Mountaintop Removal, When Mountains Move, National Geographic

Mountaintop removal is a mining practice drastically transforming Appalachia. It is an antiseptic term used to describe the most profound assault on land imaginable.

Like a cancerous mutation of strip mining, entire mountaintops are blasted away to obtain a small seam of coal. Unwanted rock is pushed into valleys and streams, destroying natural watersheds, leaving no vegetation, and turning the terrain into unusable land.

So many small streambeds are dumped with the excess rock and dirt that the length of the Ohio River is filled in. The result is a threat to clean water and the biodiversity of the ecosystem. Flash flooding occurs where it never has before.

The Central Appalachian Plateau was created 4 million years ago, and one of its richest …

Mountaintop Removal, When Mountains Move, National Geographic

Mountaintop removal is a mining practice drastically transforming Appalachia. It is an antiseptic term used to describe the most profound assault on land imaginable.

Like a cancerous mutation of strip mining, entire mountaintops are blasted away to obtain a small seam of coal. Unwanted rock is pushed into valleys and streams, destroying natural watersheds, leaving no vegetation, and turning the terrain into unusable land.

So many small streambeds are dumped with the excess rock and dirt that the length of the Ohio River is filled in. The result is a threat to clean water and the biodiversity of the ecosystem. Flash flooding occurs where it never has before.

The Central Appalachian Plateau was created 4 million years ago, and one of its richest assets is wilderness containing some of the world’s oldest and biologically richest temperate zone hardwood forest.

Scotch Irish settlers came to the mountains and made homes in the protective hollers. Mountain life produced a rich culture, not as depressed or as quaint as often pictured.

Mining has always been a way of life in Appalachia. West Virginians have always lived with the backdrop of the coal train passing by. Money has always gone out of town on that train—it is no coincidence that some of the poorest people in the US live in coal country. But the area had other assets and families felt this was a safe place to raise their children. The reality now is that mountaintop removal is a threatening these people’s lives.

Coal is floated in chemicals to wash away heavy metals and impurities. The wash water is poison. Hundreds of feet above many homes and communities are impoundments or slurry ponds. Usually unseen from the road, they are pockets of poisoned mining wastewater behind a dam. If one dam fails, the slurry runs into the creek or stream and roadways in the valley below. The water is a toxic witch’s brew of arsenic, mercury, and other heavy metals and chemicals. There are some 500 impoundments in West Virginia alone. Some sit directly over abandoned mine tunnels which snake beneath the ground and are weakening because of blasting at nearby mine sites.

Politicians and mine officials assure residents that the impoundments are safe. Yet, during a thunderstorm in the fall of 2000, more than 260 billion gallons of sludge poured out of a mountain surrounding people’s homes, contaminating the drinking water in 17 communities.

The result of this mining is environmental and cultural genocide. Mining has pitted neighbor against neighbor and has divided families. People do not trust each other. Coal companies buy out family homes and entire communities, and individuals who stand their ground face intimidation and threats from mine representatives. Some families are forced or tricked into selling. Churches and schools close. Houses are burned down.

Coal is big business—a $23 billion per year industry. West Virginia produces approximately 170 million tons of coal annually. Although most people think of it as dirty and antiquated, coal produces 52 percent of the nation’s electricity.

It is estimated that 20 percent of the mountaintops have been leveled and by the industry’s own projections and current levels of production, West Virginia’s coal will last another 27 years. Then the coal, and the mountains, will be gone.

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Activist Larry Gibson lead two friends to a knoll in the family cemetery on Kayford Mountain which overlooks the sprawling Samples Mine. This is one of the few places to see a mountaintop removal mine.
More than 300 of Gibson’s relatives are buried in the cemetery. His family has lived near Kayford Mountain since the late 1700’s and always looked up to the mountain peaks that surrounded them.
Since 1986, there has been a slow motion, continuous destruction of the mountain—24 hours a day, seven days a week. Gibson occupied the highest point of land around, surrounded by a 12,000-acre level plot of land that was previously a mountain range.
The mine owned by Cantenary Coal Company, which is a subsidiary of St. Louis based Patriot Coal, wanted to buy the property to expand their operation. Gibson formed a nonprofit foundation of the Stanley family heirs when their 500 acres shrunk to 50 after the coal company (then Arch Coal) had acquired the rest.
Over the years, Gibson was intimidated, harassed, and threatened by mining company employees for holding out. He remained outspoken against mountaintop removal.
Once this was a quiet rural community, but mining companies can legally come within 100 feet of a family cemetery and 300 feet from a home. The Hobet 21 coal mine was owned by Patriot Coal ( then Arch Coal) loomed over one of the few remaining houses in Mud, W.V.
In 2003, Hobet 21 produced about 5.2 million tons of coal, making it among the largest surface mines in the state. The Lincoln County mine has been expanding over hills and valleys, filling in Connelly Branch creek. After the company was bankrupt in 2015, the site was passed on to a conservation firm who continued mining another year.
The town of Mud hasn’t been much of a community in the couple of decades since the post office closed, but in 1998 around 60 residents remained. They had two churches and a ball field. In early 1997, Big John, the mine’s 20-story dragline, moved above Mud and more houses, near this one, were bought and destroyed.
Snow accentuates the contours of a flattened, freshly cut mountaintop removal site in southwestern W.V. at Cantenary Coal near Cabin Creek. Mountaintop removal is a mining practice where the tops of mountains are blasted away to expose the seams of coal underneath.
A much as 500 feet or more of a mountain summit may be leveled. The earth and rock from the mountaintop is then dumped into the neighboring valleys.
According to Appalachian Voices, an environmental non-profit that focuses on coal’s impact in Appalachia, “Mountaintop removal has a devastating impact on the economy, ecology, and communities of Appalachia.”
Analysis from a study in 2009 that Appalachian Voices commissioned along with Natural Resources Defense Council in 2009 shows that 1.2 million acres have been mined for coal. “To date, over 500 mountains have been leveled, and nearly 2,000 miles of precious Appalachian headwater streams have been buried and polluted by mountaintop removal.”
 
