A 73-year-old miner, with 53 years of experience, was ejected from a bulldozer he was operating. That’s according to a preliminary report from the Mine Safety and Health Administration on the death of William Mapes on Sunday.
A 73-year-old miner, with 53 years of experience, was ejected from a bulldozer he was operating.
That’s according to a preliminary report from the Mine Safety and Health Administration on the death of William Mapes on Sunday.
Mapes was killed on the job as a contractor for LMS Excavating of Freeburn, Kentucky.
He was working at the Appalachian Resource West Virginia’s Grapevine South Surface Mine in Mingo County.
According to the MSHA report, Mapes was operating a bulldozer when it left the haulage road and rolled down a hill. He was not wearing a seatbelt. No autopsy was performed, the report said.
On March 11, 1939, the West Virginia Legislature passed the state’s first law regulating surface mining. Once referred to as strip mining, surface mining strips away earth, rock, and vegetation—known as overburden—to expose coal deposits.
Coal companies began surface mining commercially in West Virginia as early as 1916. However, the state’s rugged terrain made it unprofitable in most places. The arrival of diesel machinery, trucks, and highways allowed the industry to break from its reliance on railroads and to develop surface mines.
As the practice increased, its environmental impact became more apparent. It turned into a political hot topic starting in the late 1960s. Governor Hulett Smith appointed a special task force to address the issue, and other politicians, including Jay Rockefeller, stridently opposed the practice.
In the 1990s, a new form of surface mining, mountaintop removal, became more common. This more invasive method provides access to coal that would’ve been left behind by traditional strip mining. In recent years, tensions over mountaintop removal have risen between those wanting to boost the state’s diminishing coal industry and activists wanting to protect the environment.
Appalachian surface coal miners are consistently overexposed to toxic silica dust, according to new research from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, and surface mine dust contains more silica than does dust in underground coal mines.
The research is the first to specifically analyze long-term data on exposure to toxic silica dust for workers at surface mines. The work reveals that while attention has been trained on a surge in disease among underground coal miners, surface miners are similarly at risk of contracting coal worker’s pneumoconiosis, or black lung disease.
Black lung disease has been identified in coal miners in every coal-mining state at both surface and underground mines. NIOSH researchers were specifically interested in surface miners’ exposure because those mines produce the most coal and, in 2017, twice as many miners worked at surface mines compared to underground mines.
Researchers analyzed 54,040 coal dust samples taken on surface mines between 1982 and 2017 to determine the percent of that coal dust that was silica, and found that the level of silica was above the permissible limit in 15 percent of those samples. Silica dust comes from quartz in the rock layers near coal seams, and it is significantly more harmful to lung tissue than coal dust alone.
“The exposure to coal mine dust declined over time,” said lead researcher and industrial hygienist Brent Doney. “However … when you look at the percentage of silica that was in those samples, that didn’t drop.”
After decades of successful reduction in black lung disease through safety controls in coal mines, black lung disease has been on the rise among coal miners for the last two decades. Central Appalachia has seen a marked increase in the most severe form of black lung, known as progressive massive fibrosis. A recent investigation from NPR and PBS Frontline found that federal regulators and the mining industry knew that exposure to silica dust was a major factor contributing to the surge in disease but failed to act to protect miners’ health.
“Unfortunately, I’m not sure this is a particularly novel finding,” NIOSH epidemiologist Scott Laney said. “The evidence is very clear. We know that silica and mine dust are toxic, and we have the technology to suppress it, and yet coal miners are still exposed to way too much of it. So from a public health perspective, there’s ample evidence to suggest that further safeguards are necessary.”
The federal Mine Safety and Health Administration, which regulates coal mining, issued in August a request for information to determine whether additional regulation of silica was necessary, and if so, how best to proceed. Some critics of the administration argued the move was too little given what is already known about silica’s role in disease.
Forty years ago, President Jimmy Carter signed a law that literally changed the face of Appalachia.
The Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 (SMCRA) was intended to replace a state-to-state patchwork of rules for strip-mining with a uniform federal standard. Four decades later, however, environmentalists say the law has fallen far short of its potential.
“Massive destruction, massive explosives — and only 300 feet away from someone’s home,” said Thom Kay, legislative associate at Appalachian Voices. “What is SMCRA doing if that’s still allowed?”
Louise Dunlap, who co-founded the Environmental Policy Center in the early ’70s and was such an integral part of lobbying for SMCRA that Carter mentioned her in his speech at the signing ceremony.
