The writer Silas House grew up in the hills of Eastern Kentucky. Through his novels and other writing, he’s described life in coal country through rich, complex characters steeped in history and tradition. He is not only an observer, but also an activist in the fight against mountaintop removal coal mining. He’s written about the practice in the New York Times and Sierra Magazine.
House grew up in a coal mining family and community. He says it was a culture unto itself—one of pride in the hard work of mining, and in providing energy to the country. But the environmental impacts weren’t hidden.
When House was 11 years old, a strip mining operation began across the road from his family’s home.
“And for the next two years, that sort of took over our lives. You know, we breathed dust, we heard the blasts, we just—it changed that community forever,” he says.
The experience left a lasting impression him. He says it made him aware of coal’s double-edged sword: the industry brought his family out of poverty, but at the same time, his family and community paid a price.
In one memorable example, at a mining site that abutted House’s father’s family graveyard, the coal company was mining so close to the graveyard that they pushed his great-aunt’s grave over the mountain, and into the creek below it. House says that’s where the seeds of his activism were sown.
In 2005, Wendell Berry contacted House and 14 other Kentucky writers to tour Eastern Kentucky and look at mountaintop removal sites.
“And I knew all about strip mining and I knew about deep mining, and I felt like I knew the coal industry pretty well,” House says. “But I really, even living amongst it, didn’t understand mountaintop removal, and how different that was, how devastating it was.”
Later, at a town meeting, dozens of people came to talk about their experiences with mining and mountaintop removal.
“And almost every one of them would end their testimony by saying, ‘Nobody will listen to us. Please, tell our story. And please get our story out there.’ And all of us sitting there felt like we had been handed this responsibility. And that we had to do something,” House says.
Some people from the region have thanked House for being outspoken on the issue. Others have called him a traitor. He says that characterization hurts, because he cares so deeply about Appalachia and has an abiding respect for miners.
“When I’m talking about being against coal, I’m talking about being against these huge corporations that, you know, don’t think about balance,” House says. “They don’t think about the communities that they’re harming. And for the most part, they don’t think about their miners, their employees, you know, it’s all a numbers game. And so, I always try to get at that complexity.”
House calls mountaintop removal a human issue, as well an an environmental one. He says many in Appalachia have been stigmatized by outsiders for their accents and cultural identity, and that coal has always been at least one point of pride for the region. He says coal companies feed into that mindset, and so anyone who questions the industry’s practices is attacked. House has even received letters threatening his children. But they’ve had the opposite effect of silencing him.
“I think that it made me realize, really, I was speaking out because of my children, more than anything else,” House says. “Because I wanted them to have clean water, I wanted them to be able to, you know, be from a place that they could be proud of—that they could bring people to and it not be utter ruin. If anything, you know, it solidified my passion for the issue.”
Many of Appalachia’s coal mines were dug before the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 was passed. Thousands of problem mines throughout the region are not subject to that law’s protections. These so-called pre-law mines come with a bevy of issues—they fill up with water, cause landslides, and catch fire.
Jim Holliday is all too familiar with these dangers. He’s a veteran mine inspector whose job it is to clean up these decades-old mine problems.
Holliday has a handlebar mustache and wears a federal Office of Surface Mining uniform. He used to work on strip mines, but for decades he’s been inspecting old coal mines that now pose problems.
HOUSES ON THE BRINK OF COLLAPSE
Today he’s driving along Highway 80 in Perry County, the heart of Eastern Kentucky coal country. He turns off the road into a hollow.
“Coal seam level’s right up above that old hill,” he says. “But this is a community that’s built up in early years, railroad track came through the hollow. They mined everything they can get in these hollows.”
He gets out of the SUV and walks toward a house that hugs a steep hillside. The crushed stone driveway is brand new. Holliday’s partner for the day, Wally Barger, joins him.
Barger is a mine inspector with the Kentucky Department of Natural Resources, and he stands next to the house with grey siding.
They’re here to look at one of the most common issues posed by these old mines.
“Just the water, too much groundwater from the mining back in the 1940s and ‘50s,” he says, pointing to the hillside above. “There’s like three coal seams—the Hazard 5, Hazard 7, and Hazard 8, (and they) all had either underground mining or auger mining water build-up from voids in the mountain,” Barger explains.