A father and sons react to the orange/black water in the bathroom that smells bad and has an oily residue mixed with coal soot. His health is affected and he fears for his sons. He suffers from rashes and red eyes when he showers and he tells the kids, “Don’t brush teeth in water. Don’t drink the water.”
He told National Geographic that when he moved in six years ago he thought the only problem was that the water was discolored by iron. At 38 years old, he has since developed gallstones, breathing problems, memory loss, and his hair is falling out. He has anxiety, nervousness, and his pancreas is at two percent function. All of this occurred after he moved to this trailer. Scared for his family, he asks, “What have I done to them?” Neighbors in nearby Williamson and Rawls who have the same water are having it analyzed.
A November 4, 2003 Associated Press article by Michelle Saxton of the Williamson Daily News entitled “Water in Mingo Communities Contains Manganese” stated that some security guards quit opening valves on Massey pumps when they realized they were poisoning the community. In a later court hearing it was shown that Massey Coal Company had, indeed, Illegally injected slurry from the Rawls Sales Processing Company (Massey Coal Company subsidiary) impoundment into abandoned underground mines for at least eight years.
As of the fall of 2011, some 500 West Virginia residents are still in limbo over a suit brought against Massey energy over claims that it and Rawls Sales poisoned hundreds of drinking water wells with coal slurry.
Bulldozers fill trucks with excess rock at a small mountaintop removal site in Man, West Virginia, where a small crew is mining coal in a site in Logan County that was left by a large coal company as rubble.
Large mining operations are only visible from the air, although coal and debris are removed using enormous earth-moving machines known as draglines that stand 22 stories tall and can hold 24 compact cars in its bucket. The machines can cost up to $100 million, but are favored by coal companies because they can do the work of hundreds of employees. A small operation like this one can keep 17 employees working for five years and making good wages.
Family members visit at the end of a reunion of the Caudill/Miller family at their homestead in Mud, W.V. The family fought Arch Coal Company in court to keep their 26 acres, where they plant a garden and spend weekends. The home stood in the way of Hobet 21, a 12,000-acre, mountaintop removal mine. After a long battle in court, the West Virginia Supreme Court ruled that a Lincoln County family was wrongly forced to sell its home to make way for the surface mine. Justices said a lower court was wrong to discount the family’s ‘sentimental or emotional interests’ in the property in favor of the economic concerns of a coal operator.”
The mining operations expanded to surround the Caudill property.
 
