Big news today in the ongoing fight between the U.S. EPA and the Corps of Engineers over the regulation of mountaintop removal coal mining.
Remember those first couple of Corps’ Clean Water Act permits that EPA announced two months ago it wanted to take a closer look at?
One of them was a permit for Central Appalachia Mining LLC to bury 3.5 miles of streams to get at about 7.3 million tons of coal in Pike County, Ky. And apparently, the company decided it didn’t like the idea of EPA taking a closer look at its permit, and — after an initial meeting in mid-April — cut off those discussions.
So then on Monday, Corps officials in Huntington were preparing to approve the permit. Ginger Mullins, regulatory branch chief for the Corps’ Huntington District office, told me today that the permit documents were sent to the company. The permit would be issued once the company signed the documents and returned them, along with a $100 permit fee check, to the Corps.
But that never happened — because EPA stepped in, sending this letter to Corps District Engineer Dana Hurst, invoking EPA’s authority under the federal Clean Water Act to take over review of the permit and block issuance by the Corps.
“That stops signing of the permit by the district,” Mullins told me. “It’s now more or less in their [EPA's] hands.”
In the letter, Acting EPA Region 4 Administrator A. Stanley Meiberg cited his agency’s concerns that the mining proposal “could result in unacceptable adverse effects on the aquatic ecosystem, particularly to the water quality and fish and wildlife resources.”
The letter continued:
Specific concerns include the cumulative impacts of this project on the watershed, considering both the direct fill of natural stream channels and the indirect effects of such fill activities on downstream water quality across the watershed, and inadequate avoidance and minimization of impacts to the aquatic resources of national importance.
EPA feels that additional measures may be available to reduce the impact of this proposal, and that all alternatives should be exhausted to ensure that this proposal does not result in an unacceptable adverse impact, either individually or cumulatively, on the aquatic environment.
So what’s this all about?
Well, in this letter, EPA again cited the language concerning “aquatic resources of national importance,” which — as I’ve written before here –Â allows EPA to bump the permit review upstairs, taking it out of the hands of local Corps officials and moving it to Washington. That’s the process under Section 404(q) of the Clean Water Act.
But more importantly in this instance, EPA’s letter constitutes the beginning of the review process under Clean Water Act 404(c). Normally, Section 404 permits are reviewed and issued by the Corps, but this part of the law:
…Authorizes EPA to prohibit, restrict, or deny he discharge of dredged or fill material at defined sites in waters of the United States (including wetlands) whenever it determines, after notice and opportunity for public hearing, that use of such sites for disposal would have an unacceptable adverse impact on one or more of various resources, including fisheries, wildlife, municipal water supplies, or recreational areas.
Under EPA regulations, EPA now will issue a public notice (within 15 days) to announce its determination “to restrict or prohibit the discharge of dredged or fill material” at the Big Branch Mine. This EPA fact sheet spells out the rest of the process, which includes a public hearing and further review by EPA and — possibly — a rejection of the permit if major changes aren’t made to the mining plan.
This is a rare process, as this list of EPA 404(c) actions shows.
Stay tuned …
Subscribe to the Coal Tattoo
This is great. Its wonderful to know that we have an EPA that – even though it hasn’t specifically used the term “cumulative impact” (as far as I know) – is looking at just that, the cumulative impacts of mountaintop removal. It seems to me that the coal industry, after negatively impacting over 1.2 million acres of Central Appalachia through mountaintop removal, is going to be hard-pressed to find an area to strip-mine without having adverse cumulative environmental impacts.
This week NASA posted an interesting satellite image of large-scale surface coal mining in the mountains of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=38337&src=eoa-iotd
“The area’s heavy dependence on coal for industrial and domestic electricity and heating has left its mark on the surrounding landscape. . . . The transition from underground mines to more profitable large-scale surface mines has led to soil degradation, dramatic changes to terrain, and water and air pollution.”
The site has a link to an interesting report (not perfectly translated) that discusses some of the ecological problems with this type of mining.
Environmentalist have been lining up for years to attack the poor science conducted within research by the EPA. Now that the same poor science is being used to back their agenda the research methods of the EPA are now above questioning.
I guess it all depends on who is driving the bus.
However, with a new bus driver every four to eight years this debate just gets old…too many opinions with too little science.
Maybe, just maybe, West Virginia won’t become known as ‘the flat-top state after all!
It’s about time somebody did something to help preserve the natural beauty of such a marvelous place as West Virginia!
May God bless the efforts of those behind the stoppage of the ‘rape of the mountains’!
[...] just this week, the EPA intervened to take over review of a permit for a massive mountaintop removal coal mine in Pike County, Kentucky. Once again, EPA Administrator Jackson seems to be fulfilling her promise of using sound science [...]
[...] EPA vs. Corps: Mountaintop Removal Fight Heats Up (Coal Tattoo) [...]
For ten years I have been pointing out the fact that the WVDEP must take into consideration the cumulative effect of mountaintop removal mining before it can adequately determine the true cost of this type of extracting coal to the residents in southern WV and in Kentucky. I preached the necessity of considering cumulative damage of multiple permits side by side at every hearing, meeting and conference I attended. Now, finally, the EPA have realized the truth of this statement. I pray that they will continue to enforce this undeniable truth.
Janice