The Liberal Patriot

A Special Series- The Myth of Cheap Coal Energy, A Paradigm Of Greed

Almost Heaven – Destroyed

J.G. Schwam - July 31, 2004

Julia Bonds called growing up in the hollers of the Appalachian coalfields almost heaven. Her family settled in the hills of southwest West Virginia eight or nine generations ago. It’s hard to be sure. These hills are part of a North American Amazon, known as the Cumberland plateau. It is one of the most biologically diverse forests on earth. Prized hardwoods, hickory, white oak, walnut, cherry and birch all grow abundantly. Wild raspberry, strawberry, blackberry, ginseng and fiddlehead ferns blanket the forest floor. Spend an afternoon on the porch of a 100 year old farmhouse deep in these hollers sipping iced tea and feasting on corn and green beans from the garden with a piece of home fried chicken from out back, while a gentle breeze blows across the mountains. Watch the grass wave on the lush bright green lawn, while a mountain stream meanders by and you will understand why no one ever wants to leave these mountains.

It is easy to understand why 2003 Goldman Prize winner Julia Bonds remembers her childhood in these hills as almost heaven. They are. But her children will not grow up in the same hills. The deep underground mines that her father, uncles and those before them labored and sometimes died in to make a living amidst beauty of this land against the harsh the economic reality Appalachia has always been are gone.

As harsh a life as the mines may have been the patriot Americans that worked them did so proudly knowing there labors fueled the furnaces of democracy and freedom. But pride alone is not why they stayed in the mountains. It is their beauty, their heritage, the glorious culture of music, church and family that spans generations. Their reverence for the mountains and their ancestry there is illustrated in what they call their ancestors farms and houses. They are home places.

The coal that has fueled one hundred and fifty years of Americas industry is still there. The deep pockets of the energy industry have created a new paradigm to mine the coal that fuels this feckless, impudent industries myth of cheap, cleaner greener coal energy. This new paradigm is destroying these mountains, a national treasure. Its called mountain top removal mining or because activist groups like Bond’s Coal River Mountain Watch have begun to make mountaintop removal a bad word the coal industry has begun to call it peak decapitation, as if in today’s world decapitation sounds better.

Every week 17,500 tons or more of explosives blast away at least six square miles of these mountains. Immense eight story shovels known as drag lines dump tens of thousands of tons rock, blasted away, in buckets big enough hold forty Honda Civics in a single pass, into once pristine mountain valleys and streambeds. The mountains around Larry Gibson’s home place, Kayford Mountain once towered two hundred feet above his. Now they are four hundred feet below his Mountain. By the end of the year one thousand vertical feet of the mountains around his will blasted off and dumped into valleys nearby, choking off ancient mountain springs. Each month miles more of the Ohio River watershed is wiped away under dozens of thousands of tons debris the mining industry calls over burden, the rich soil and forest that covers the coal seems deep below are pushed over the precipices they create into the valleys, burying these pristine ecosystems forever, creating horribly polluted acidic, heavy metal laden Rivers Styx from what was moments before Appalachian splendor.

Mountaintop removal coal mining is for the culture and forests of southwestern West Virginia an unfolding social and environmental holocaust on an epic scale. But the impact does not stop there. These mountains feed the three of the most important watersheds in eastern North America the Ohio, Mississippi and Potomac. Tens of millions of Americans draw drinking water from these rivers and their tributaries daily. Thousands of farms water their cattle and irrigate their fields with water that rolls forward from the West Virginia hills now laden with, mercury, nickel oxides, sulfuric acid and harsh chemicals used to treat the coal before shipment. Some of these chemicals in concentrate are so caustic they will turn granite into sludge and liquefy asphalt on contact. If you live south of the Delaware or east of the Mississippi rivers you are directly or indirectly drinking these poisons. We are all downstream.

In the arboreal paradise that are the hollers of the West Virginia coal fields the destruction of the new greed driven paradigm of mountain top removal mining is starkly evident. Millions of gallons of polluted waste water is pumped into the abandoned deep mine shafts that riddle the hills along side and underneath the strip mines. These caustic wastes are destabilizing the mountains. They leak, boil and sometimes blow out violently, along side of homes, roads, schools and playgrounds. Maria Gunnoe loves to hike in the mountains she grew up in. A resident of the coal fields and a scion of eight generations to live on her land says, “the mountains are moving, you can feel it under your feet”. She has seen what they call mine cracks, the evidence of underground mines becoming unstable often blowing out rivers of toxic sludge covering gardens, roads and spoiling ancient stream beds forever.

Yet this new fallacious paradigm of coal as cheap energy seems to have bought off the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, the US Bureau of Surface Mining and the US Environmental Protection Agency. They refuse to test or release tests of these waters. Nor do they seem to care to as they are charged by law, to regulate or contain toxic runoff and protect the environment and the watersheds of tens of millions of Americans from pollution that in some areas is likely profound enough as to be irreversible.

Under an administration bent on expanding energy production at any cost, these agencies charged with protecting the environment are grossly remiss. The US Army Corps of Engineers knows full well that gargantuan impoundments such as the one above the Brushy Fork creek that holds back seven billion gallons of thick toxic, mercury laden coal sludge are not stable or engineered well enough to be safe. Yet they continue to permit more.

The Brushy Fork impoundment is no more than an earthen and rock dam, nine hundred and forty feet high and four miles long, never intended to grow to its current size. Yet, influenced to abdicate their responsibility by the Bush administration that has packed the US Department of the Interior with coal and mining and energy industry lobbyists and executives have allowed this and other such waste dumps to become an appalling example of the reckless and irresponsible expansion of surface mining in West Virginia.

The residents who have seen leak after leak at Brushy Fork be stanched by piling on more loose rock and dirt only until the next know its only a matter of time before the leaks cannot be stopped by these Band-aids and thousands of Americans and probably sixty miles of mountain rivers leading into the Ohio River River tributary the Kanawah River are buried forever under a river of toxins forty feet high that will be more than ten times larger that the Exxon Valdez.

The paradigm must be changed. The cost is too great. We elect our government to be responsible, not the opposite.

This is the first of a series of articles on the true cost of so called cheap coal energy.

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