Mountain Top Removal Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Historic Floods Leave Rural Community With Questions

Moments after she ended the call the river had breached its five-foot banks. She looked up stream and saw waves of turbulent water coming towards her.
“It literally looked like the dam opened,” Anna Goodnight said.

Escaping The Flood

Anna Goodnight’s yellow panel house sits along the Little Creek hollow. Her home, and the other homes on this street, are accessible by a small bridge that crosses a trickling creek. The morning of August 28th she stood along the side road holding her son’s hand, waiting to put him on the bus. It was raining and had been raining on and off for a couple days.

At 6:45 a.m. Anna looked up the road and noticed the small creek was the slightest bit higher than normal.

“I looked up the road and I called their dad. I said, are you sure everything’s still good? Yeah, (he said) sure. I said, Are you sure? Are you sure everything’s gonna be okay? He said yeah, everything’s fine,” Goodnight said.

Moments after she ended the call the river had breached its five-foot banks. She looked up stream and saw waves of turbulent water coming towards her.

“It literally looked like the dam opened and all this just came gushing down,” she said.

The bridge that connects the road to their house was washed away creating a cascade of thunderous sounds as bridge after bridge gave way to the pressure of the raging creek.

Anna ran over the bridge, back to her house to grab her other child and her dogs. Then back over the bridge through a veil of water that was coming up over it, to her car.

“As soon as we got across it wiped the whole thing out. When I got in the car to leave, you can see, it followed us all the way down. Just rushing out,” Goodnight said.

Another one of her neighbors was not able to cross the creek in time. Goodnight says she saw her on the other side of the flooding creek climbing with her four young children up over the mountain to get to high ground away from the waters.

Seven homes were washed away in the floods in late August. Credit/Anna Goodnight

Mountains Of Water

The residents in this area are used to floods because these hollows, or areas low in a valley lined up with creeks, are vulnerable to flash floods. However, residents that live along Little Creek all said this flood was different.

“Never have I witnessed anything like that,” Goodnight said.

A flood warning was not issued until 7 a.m. — 15 minutes after Goodnight said the flood started.

“A statement was made from somebody, ‘When you get an alert, that you need to leave your home.’ Well, there was no alert. There was no warning. There was not a flood warning. There was nothing,” Goodnight said.

Most residents say as quickly as the water went up, it went down. That’s characteristic of a watershed area that has been impacted by surface mines, said Nicolas Zegre, a professor of forest hydrology at WVU’s mountain hydrology laboratory.

“When we get into surface mine systems, because of all the impervious surfaces and the lack of vegetation and lack of soils, we see a very flashy flow response where the stream rises very quickly. It peaks very quickly, and then it falls very quickly. And that shape of the hydrograph does say a lot about what’s going on in that watershed,” Zegre said.

In an undisturbed watershed, different things happen to the precipitation, Zegre said. Some of it is absorbed by the ground and stored for later use, some of it absorbed by trees and used in a process called transpiration, some of it is held in the ground or puddles and eventually evaporates. He said even if that water does eventually find its way into the creek, it typically releases the water over a longer period of time, having less intense peaks.

“The biological system that normally would attenuate that rainfall is no longer there. So, we would expect increases in runoff on landscapes,” he said.

Moving Mountains

Reclaimed mines don’t do much better.

“The big question as to whether reclamation ever restores the function of the watershed: The answer is no,” Zegre said.

That’s because those mines, even when complying with state and federal law, usually just plant exotic grasses on top of the minded areas.

“So this requires, you know, built infrastructure to kind of manage the runoff that’s coming off of these impervious surfaces that are associated with the mine. So even when it’s recreated, it’s still a disturbed landscape that is largely dominated by minerals and rocks, as opposed to soils and trees,” Zegre said.

The areas that were flooded are wrapped with older spiraling contour mines and dotted with newer mountaintop removal mines. Mountaintop removal mines are the most common form of modern coal mining.

“It’s really efficient. And so what this does is it starts at the top of the mountain, it removes the trees, it removes the soils, and then it uses explosives to remove the geologic overburden on top of those coal seams,” Zegre said.

Geological overburden is an industry word for a million pieces of blown-up rock that once formed the top of a mountain. That rock is then placed in the valleys to create another industry word, “Valley Fills.”

Some experts, like Zegre, say valley fills store water.

“Research that we’ve done on this has shown, at least for the Coal River watershed in the southern coalfields in West Virginia, maximum flows have been decreasing in that watershed,” he said. “And it was our belief that that was associated with the valley fills.”