“On the 40th anniversary, we’re not celebrating because of the lack of enforcement and budget cuts,” Dunlap said, “but it is an anniversary that deserves recognition and a renewed commitment that the law be updated and enforced.”
Kay was quick to say that the environmental impacts of mountaintop removal mining and other forms of strip mining might be worse without SMCRA, but added that the lack of enforcement by states has severely undercut the law’s effectiveness. A federal investigation released in February, for example, found that West Virginia was lax in enforcement; a week later, Governor Jim Justice criticized state environmental regulators, not for failure to enforce federal laws but for dressing too casually.
The mining industry sees it differently. The Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE), the federal agency tasked with overseeing SMCRA, “has achieved a great deal in the past four decades – for the environment and reclamation of abandoned sites as well as for coal mining, employment and the economic well-being of coalfields,” wrote Luke Popovich, spokesman for the National Mining Association, in an email.
“But the distinguishing characteristic of this law has been the foresight Congress had in giving states primary authority over coal oversight and permitting. SMCRA is by design not a top-down, one-size-fits-all program. That’s in recognition of the plain fact that coal mining varies greatly with the great variety of the coal resource throughout the country–from the arid West to the Appalachian mountains,” he added.
State enforcement—or lack thereof—coupled with the rise of large-scale mountaintop removal mining in the 1990s has changed the Appalachian landscape, and not just in a figurative sense, either. A 2016 study by researchers at Duke University found that mountaintop removal mining techniques had significantly changed the contours of southeastern West Virginia. Before mining, the area’s most common feature was steep slopes with a pitch of 28 degrees. Now, those slopes have been replaced by a new most common feature—a more or less flat plain with a 2-degree slope.
Although economic developers have long decried the general absence of flat land in Appalachia that can attract industry, only a small percentage of reclaimed mining sites were put to use for business, Kay said. A 2010 study by Appalachian Voices and the Natural Resources Defense Council found that 366 of 410 reclaimed mountaintop removal sites, or 89.3 percent, had no post-mining development other than forestry or pasture.
“I’m not completely satisfied with the legislation,” Carter said on August 2, 1977. “I would prefer to have a stricter strip mining bill. I’m concerned with some of the features that had to be watered down during this session to get it passed, but I think that this provides us a basis on which we can make improvements on the bill in years to come.”
Dunlap remembered that day as one of hope. A coalition of advocacy groups and coalfield communities had lobbied for nearly a decade to pass a federal law regulating strip mining. Twice, Congress had passed versions of SMCRA that were vetoed by Carter’s predecessor, Gerald Ford.
As lawmakers developed a new version of the bill, Dunlap’s group worked closely with Pennsylvania, which had passed a restrictive strip-mining law but was receiving pushback from the coal industry. Dunlap said that advocacy groups also kept close communication with coalfield communities around the U.S., using airmail to send proposed amendments to activists, then receiving feedback over the phone.
“We had a network of citizens around the country, who in some cases had been dealing with their state legislators,” Dunlap said. “We’d send the amendments out each day during mark-up. People would get them and call us, and tell us go with this, don’t go with that. Many of the provisions in the law were literally written by citizens.”
The improvements that Carter hoped for never really materialized. Take the stream buffer rule, first added in 1983 by the administration of Ronald Reagan.
Surface mine reclamation in progress at Kayford Mountain near the Raleigh and Kanawha County border in West Virginia. (Photo: Roger May)
“We feel like that was never properly enforced, and not just lax enforcement but bad interpretation,” Kay said. “We saw it as saying you cannot mine through streams, cannot dump your waste into streams. They saw it as you pretty much can; you just have to ask. They’d ask for a waiver and the states would give it to them. In cases we’ve looked at, there are very few examples where the state refused a company the ability to dump into a stream or mine through a stream.”
The rule was updated in 2008 under George W. Bush, but environmentalists saw the new version as even worse than the 1983 version, and it was ultimately overturned in court. The most recent iteration came late in Barack Obama’s second term, but wasn’t even implemented before Congress and President Donald Trump overturned it.
Jay Rockefeller — who lost the West Virginia’s 1972 gubernatorial race partly due to a campaign pledge to ban strip-mining, reversed his stance and, after winning election four years later — was one of several key elected officials who helped to stall SMCRA’s implementation and enforcement.