That water caused the hillside where Barger and Holliday stand to move. That pushed the ground from underneath the house they’re standing next to. The house’s owner comes out to greet them.
“The house started falling–the basement just dropped out—it just kept getting’ worse and worse and worse,” says Ed Noble.
Noble grew up nearby—he remembers watching miners digging coal out of the hillside above. He’s owned this house 20 years. In late 2013, the house began breaking apart.
“Water was coming out under the floor. It was just slipping—the whole basement dropped down about 4 foot—went straight down,” he says.
The state came in and dug straight down to bedrock. It reinforced the foundation of the house, and it saved Ed Noble’s house.
Barger says there was a moment in the project when he thought Ed Noble’s house would have to be demolished.
“I thought we lost it—and we were able to get it cribbed back up and get it stabilized….We spent about a half a million dollars to save this house,” Barger says.
The state of Kentucky got that money from a special tax on coal that goes specifically to abandoned mines built before 1977. But that source of funding might not last forever. For starters, there is less coal being mined these days, so there’s less money in the fund. And in 2021, unless Congress renews it, the money is scheduled run out.
“We’ll never run out of reclamation but we will run out of money,” Barger says. “Their money’s going to start dwindling—then it’s going to come to a halt. It’s not going to be there anymore.”
CONTINUOUS FIRES
Holliday and Barger get back in the SUV, and make their way to the top of a hillside. It’s steep, and covered with waste coal. Basically, it looks like a huge pile of charcoal was dumped on the hillside.
Holliday walks to a part of the hill where blue smoke is wafting off the ground.
“When you see steam, smoke, that stuff can be burnin’ underneath—I wouldn’t venture around too much on it,” he says.
This is a coal refuse fire. Barger’s agency has to put out the fire. Basically, all the old coal on the ground is burning. The smell is awful–sulfurous, sticky, sweet. Barger says it can stay with you for days.
The mine here was built in the 1920s. The coal on the hillside was waste coal. It wasn’t pure enough to sell, so the miners just left it on the ground.
“You will find rocks and burning’ materials in there at 350–400 degrees. You have to isolate them…have to mix them with materials,” Barger says. “We use waters to cool it down so operators can operate safely.”
Many hillsides in Eastern Kentucky are covered by pieces of coal left by miners long gone. Fires will be igniting for years to come. Forest fires can cause them, and they can burn for years.
Holliday and Barger get back in the truck. They say they will keep doing this work—policing landslides and putting out fires—as long as the money keeps coming in to pay for it.
Photos by Reid R. Frazier. Top left: Ed Noble’s home in Hiner, Kentucky almost had to be demolished because of shifting land from old coal mines. Bottom right: A coal refuse fire smolders in Carbon Glow, Letcher County, Eastern Kentucky.
Residents, lawmakers and workers in coal-producing states are worried about the future of their natural resource. A combination of market forces, environmental concerns, the increased affordability of renewables, and low natural gas prices all seem to be conspiring against the hard black rock. Nationally, coal production is down and between 2012 and 2013, the number of employees at U.S. coal mines decreased by more than ten percent.
And then, there are the regulations. Perhaps the most impactful one so far is theEnvironmental Protection Agency’s rule to cut down on mercury emissions from power-plants which went into effect on April 16th of this year. Those that are unable to meet the tight new standards will have to shut down. Next up is the EPA’s proposed Clean Power Plan, which aims to reduce carbon emissions from existing power plants. The agency plans to finalize that rule sometime this summer.
But 45 years ago, it was another sweeping federal environmental regulation that gave Wyoming coal its start: the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the amendments that followed. In its wake, many utility companies started using Wyoming’s low-sulfur coal which has less than half the sulfur content of Appalachian coal. Demand skyrocketed as did the number of jobs. In 1970, Wyoming employed just 621 coal miners but a decade later, there were more than six thousand.
Coal miner Beverly Baughman and her husband Rick Swanson live in Rozet, a town in Wyoming’s remote, coal-rich Powder River Basin. Swanson was around in the earliest days of Wyoming’s coal boom. In the early 1970s, he helped build a mine calledBlack Thunder which is now the largest coal mine in the U.S.
“It was the biggest construction project I had ever worked on and I was just a little old tiny piece of it, you know. I didn’t know how big it would get,” Swanson said.