However, Zegre says that it is hard to say if those valley fills help absorb torrential rainfall — like the 11 inches of rain that eastern Kanawha County saw in late August.

Other experts like whistleblower, expert witness, activist, and mine and health safety expert Jack Spadaro say valley fills make floods worse.

“All the studies that have been done by hydrology engineers with knowledge about how runoff happens on a slope or a mountain top have proven beyond a question that valley fills do not reduce the flow of water what-so-ever,” Spadaro said. “That’s a myth that was created by the industry to justify what they are doing.”

It’s important to emphasize that with the amount of rainfall that eastern Kanawha County had there would have been a flood regardless, Zegre said.

“Whether it’s an old growth forest, a surface mine, or a parking lot, when you drop 8 to10 inches over a couple of hours, there’s going to be a flood that comes off that landscape,” Zegre said.

Spadaro said while that is true, surface mines make floods worse, whatever the scenario.

“There have been many studies that show there’s an increase of peak discharge during a storm period. It can range between a 150 percent increase to as high as a 1,000 percent increase in the flow of water that’s coming off those watersheds. And that’s what’s been causing these floods,” Spadaro said.

Rising Water, Climbing Temps

As temperatures rise due to climate change, the air holds more water making heavy rainfalls happen more often.

“For every one-degree temperature change in the atmosphere, the atmosphere can actually hold 4 percent more water,” Zegre said. “A study by Climate Central actually showed in Huntington, West Virginia, hourly rainfall has increased by about 28 percent Since the 1970s. And so in an hour, when it’s raining, there’s 28 percent more moisture in the air that’s falling.”

That could account for some of the relentless rain that fell on the watersheds of Fields, Little, and Slaughter Creek Sunday night through Monday morning.

The Hollow Way

Just a few miles beyond those communities devastated by flash floods, upstream of the creeks that washed out the land, near their headwaters, sits a sprawling active coal mine.

“I think it would be hard to exclude that surface mine from playing a role in the stream flow that was experienced downstream. I would expect that the surface mine played a role in stream flows downstream,” said Zegre. “Now, whether that was enough to create the floods that were experienced, hard to say, but I wouldn’t be surprised.”

Downstream from that mine, sandwiched between two steep green slopes is the Little Creek Hollow where Anna Goodnight and her family live. The effort to clean up the destruction those raging waters left behind has begun. The street is lined with piles of soggy personal belongings waiting to be picked up by debris clean-up crews.

“We lost pretty much everything in the garage. I don’t even know how many feet of mud are probably under the house – around 18 inches,” Goodnight said. “We hooked up our own water yesterday to finally get water because we have had no resources up here whatsoever. No resources. There have been NO resources here.”

Goodnight said she called the Department of Environmental Protection, the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, FEMA, and the Governor’s office to no avail.

“The state and local government have completely let us down on this,” she said.

Frustration in this hollow is balanced with helping each other pick up the pieces. Many who lost their homes are at other neighbors’ houses helping them. Every house had a neighbor or church group there helping gut the water saturated walls, carrying groceries down through the steep creek, baby sitting, lending equipment, or just lending an ear.

That was the case for John Chambers and his sister. They had just put their childhood home on the market when the flood came through.

The kitchen with tile floors is now an empty room with bare sheetrock, water marked plywood, and exposed pipes. Chambers said he had just started working on his own house because he had been helping others

“I got mud and water there. They got 14-15 inches of mud. Got their doors pinned and blown open and can’t walk in the house,” said Chambers. “What are you gonna do? You’re just gonna stand there and watch them with a shovel? No, you’re gonna get out and you’re gonna help! You’re gonna do what’s right!”

The creek bed, the streets, everyone’s yard’s and most people’s homes are filled with this deep yellow, sandy, silty mud — and lots of coal scattered around the area.

Goodnight walked around her house picking up little pieces of coal.

“There’s coal in my garage, coal in the backyard, I mean it’s everywhere,” Goodnight said.

Little pieces giving way to more questions. his reason, or that reason.

“Not to say blame needs to be placed, but I need a little peace of mind,” Goodnight said.

Community members and leaders are urging for an investigation into surface mines in and around eastern Kanawha County. And this community is searching for answers – how did this happen? Why was it so bad this time? Was it surfacing mining? Climate change? Timbering? A sediment pond? And an act of God?

“I wouldn’t say it’s an act of God. God wouldn’t do this to people,” Chambers said.

Coal Production Drop Off Leaves Behind Unreclaimed Mine Lands

Coal has been “king” for most of the last century in West Virginia and central Appalachia, but in recent years, global market forces, governmental regulations and alternative energy sources like natural gas have reduced its dominance.

