Photo courtesy of Vivian Stockman, Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition. Flight thanks to Southwings.

There’s a major story on mountaintop removal out today on Yale’s  Environment360 Web site. It was reported and written by three-time Pulitzer Prize winner John McQuaid, who has written before about the issue here and here.

In short, McQuaid concludes:

The environmental damage caused by mountaintop removal mining across Appalachia has been well documented. But scientists are now beginning to understand that the mining operations’ most lasting damage may be caused by the massive amounts of debris dumped into valley streams.

The story summarizes the state of the science, which was recounted previously on Coal Tattoo here, and reports:

… The scientific picture of mountaintop removal now emerging — from, among other things, the study of valley fills like the one in Laurel Branch — is, in its way, far more dramatic than any protest … The spread of mountaintop removal through central Appalachia in the past 15  years has given scientists the opportunity to study environmental destruction on a previously unthinkable scale: The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that by 2013 a forested area the size of Delaware will have been destroyed and that more than 1,200 miles of streams have already been severely damaged. As that footprint has grown, so has the evidence, outlined in peer-reviewed scientific papers and ongoing investigations, showing that the damage is far more extensive than previously understood.

The Obama administration’s approach puts pressure on coal companies to compromise with regulators to limit some of the more egregious impacts of mountaintop removal. That may have some effect, but it will be limited by the government’s balkanized regulatory scheme for coal mining, which dates to the 1970s and never contemplated the vast damage that results when mountains are demolished.

The story offers little hope that the measures taken so far by the Obama administration will do much to stop the destruction:

The Obama administration’s approach puts pressure on coal companies to compromise with regulators to limit some of the more egregious impacts of mountaintop removal. That may have some effect, but it will be limited by the government’s balkanized regulatory scheme for coal mining, which dates to the 1970s and never contemplated the vast damage that results when mountains are demolished.

In the case of valley fills, for example, only the EPA has ecosystem-wide responsibility through the Clean Water Act which governs what may be dumped in streams and waterways. But the agency’s power is circumscribed; it shares authority with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which actually grants the dumping permits and has taken a much more sympathetic view of the practice. The Interior Department, meanwhile, oversees mountaintop projects via another law, the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act.

Nevertheless, the White House is betting that mountaintop mining can be managed and the damage ultimately repaired. But the science indicates that such an incremental approach may never be effective. Mountaintop removal does damage on both vast and microscopic scales, from hydrological changes over hundreds of square miles to effects on the life cycles of the tiniest stream microbes. Overseeing the repair of such damage is beyond the capabilities of any government agency; the most serious impacts — to streams — may be all but impossible to fix.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 20, 2009 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Media coverage, Mountaintop Removal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.