His wife, Beverly, started as a roughneck in the oilfields and then switched over to coal in 1985. Rick Swanson is now retired but says that the industry has been good for them and their large extended family because of the steady work and fair pay. The couple and their handful of horses, now lives on a ranch ringed by rolling prairie and mountains in the distance.
“The mines gave me the opportunity, with very little education, to make money. We’ve had an excellent economy here,” Swanson said. “You’re never hungry. You can always find a job if you want one.”
Wyoming’s coal economy has not been hit as hard as that of other states, such as West Virginia or Kentucky. But many coal-fired power plants across the country are already partially or fully shut down. At least five have closed already this year. No matter the politics of coal or the productivity of the mines themselves, fewer coal-fired power plants mean less coal will be burned. So I asked: what would this region look like if coal went away?
“We would look like West Virginia. There would be no jobs. Rick and I came here and we ended up in the sweet part of life, but the kids that I see come work for the mine now, I tell them are you really sure that this is what you want to do? Because this job might not be here.”
None of Beverly and Rick’s kids went into mining but their nephew Philip Carstens did. Phillip moved to Wyoming from California eight months ago for a coal mining job that he told me he loves. But he doubts his son will follow in his footsteps.
“The way things are, it probably won’t be around that long, I imagine,” Carstens said.
These worries are certainly real. But the substantial regulatory threats to the industry are being challenged in court. The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments in March over whether the EPA should have considered the cost of mercury regulations while the agency was developing them. The Supreme Court should issue a decision by this summer.
When it comes to the Clean Power Plan, a lawsuit brought against the EPA by 11 states, including Wyoming, has gone to the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia. Oral arguments began the week of April 13.
Pictures, top to bottom: Clippings from local newspapers chronicle the rise of Wyoming coal industry in the 1970s, Dusk in Rozet, WY, just down the road from Beverly and Rick’s home. Photos: Leigh Paterson
At a state park in Logan County, West Virginia, dozens of coal miners and their families are milling around a vast meeting room. State officials called this meeting to help them figure out what to do next after the coal mine they worked in closed. Dell Maynard is one of these miners. His primary emotion right now is shock.
“I’ve been laid off three times in the last year,” says Maynard. “I’m not kidding. And it’s not because I don’t try to find a job because I’ve found three. Oh, it’s awful. I’m telling you this place is going to be a ghost town if they don’t do something.”
Faced with competition from natural gas and increasing federal regulations, layoffs and mine closings like this one are becoming more and more common in parts of West Virginia and Kentucky. The coal industry is facing tough times.
For others in Logan County, it’s anger—at the federal government, politicians, at the coal companies, each other.
“I think I’m more angry than anything because I don’t think this has to happen,” says Steve Sigmon. “It’s hurtful. Don’t know really where to turn. I mean I’m not an old man, but I’m not a young man either. And to start focusing on another career, it’s a big adjustment in life.”
Many are trying to bargain their way back to the way things used to be. If they could just get this one guy out of office, things would be great again.
“Obama has absolutely stuck a dagger in the heart of coal,” says Maynard.
All over Appalachia, people are in different stages of mourning this thing that’s put dinner on the table and shaped the culture for so long. Some are even starting to talk about a transition. About Appalachia, about moving past coal.
Credit Catherine Moore
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At Lucas Farm, Shane Lucas makes some ‘real money’ selling produce at a roadside stand.
COLLAPSE AND RENEWAL
Shane Lucas trudges through the cold mud at a small mountain farm outside of Whitesburg, Kentucky to a weathered barn on his property. It used to be a coal tipple—a structure where the coal is loaded for transport. Coal’s long decline in Appalachia really began back in the 1950s, when machines started replacing miners.
“Back in the ’50s, my papaw run a coal tipple in the head of the holler up here. And they all shut down,” says Lucas. “So they went up in there and tore the coal tipple down.
His wife wants him to tear it down.
“I hate to tear it down…I was thinking of building me a building, a chicken house or something out of it, just to keep it,” he says.
Like his father, Lucas is building something new in the shadow of industry’s decay. And like his barn, Lucas’ story is one of collapse and renewal.
For almost 20 years, he was a surface miner, running a production drill at the vast Cumberland River Coal complex near his home. He loved his job. But then two years ago, his life took a dramatic turn when he was laid off by Arch Coal. One day, they just shut the doors.