That drop off has caused job losses as well as losses in income and severance taxes. At the same time as those coal companies close down, and often declare bankruptcy, it has left abandoned mines behind.

Brian Lego is a research assistant professor at West Virginia University’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research. He was one of the authors of a 2018 study called “The Economic Impact of Coal In West Virginia.” He said that coal production peaked most recently in 2008, when oil prices were high. Natural disasters and the Fukushima nuclear meltdown in 2011 also prompted strong global demand.

But coal production has only fallen since then. In an email he noted that “coal production averaged a shade under 80 million short tons (annualized rate) in the first quarter of 2021 and appears to have increased to somewhere in the low- to mid-80 million short tons range during the second quarter.”

That is down from 150 million short tons in 2010.

Lego expects the short-term outlook for coal exports from West Virginia to remain stable through 2023 and 2024 — exceeding coal exports for 2019 and 2020. But, he wrote, exports would likely fall short of the 2017/2018 period – barring some stronger-than-expected growth in metallurgical coal demand.

In more general terms, he said he expected exports to decline over the next decade and then fall off more sharply in the 2030s.

From his perspective, natural gas is a major factor.

“Particularly here in the Mid-Atlantic region,” Lego said in an interview. “With the Marcellus and Utica shale, that was a major emergence of a competitor to coal-fired power in the entire U.S. The amount of growth in electricity generation that’s come from natural gas has, essentially, tripled. Natural gas accounts for half of the region’s electricity generation.”

Jobs

Since 2010, West Virginia has seen a net loss of more than 6,000 direct coal mining jobs since 2010, according to WorkForce West Virginia. There are 14,780 men and women currently working in mining in West Virginia, down from 43,875 in 1971.

The Appalachian region as a whole lost 27 percent of its coal jobs between 2005 and 2015, according to a report released by the Appalachian Regional Commission. The U.S. Energy Information Administration indicated there were about 30,000 people employed in coal mining throughout Appalachia in 2019.

Budgets

The fall in coal production has brought more than just layoffs. Coal severance taxes, which pay for things like schools and senior services, have also taken a hit. In 2010, these taxes brought in more than $300 million or about eight percent of the state’s general revenue fund.

In 2020, according to numbers supplied by the state Department of Commerce, total coal severance taxes were just over $200 million. That’s about four percent of the state’s General Revenue Fund.

Employment taxes from those directly associated with coal mining amounted to just over $125 million in 2010, according to a report from the Center for Budget and Policy. At the time there were 21,012 West Virginians directly employed in coal mining. The report estimated that each coal mining employee paid just under $6,000 per person in income taxes to the state.

Using the CBP estimate of approximately $6,000 in income taxes per miner, that reflects a drop of payroll tax income for the state of nearly $37 million to just less than $88 million.

Legacy costs

Coal mining also has a number of legacy costs– from abandoned mine lands to road damages from coal trucks.

A report from the Ohio River Institute says that Abandoned Mine Lands (AML) in West Virginia — these are coal mines abandoned before 1977 — account for just over 20 percent of the U.S. total and more than 24 percent of the costs.

Those mine lands account for 173,000 acres of land that need reclaimed with reclamation costs estimated at $5 billion. Only Pennsylvania has more unreclaimed pre-1977 mine lands than West Virginia. More than 30 percent of West Virginians live within a mile of an unreclaimed mine site.

Since the AML law passed in 1977, federal law has required mine owners to establish bonds that would pay for clean-up costs for coal mines. The law gave states considerable leeway in how they set up those bonds, however, and most are severely underfunded.

A report by Appalachian Voices, called Repairing the Damage, looked at the costs associated with more modern coal mines that have been abandoned as coal companies have declared bankruptcy. Much of the necessary clean-up costs are not covered by existing bonds.

Between 2008 and 2017, the number of coal mines plummeted from 1,435 to 671 mines in 2017, according to the Energy Information Administration.

In a seven-state area, there were 633,000 acres of land that needed some level of cleanup. More than 200,000 acres of that was in West Virginia — the highest total for a single state. Kentucky was slightly lower.

The total estimated outstanding cost of this reclamation ranges from $7.5 to $9.8 billion. The total available bonds amount to approximately $3.8 billion.

The clean-up process is expensive, says Erin Savage, who wrote the Appalachian Voices report and calculated clean-up costs for various mine types.

“A fully unreclaimed surface mine, I have at about $12,000 per acre to reclaim. Underground mines at about $29,000 per acre. And the other mines are the processing facilities and those are at $26,000 per acre,” she said.