As SMCRA remained largely stagnant, coal mining technology moved forward by leaps and bounds. The use of mountaintop removal techniques jumped sharply in the ’90s, mining coal on a scale that SMCRA’s authors likely never imagined.
“Without SMCRA, a mine like Hobet might not exist,” Kay said. “The compromises that happened in passing that bill paved the way for mountaintop removal as we saw it in the ‘90s and early ‘00s. It didn’t legalize it in the sense that it was not legal before, but it did formalize what was allowed.”
The landscape-scale effects on the environment also changed communities. In places like Lindytown, residents whose families had dwelt there for generations sold their homes to coal companies rather than live so close to active strip-mining operations.
In a news release, Citizens Coal Council lamented that the promises of SMCRA have not been upheld, but only “honored in breach”—“that is, ignored, compromised, and twisted in their implementation and interpretation.”
“The 40th anniversary of the enactment of SMCRA is not a time of celebration of achievement, but rather, a somber reminder that after 40 years of implementation, and fully 60 or more years after grassroots efforts to see enacted a national program for controlling surface coal mining operations, the promises made by Congress to the people of the coalfields remain largely unkept,” said Tom FitzGerald, director of the Kentucky Resources Council, in the release.
In contrast, Popovich said the NMA welcomes a renewed focus on state — not federal — enforcement.
“In recent years we’ve lost sight of that distinguishing and very valuable characteristic of SMCRA and now appear to be recognizing it once again,” wrote Popovich. “The law empowered the states; let’s let state agencies do their part Congress as Congress intended.”
Trump’s early actions indicate that he is unlikely to make SMCRA a priority. His administration’s budget proposal would cut $111 million in funding from OSMRE. The proposal includes eliminating the $89.9 million Abandoned Mine Land Economic Development Pilot program, which stands at the center of a fight over the related Revitalizing the Economy of Coal Communities by Leveraging Local Activities and Investing More (RECLAIM) Act.
Congress so far has shown an unwillingness to incorporate Trump’s proposed cuts in their totality. With a budget battle looming in September and October — as well as pending legislation such as the RECLAIM Act — lawmakers will make decisions in coming months that will affect the shape of SMCRA, and its corresponding effect on the Appalachian landscape, into the future.
A native of the Alleghany Highlands, Mason Adams (@MasonAtoms) is a contributing editor of 100 Days in Appalachia and has worked as a journalist in the Blue Ridge Mountains since 2001. He lives with his family plus dogs, cats, chickens and dairy goats in Floyd County, Virginia.
A federal science committee studying the health risks for people living near surface coal mines has scheduled a public meeting this week in southern West Virginia.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine committee plans to hear from state health and environmental officials, coal operators and environmental groups at a panel discussion Tuesday in Logan.
A Town Hall session is scheduled later Tuesday.
The panel is examining four states in central Appalachia, also including Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia, and planned to visit a mine site Monday.
Citizens groups that oppose the large surface mines, sometimes called mountaintop removal coal mining, say they’re urging members to speak up at the Tuesday session.
A jury has ruled in favor of a coal company in Wyoming County Circuit Court. The verdict came in Thursday afternoon after only a few hours of deliberations.
Fifteen families accused Dynamic Energy, a subsidiary of Mechel Bluestone Inc., of contaminating their water supplies. The trial began in April.
The families said that Mechel Bluestone violated the West Virginia Surface Coal Mining and Reclamation Act and damaged several wells along Cedar Creek Rd. in Clear Fork.
Water testing presented by the plaintiffs showed high levels of arsenic, aluminum, lead, iron and other pollutants.
Representatives of the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection testified that there was no correlation between a nearby surface mine and the wells.
Mechel Bluestone Inc. is owned by front runner for state Governor, Jim Justice. Justice sold the mine to a Russian Company in 2009 but bought it back last year.
The company responded to the verdict in an email. Chief Operating Officer for Justice Management Services with Bluestone Industires, Inc Tom Lusk said,
“I want to thank the Jury, our attorneys, and the people from Wyoming County for seeing through this attempt by Plaintiff’s Attorneys to extort money from an already struggling industry. Fortunately, the facts meant more to this Jury, of Wyoming County Residents, than distortions and absurd attempts to allege that Mining harmed these water wells. Thankfully, this frivolous lawsuit did not end in more harm to our good West Virginia coal miners and their families.”
David Barney, an attorney for the families who filed from Cedar Creek, said they will appeal.