“Drawed us into the room,” Lucas explains. “We all started handing out the envelopes. And you open them up and there it is. Everybody was scared to death, everybody’s saying ‘What are we going to do?’ Because there’s nothing out here. In debt. How are they going to pay for everything? It was really a bad moment.”
But Lucas had a back-up plan. He started Lucas farm—where he grows broccoli, turnips, and apple trees. What started as a scheme to haul produce from Tennessee to pay for fishing trips has since blossomed into broccoli, turnips, and apple trees. By the time he lost his job, Lucas was making some real money selling at his roadside stand—not like in the mines, but just maybe…enough.
“Fooling with this, I’m never broke,” he says. “I’ve always got a dollar in my pocket. I might not could pay bills but I’ve always got a dollar in my pocket. I could survive. You know if I get laid off, keep from having to leave this part, maybe I could grow. My wife works, so maybe we could make it instead of having to move off.”
FILLING A GIANT HOLE LEFT BY COAL
“The region is in a really critical moment of economic transition. For me, it’s a really pregnant moment of opportunity,” says Ivy Brashear, an eastern Kentuckian who works for Mountain Association for Community Economic Development, a non-profit that’s helping to chart a course for economic transition in the region.
Her group focuses on entrepreneurship, energy efficiency, forestry, and local foods. She’s part of a movement that is spreading in Appalachia, calling for more dialogue, planning, and investment by citizens, government, and NGOs to fill the giant hole created by coal’s hollowing out.
“Not that it’s easy to make that transition,” says Brashear. “It’s really not. It’s long, it’s hard and it’s expensive. But there really is no other option for us if we are to survive as a region and as a people than to search for alternatives and to do something else.”
For former miners like Lucas, there is a lot to work out. Growing food is an old tradition in Eastern Kentucky, but selling crops is actually pretty new. Last year, when his boss called and offered Lucas back his surface mining job, he said yes. But this time, he’s not banking on the coal mine re-opening. He’s got a plan. Over the next five years, Lucas will be turning more ground under, planting a big berry patch, and looking to source produce year-round.
Can he make a living farming full time? He’s got his doubts, but he’s willing to give it a try.
“Would my life be easier…just go back to coal mining and forget this?” he asks. “Or do I still try to juggle both and shoot for something that may not never happen and still have to go back to the coal mines? That’s what’s hard right now.”
Lucas is at a threshold—with one foot in an ailing traditional industry and one in a new economy. Like many people in Appalachia, he’s just trying to find his footing. He’s thinking about what to build out of the wood of an old coal tipple.
Driving south of Gillette, Wyoming, through an arid and austere landscape once home to herds of bison, you pass coal mine after coal mine, for 70 uninterrupted miles, carving deep troughs into the prairie. Seen from the road, the immensity of the mining activity is striking. But descend into one of these open pit mines for the first time, and it’s hard not to be overwhelmed.
Colossal digging machines called coal shovels load hundreds of tons at a time into haul trucks three stories high. Giant bulldozers rip away layers of dirt to get at rich coal seams, and clouds of brown and black dust darken the air.
This is the Powder River Basin, the new home base for the U.S. coal industry. If coal has started to leave Appalachia, the American West is now coal’s heartland. Production has dipped slightly in Wyoming, but the state still produces 40 percent of the nation’s coal—far more than any other state. The impact of this industry on the land and the people run deep in Wyoming.
Credit Clay Scott / High Plains News
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High Plains News
400 million tons of coal are produced by the Powder River Basin.
WORKING THE COUNTRY’S COAL SEAM
J. D. Dietsche showed the coal shovel he’s operated for Alpha Coal for a decade, seven days on, seven days off. On a frigid day, bare hands stick to the metal rungs in the $50 million machine.
“You drive your truck to the dirt shovel, get a load of dirt, drive it to the dump, come back and do it again and again and again and again, for 12.5 hours, minus your half-hour lunch break,” says a laughing Dietsche. “It is very, very repetitious.”
It’s repetitious work, often dangerous. And the hours are long. But coal is a vital part of the economy of this sparsely populated state.