West Virginia has approximately $3 billion of reclamation liability, from mines abandoned after 1977, but only has approximately $1.2 billion in bonds to secure that reclamation.

A recent legislative audit of the state’s reclamation fund found that the bonds the coal companies are supposed to obtain to reclaim land once mining is done are set between $1,000 and $5,000 per acre. That’s simply not enough, according to Savage.

“For West Virginia, I estimated that the bonds cover roughly 31 to 49 percent of the potential liability,” she said.

Savage noted that this problem may be too big for the state government to deal with on its own.

“The water pollution, the erosion, flooding, those aren’t just environmental issues, those have direct impacts on the communities that live around those mines,” she said. “And that’s why we really think the federal government needs to step in here.”

But she also wants to see the private companies that created the messes held accountable.

“We wouldn’t want to see some new program that really lets coal companies off the hook and incentivizes bankruptcy and just walking away,” she said.

Restructuring bankruptcy in most cases allows companies to shed prior environmental and other obligations. From 2010 to 2019, more than 50 U.S. coal companies declared bankruptcy.

The $1 trillion infrastructure bill passed by the U.S. Senate and pending before the U.S. House of Representatives includes additional money for the AML program.

Reclamation

One conclusion made in the Appalachian Voices report was that if the “remaining 633,000 acres in need of reclamation were reclaimed, this would create between 23,000 and 45,000 job-years across the Eastern states. Proper mine reclamation could have significant positive economic impacts, and contribute to carbon sequestration and climate change resilience.”

An example of how reclamation can change things is in the town of Smithers in Fayette County, West Virginia. An underground mine in the hill above the town was full of water and literally buckling U.S. Route 60 — a road that sees 7,000 cars a day during the non-tourist months.

Smithers Mayor Anne Cavalier said they called it the “mountain on the move.”

“That was created because abandoned mine lands from probably 50, 70 years ago had been mined out and they had filled with spring water,” she said. “Mountains are just full of springs and the water pressure was simply pushing that mountain out.”

She said that if Route 60 had been forced to close, even for a few years, none of the businesses in the town would have survived.

An aerial view of the reclamation project that saved U.S. Route 60 and the town of Smithers.

But now the town has a completely different future. A reclamation project through the state Department of Environmental Protection stabilized the hillside with pilings and relieved the water pressure, preserving the road. Traffic continues to move past the town with travelers stopping for gas and food.

Just two miles from Smithers, another reclaimed coal mine has been turned into the Mammoth Preserve by the West Virginia Land Trust. Cavalier noted it is 5,500 acres of land for camping, mountain biking and horseback riding.

“I see us sitting here now in a sweet spot. I see new jobs and new futures for the members of those families who can make that transition from coal to tourism,” she said.

The ability for the town of Smithers to go from facing an uncertain future to one where the future looks bright is thanks to the reclamation of former mine sites. And Cavalier looks forward to what she hopes will be a time of renewal for her home.

“I’ve never been more excited about this town’s history,” she said.

The Three Reasons Residents are Appealing the KD Mine No. 2

The Department of Environmental Protection’s Surface Mine Board held the first of at least two hearings focused on Keystone Indutries’ KD Mine No. 2 Monday. The mine is located just 1,500 feet from the edge of the Kanawha State Forest in Kanawha County.

Tom Rist, a Fayetteville attorney, argued the case of a few residents of Middle Lick Branch Road, a small community of four or five homes located just across the street from the forest.

Rist said there are three major issues his clients have with the permit:

The permit clearly states there will be no impact to any public parks, but provides the Division of Natural Resources with ten cents per ton of coal mined and requires the mine company to dredge a pond in the forest.
Use of the forest is being restricted because of blasting on the mountain top removal site. The mine company, Revelation, has posted signs at three of the trails heads and outside the shooting range to warn of blasts and the DEP said the company must assure the trails are closed before they blast.
The blast warnings are too vague for residents and park visitors to really be informed. Signs posted at trail heads say the company will sound a warning alarm at least three minutes before the blast, but residents of the Middle Lick neighborhood say they have only received one notification of blasting in the form of a letter.

Daile Boulis, a Middle Lick resident, read that letter as part of her testimony Monday.

“Blasting activity shall be conducted between sunrise and sunset from May 10, 2014, through May 10, 2015, unless emergency conditions dictate unscheduled detonation,” she read.

Rist maintained that is not a concrete timeframe.

The Surface Mine Board will hold a second hearing August 20 during which they will allow the DEP, Keystone and Revelation to present their case, including witnesses and evidence.

Rist said a ruling could come that same day or could take two to three months, all while mining continues at KD No. 2.

