities. Few miners are able to rise above this poverty and unemployment continues to increase. The unemployment is not due to lack of coal or because of new regulations, as discussed in section V.
Coal mining is making corporations and investors wealthy, but the miners continue to lose jobs and live below the poverty line, in. The local communities have very little power to move away from coal mining, which is one reason they cling to this lifestyle, despite the current mining practices literally killing them and leaving them unemployed. The Stream Protection Rule SPR , enacted at the end of the Obama administration, was designed to prevent the dumping of coal waste into waterways by coal-mining operations.
He used a formerly rarely-used, though growing in popularity especially for environmental regulation, federal statute called the Congressional Review Act CRA. The effects of using CRA to void a regulation is permanent. It could potentially only require the changing of the text in a rule but would more likely require a change to the substantive change to the rule. For example, the only time an agency as reissued a rule struck down by the CRA was in The SPR was not a drastic rule and many environmentalists argued that it was not enough.
The effects of this rule would not have been felt by anyone outside of the Appalachian area because it was meant to protect waterways for these communities.
The rule simply required coal-mining companies to monitor streams prior to, during, and after surface mining activities, including MTR. The rule also required companies to create buffer zones around affected streams. The rule by no means resulted in the barring of mountaintop removal mining, it simply updated the prior legislation that was put in place before surface mining activities were even a thing.
SMCRA was focused on restoring land to its pre-mined condition, not on the effects of mining on water quality. Further, state governments have consistently failed to enact water quality standards and are unable to fund studies that look into the health effects of coal mining. The Obama administration recognized this and created monitoring regulations through the SPR and provided funding for studies into health effects, but the Trump administration has decided these communities do not deserve this funding or these regulations.
The propaganda around the idea that coal means jobs is outdated and not supported by the evidence. For example, a study done in by Duke University showed that between electricity generated by coal declined by 24 percent while alternative energy from natural gas, wind, and solar grew by 39 percent, percent, and percent. The town of Madison, lower right, lies along the banks of the Coal River. In , the mining operation is limited to a relatively small area west of the Coal River. The mine first expands along mountaintops to the southwest, tracing an oak-leaf-shaped outline around the hollows of Big Horse Creek and continuing in an unbroken line across the ridges to the southwest.
Between and , the mine moves north, and the impact of one of the most controversial aspects of mountaintop mining—rock and earth dams called valley fills—becomes evident.
There is always too much rock left over, and coal companies dispose of it by building valley fills in hollows, gullies, and streams. Between and , this leveling and filling in of the topography becomes noticeable as the mine expands northward across a stream valley called Stanley Fork image center. The most dramatic valley fill that appears in the series, however, is what appears to be the near-complete filling of Connelly Branch from its source to its mouth at the Mud River between and Since , the mine has expanded from the Connelly Branch area to the mountaintops north of the Mud River.
Significant changes are apparent to the ridges and valleys feeding into Berry Branch by The images from and show some green-up of restored lands. The images also show expanded operations in the southwest and northeast. Over the year period, the disturbed area grew to more than 10, acres And this form of mining makes a twofold contribution to climate change: The forests destroyed in the process no longer store carbon, and the burning of the coal that's mined releases carbon into the atmosphere.
The lost forests don't grow back. The effects of mountaintop removal are permanent. Clean coal? These folks in Rawl, West Virginia can tell you there's no such thing. Their water is now unusable because of contamination caused by mountaintop removal. Photo by Vivian Stockman. Mountaintop removal destroys lives and communities.
Citizens living in mining areas say it's like being in a war zone. Blasts shake houses, crack windows and foundations, ruin wells, send boulders careening into homes, and coat everything in dust. In , a three-year-old child was killed in his sleep when a boulder from a mine site crashed into his home.
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