“There’s 20-some mines in the basin. If coal takes a hit like it did back east in Virginia, Gillette would be a ghost town,” says Dietsche. “Everybody and everybody’s family depends on coal. On one of these coal mines out here. I know we got the oil and gas, but for the most part, Gillette wouldn’t be Gillette without coal.”
The 7,000 or so coal jobs here are highly sought after. Miners like Carrie Sieh, who’s worked in coal for 30 years, have raised their families with their earnings. But it’s more than just a paycheck, she says.
“Because we are willing to go out, run that equipment, and mine the coal, and bring it out of the earth, and we work holidays, 24/7, and through snow, through rain, through…all kinds of weather, then everybody else has the luxuries of electricity, and running water…the things that people take for granted that coal does provide for people,” says Sieh.
Credit Clay Scott / High Plains News
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High Plains News
Three-story haulers move coal out of a mine in the Powder River Basin.
COAL’S CLASH WITH RANCHERS
The 400 million tons of coal mined each year in the Powder River Basin supplies power for millions of Americans, and gives an important boost to the Wyoming economy. It’s lower in polluting sulfur than eastern coal, and closer to the surface. And while you might not have to blow the tops off mountains to get at the seams, coal mining here has still impacted the land, and the people who depend on it, in far reaching ways.
Just ask L.J. Turner, whose family has ranched in the southern end of the Powder River Basin since 1916.
“From our perspective in here, it really seems that most of the time, we’re the only ones that don’t have the ranch for sale and hoping to sell it to the coal company,” Turner says. “We don’t have any plans of going to Phoenix, or Tucson, or Baker, California, or anywhere else. This is home. It’s been home for all of our lives.”
Turner’s ranch looks out onto the North Antelope-Rochelle coal mine. The mine sprawls for miles over pastures where cattle once grazed. Ranchers in this area have historically depended on public grazing leases to make a living. But those leases are superseded by mineral development, and the Turner family has lost thousands of acres to mining.
This is—or was—a landscape of rolling grassland, punctuated by rugged breaks where mule deer took shelter. But the undulations of the land have been leveled to get at the coal. By law, the coal companies are bound to “reclaim” the land when they’ve finished mining it. But Turner says that in practice, reclamation has been incomplete, at best.
“The coal miners over here whenever they moved in and started taking our pastures, they said, ‘Oh, you just wait until we’ve reclaimed this land. It’s going to be so good you won’t believe how good it’s going to be,’” says Turner. “And that’s been…30 years, maybe? And our cows have never had a mouthful of reclaimed grass in those 30 years.”
Of even greater concern, says Turner, is the steady drying up of local water sources in recent years, which he attributes to the water needs of coal mining.
“Are they going to be able to reclaim the aquifers and the creeks?” Turner says. “Because I don’t think they can. They say they can, but all they’re doing is talking theory.”
Credit U.S. Geological Survey
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Led by production from its Powder River Basin, Wyoming produces 40 percent of U.S. coal.
ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT UNRESOLVED
In western Montana, in his house along the banks of the Bitterroot River, Bill Ritchie is someone who has given quite a lot of thought to the impacts of western coal mining—on water. For more than 20 years he managed several Powder River Basin coal mines.
“There are problems,” says Ritchie. “The really complex stuff was the environmental issues, tracking the water, trying to de-water, trying not to pollute streams. Really it took a lot of work, a lot of effort, and a lot of money.”
When Ritchie first started working in coal, he says, western mines were being applauded for producing a product that was much cleaner than eastern coal. But Toward the end of his career, he says he started to reexamine some of his assumptions about coal mining.
“We actually felt we were doing very good work by replacing high-sulfur coal with low-sulfur coal where we could get our foot in the door,” says Ritchie. “We were doing good work, and it was a good, clean environment.”
But some things about coal weren’t well understood at the time, he says.
“We didn’t understand the impact on the atmosphere and the greenhouse gases. We didn’t understand mercury as well, or the problem it creates in peoples’ health, just burning it,” Ritchie says. “We worked on clean coal projects from the time I was first starting in the coal business. And they still are working on ‘em. here is no such thing currently as clean coal. The net result is still…polluting…the atmosphere.”
All coal mines, says Bill Ritchie, including the ones he managed, begin by taking the coal that’s closest to the surface, and easiest and cheapest to get at. As the mine goes deeper in its life, the coal will be deeper and thinner-seamed and more costly to recover.