New Coalition Battles Mine Site Near State Forest

About 7 miles outside of Charleston sits 9,300 acres of protected land. The Kanawha State Forest is home to hiking and biking trails, campsites and a shooting range, but just a few hundred acres away, the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection has approved a mountain top removal mine site.

The Kanawha State Forest Coalition, a group of concerned Kanawha County residents, formed to fight the site and get the administration to withdraw the permit, saving hundreds of plant and animal species on Middle Lick Mountain where mining is set to begin.

The Permit:

The original proposal for Keystone Industries’ KD #2 was filed with the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection in 2009. The site on Middle Lick Mountain, however, wasn’t approved until May 2014. During that time, the permit was altered.

As it stands:

The proposed site included nearly 600 acres of land to be mined, the approved permit includes only 414 acres.
Two proposed coal seams on the side of Middle Lick Mountain facing the Kanawha State Forest were removed, increasing the buffer zone from 300 to 588 feet.
Blasting times during the heaviest hours of park usage, on holidays and weekends, is to be limited to emergencies only.
The side of the mountain facing the park is to be mined last, “limiting the time the operation is visible to park visitors.”
Seven million tons of coal are expected to be mined over a 10 year period.
The site must be restored to its original contour and a selection of native hardwoods are to be replanted.

The Fight:

The closeness to the state forest and the impact on native plant and animal species are two of the major reasons the Kanawha State Forest Coalition formed. The group of concerned citizens has gone door-to-door to educate people living in the area about the mine and have them sign a petition asking the governor to order the withdraw of the permit.

“It’s a chance to raise our voices up as one,” Chad Cordell said, one of the group’s leaders.

The group held a public meeting in Kanawha City last week to talk about how to fight the mine. The meeting drew more than 200 county residents.

A group of Loudendale residents have also filed an appeal with the DEP’s Surface Mine Board to have the permit axed.

The Defense:

Acting Director of the Division of Mining and Reclamation Harold Ward said in an interview Friday the site wouldn’t have been approved if the DEP wasn’t confident in the proposed mining and reclamation processes.

Blast warning signs are posted throughout the forest on sites near Middle Lick Mountain.

David Vande Linde, chief of the DEP’s Office Explosives and Blasting, said while there are warning signs posted now about the possibility of fly rock during blasting times, there are more requirements in the permit. The mine company must make sure no one is present before they blast.

“In this case, we’ve said arbitrarily that at least 1,000 feet out, which is more than necessary a lot of times, from any blast, we’ll make sure that no one is in the area on these facilities,” he said.

“So, for example, say the Lindy Trail. They would check the first 250 or so feet and then post somebody up there and make sure no one comes down there while they’re shooting.”

Both men point to the changes in the permit as going above and beyond state regulations for a typical mountain top removal mine site.

The Hike:

The final requirement of the permit, the site reclamation plan, is what brought Doug Wood and members of the Kanawha State Forest Coalition to hike the park, counting species of trees, shrubs and forbs along the way.

Wood, who worked for the DEP for 33 years until he retired in 2011, explained the point of the exercise was to show people how many different types of species live in a landscape similar to the mountain set to be mined now and how many will actually be replaced when the mining is over.

The group counted nearly 100 species total. Wood claimed only about eight would be required to be replaced.

Parties Agree to Resolve W.Va. Mine Runoff Lawsuit

Environmentalists and a landowner have agreed to resolve a lawsuit over runoff from a reclaimed mountaintop removal mine in Mingo County.

Under a proposed consent decree, Hernshaw Partners LLC will apply for a permit from the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection to cover selenium discharges from the former mine site.

The agreement was filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Charleston. If approved by the court, the consent decree would end when Hernshaw Partners obtains the permit, or 18 months following the consent decree’s effective date, whichever comes first.

The Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, West Virginia Highlands Conservancy and Sierra Club sued the company in 2013. The lawsuit alleged Hernshaw Partners discharged selenium from the site without a permit.

The Charleston Gazette reported the agreement on Wednesday.

Logan Co. Mountain Top Mine Permit Revocation Stands

The Supreme Court has rejected an appeal from a coal company fighting to reinstate a water pollution permit for a massive West Virginia strip mine.

The justices say they will not disturb a federal appeals court ruling that the Environmental Protection Agency acted within its authority in 2011 when it retroactively vetoed a permit issued four years earlier by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

St. Louis-based Arch Coal Inc. and its Mingo Logan Coal Co. subsidiary challenged the appellate ruling concerning the mountaintop removal coal mine in West Logan County.

The case now goes back to a federal district court in Washington.