“Hopefully someday they will figure out a technology on a commercial scale that can burn coal cleanly,” Ritchie says. “But what a pity if we’ve mined all the coal, burned it, then polluted the hell out of everything. Then when it’s time, when we have the ability to burn it well, we don’t have the resource.”
Bill Ritchie says the type of clean coal technology he’s talking about is not likely to be perfected anytime soon. In the meantime, coal, that powerful and dirty and much debated black rock, is certain to remain a feature of the economy and landscape of the West for years to come.
Patrick Angel pulls his pickup truck off a small road in the hills of Eastern Kentucky, and points to a long ridge covered with dried, brown grass.
“If you didn’t know where you were, you’d think you were standing in a prairie land in South Dakota or Wyoming, because it’s all grass,” says Angel, a forester with the U.S. Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSM).
This flattened hilltop is what’s left over from mountaintop removal. This is the controversial form of surface mining where the top of a mountain is blown up and shoved into a valley to access a coal seam below.
Many hills in Eastern Kentucky now look exactly like this one—an artificial mesa covered by lespedeza, fescue, and other grasses whose tight roots choke out other plants. As a result, trees won’t grow here.
“If we were to try to even plant trees in that thick matt of fescue and lespedezas—the trees couldn’t compete,” Angel says. “Basically Mother Nature is stuck in a place where she cannnot return the forests on her own.”
Credit Reid R. Frazier / The Allegheny Front
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The Allegheny Front
A surface mine in Lecher County, Kentucky. The reclaimed part of the mine is seeded with grass.
Solving One Problem, Creating Another
The ridge is like this because of a federal law designed to keep communities safe after coal mines closed. The Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act was passed in 1977. Prior to the law, companies would routinely leave loose or unstable hillsides behind when they’d stopped mining.
The law created Angel’s agency—the OSM—to oversee reclamation and prevent unsafe mining practices. Angel was one of the first inspectors in the agency—he actually had badge number two.
Back then, it was not uncommon for landslides to slide off the top of a hill and go “into the back end of an occupied dwelling as the occupants were running out the front door,” says Angel. “We wanted to stop that so bad.”
The agency stopped those landslides, for the most part. It forced coal mine operators to compact their old surface mines and plant fast-growing grasses that would prevent soil erosion.
“I remembered myself going out and talking with operators about creating this golf course look—finely sculptured, man-made—where everything is packed in and tight and pastoral,” Angel said. “But Mother Nature doesn’t like golf courses.”
The landslides stopped—but trees would not grow back.
Credit Reid R. Frazier / The Allegheny Front
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The Allegheny Front
Water from a stream below a mountaintop removal surface mine in Eastern Kentucky. Scientists say trees can clean up the water
A Solution Comes – ‘Ugly’ But Effective
In the 1990s, a group of scientists came to Angel’s agency with a potential solution. They had studied how to re-forest old strip mines and had developed a system to do it. In a nutshell, the system involved tilling the surface mine like you would a garden before planting.
Angel says it took a while to get mine operators—and others at his agency—to buy in to the scientists’ ideas. Years of creating the ‘golf course’ look had conditioned them to creating ‘pastoral’ ridges. This new approach involved ripping up soil and leaving the ground uneven.
“Some of my colleagues call it ‘ugly reclamation.’” Angel says. “They say, ‘It’s ugly.’ I say, ‘You do know it grows trees?’ They say, ‘Yeah, I just don’t like the way it looks.’”
Eventually the agency embraced the technique, as did the coal industry.
At a former mine nearby, Angel shows off a field that will soon be planted with new trees. The slope had been covered by thick invasive grasses. But Angel’s group came through with a bulldozer and ripped up the grass, sprayed it with herbicide, and now it looks like a plowed field.
“It would take Mother Nature on her own to reforest these sites, decades, if not centuries,” Angel says.
Protecting Water
Planting forests could help fix one of coal’s worst environmental legacies—polluted streams.
A few miles from Angel’s planting site, Chris Barton leans over a stream stained reddish orange. The stream is at the foot of a large mountaintop removal mine that’s been closed for about 15 years.
Barton, a University of Kentucky hydrologist who studies coal mining’s impact on water, points out a pile of boulders upstream—visible through the leafless trees. The boulders were part of the mountain’s ‘overburden’—the layer of rock, soil and gravel coal mine operators remove with explosives, and push over a hillside to get at the underlying coal. In the process, the stream above Barton was buried with 200 feet of overburden.
Though the practice is becoming less common, thousands of hilltops in Kentucky, West Virginia, and other parts of Central Appalachia have been removed with this method. In Kentucky alone, mining is a cause of 1,500 miles of impaired streams.
Barton drops a conductivity meter, a rough measure of water pollution. Not surprisingly, the water pollution in the stream is well above acceptable levels.
Not that a meter is necessary. The stream bed is covered by what looks like red icing—iron from the rocks burying the stream. There’s so much of it in the water, it’s coating the rocks where insects and other critters like to hide.
“So the bugs can’t get under these rocks and hide,” Barton says. He tries to pull a rock off the stream bed to demonstrate, but can’t pull it up. “It’s like it’s cemented to the bed.”
The iron and other minerals that are polluting the stream are common byproducts of mountaintop removal mining, says Barton.
“When you mine, you’re taking a rock and blasting that into a zillion pieces and then suddenly it becomes a size where it can dissolve,” Barton says.
That’s why levels of salts and minerals in streams near this mining have been found to be ‘persistently elevated‘ to levels of pollution that are ‘acutely lethal’ to aquatic wildlife. Studies show wildlife populations decline in these streams.
Barton thinks if trees were to grow on top—that would prevent a lot of the runoff that’s causing this pollution. He’s working on a pilot project to demonstrate how to do this.
On A Mine, A Forest
There are signs this new approach to reclaiming old coal mines can work.
On top of a ridge in eastern Kentucky is the sprawling Starfire Mine. A few years ago, 400 miners worked on the ridgetop hauling upwards of a million tons of coal a year off the ridge. Today, like many mines in this part of Kentucky, production is slowing to a halt. Only two work on the hill now.
At the top of the mine, Paul Rothman steps through a gate to show off a young forest. There are two small cells of forest growing here—they were planted in the 1990s.
“You’ve got white ash, white oak, yellow poplar, or tulip poplar, white pine, black walnut,” says Rothman, who is an environmental scientist with the Kentucky Department of Natural Resources.
Rothman helped plant these trees back in the 1990s. He’s teamed up with Angel in the past to get more trees on top of old mines.
Today, wind-blown orchids, sweetbriers, and birches are sprouting from the forest floor. Rothman says at first it was hard to get mine owners to plant trees.
He’s had bulldozer operators nod approvingly at instructions to leave soil uncompacted—then have them sneak back onto a hilltop to pack down the dirt when his back was turned. But he thinks all the effort has been worth it.
“The stereotype is once these areas are mined you can never grow forest back on them—and what we’re trying to show people is that’s not quite accurate,” Rothman says.
A Vast Prairie
Though Rothman and others have proven forests can make a comeback in the Central Appalachian coal fields, there are still around a million acres of grasslands on former surface mines that are in need of reforestation, says Angel.
Some of these sites are used to graze cattle or for development of shopping plazas or schools. But most are not used for development. And much of it is prairie—a prairie the size of Rhode Island, spread out across four states.
The transformation of this landscape has happened in peoples’ backyards. And it can create tensions—even within families.
Jon and Loretta Henrikson live down the hill from a mountaintop surface mine in Letcher County, Kentucky. Loretta Henrikson grew up on the mountain, and she said she’s never liked strip mining.
“I’m supporting the miners and I’m supporting the jobs, but I just don’t like the way it looks,” she says. “But I have to live with it.”
She used to argue about the issue with her brother, who’s a coal miner. But a conversation several years ago changed her viewpoint.
“He said to me, ‘You don’t know what it’s like. You’ve got a husband that’s got a good job, and can feed you, and we don’t. If our job is over, what do we do?’”
Her husband Jon was a schoolteacher. He had a secure job with benefits.
But her brother explained—without strip mining—and mountaintop removal—his family would go hungry.
“So then finally I realized when he said that—it just, like, pricked my heart,” she says. “So I said I’m not going to talk about being against strip mining ever again.”
When asked, she said, no, she’d never want to move off the mountain she grew up on.
This story comes to us as part of a collaboration with Allegheny Front, a public radio program covering environmental issues in Pennsylvania.