 
Caudill family members gather on weekends and work in the garden and to maintain the homestead. They weed the potato patch and when the rains come, they sit on the porch and visit.
It took several years and a lot of money and determination, but kin of the Caudill family fought to keep their family homestead on Mud River from being taken over by the St. Louis-based Arch Coal Company. Nearly swindled out of their homestead, they battled all the way to the West Virginia Supreme Court where they finally won their case.
For 100 years, Miller’s wife and family owned the 75-acre tract that includes a farmhouse, built in 1920, several small barns and a garden. John Caudill, a coal miner who was blinded in a mining accident in the 1930s, and his wife, Lydia Caudill, raised 10 children in the home. Today, the family no longer lives there, though the heirs spend almost every weekend there.
Arch Coal wanted to tear down the family’s ancestral home. It stood in the way of the company’s plans to continue to expand its 12,000-acre Hobet 21 mountaintop removal complex. Hobet 21 produced about 5.2 million tons of coal, making it among the largest surface mines in the state. Mines like Hobet yield one ton of coal for every 16 tons of terrain that is displaced.
Under Hobet’s plans, statements from Arch submitted in court say that “ a valley fill and an impoundment pond would destroy the inundate the farmhouse and outbuilding and bury the immediate surrounding land under the valley fill.” A lower court agreed with the company, but in the end, the family won.
The mining operations have expanded to surround the Caudill property.
A woman sells household items at an informal flea market set up along the road north of Williamson in Mingo County. Clothes, dolls, and other family items are for sale most any day along the roads near the coalfields.
West Virginians have always lived with the backdrop of the coal train passing by. Money has always gone out of town on that train.
Lorene Caudill prepares for their move by taking down family photographs. She and her husband Therman endured eight years of coal dust and foundation-shaking dynamite blasts as Hobet 21, one of the largest surface mines in the state, inched slowly toward them. They put up apples from their last garden and packed their belongings after signing a letter of intent to sell their beloved home to Arch Coal Company (now Patriot Coal).
The Caudills, along with other family members, did achieve a small victory by preserving ownership of a nearby ancestral home but only after a long battle—all the way to the West Virginia Supreme Court—with the coal company.  No one lives there now but the extended family gathers on weekends to garden and for dinners at the house, which was completely surrounded by mining. Since then, the house was burned down by arsonists.
The Caudill house, where they had planned on spending the rest of their lives, is a half-mile down the road from the old homestead. They are some of the last to leave the community. Therman Caudill, a retired schoolteacher said, “It took the coal company 125 years to run the Caudill family out of Mud River, but they finally did it.”
As mountaintop removal mine permits allow the surface mines to expand, they often displace residents in their way.  Dingess-Rum Coal Company served notice to Dehue residents renting old coal company houses, giving them 30 days to move. Then they burned the houses down one by one, although some residents had not yet left.
Dehue, like dozens of other mining towns, was once a busy center of activity with a grocery, post office, theater, barbershop, pool hall, school payroll office, and Civic Club. These communities become ghost towns and over time are dismantled. Day lilies and fruit trees often mark the spot of leveled homes lining a road.
Dehue was located off Route 10 on Rum Creek south of Logan. It began in 1916 as a coal company town owned by Youngstown Mines Corporation. It existed as late as the 1970s, but the homes were never sold to private residents. Most houses were cleared and burned in 2000 and 2001.
Attorney Brian Glasser talks with some of the 152 frustrated Sylvester, West Virginia citizens who banded together in a lawsuit in an effort to halt the assault on their air. Armed with video taped evidence, photographs, and testimony, the residents proved that black dust blanketed their town from a coal stockpile and preparation plant.
They won but little has changed (the company bought a street sweeper for the community) but it was a moral victory for a group of people who saw property values plummet in the black cloud that hung over their town. None of the 152 mostly retirees had ever been involved in a lawsuit.
A four-wheeler drives up a rock-covered road that was flooded after a summer thunderstorm.
Communities near mountaintop removal mining sites are often subject to powerful flash floods. On treeless, steep mountain and valley fill slopes, rainfall quickly becomes dangerous.
Reports in the Charleston Gazette show in May 2009, Mingo County and the surrounding coalfields were hit with the 19th floods in 11 years. WV has always flooded, but with the loss of sediment after forests are cut and the diversion of waters, flooding is happening where it never has before.
Twisted Gun Golf Club is an 18-hole regulation length golf course in Wharncliffe, West Virginia. The golf course is a reclaimed mountaintop removal site, and was recognized by golfonline.com in 2007 as number 17 on the “Top Fifty under Fifty” ranking of top 50 golf courses where the public can play for under fifty dollars. Twisted Gun in Mingo County near Gilbert, has been called the “jewel of the coal fields.”
A family climbs into the woods to hunt ginseng that can bring up to $500 a pound for the root that is used for a wide variety medicinal purposes from the common cold to cancer.
West Virginia has some of the world’s most biologically diverse forests, and people fear that as more woodlands are cut for mining, ginseng will become increasingly rare.
American ginseng, a long-lived herbaceous perennial, is an important forest resource in West Virginia. It exists in all 55 counties in the state, but is established in cool, moist forests with well-drained loamy soils and protection of a thick tree canopy and shrubs.
Ginseng sales produce $5 million to $6 million each year, an important income supplement in the southern coalfields and rural communities. According to the West Virginia Encyclopedia, the Division of Forestry records indicate an average annual root harvest of nearly 20,000 pounds.
http://www.wvencyclopedia.org/articles/2112
A man walks down the road in Tom Biggs Hollow in Letcher County, Kentucky, while his children play nearby.
Lucious Thompson, who lives in nearby Tom Biggs Hollow, joined Kentuckians for the Commonwealth when he found his land disrupted from above. “There’s good mining and there’s bad mining,” Mr. Thompson said. “Mountaintop removal takes the coal quick, 24 hours every day, making my streams disappear, with the blasting knocking a person out of bed and the giant ‘dozers beep-beeping all night so you cannot sleep.”
Mr. Thompson spoke with the authority of a retired underground miner. Underground miners led quieter, more pastoral lives above harsh, deep workplaces that were far out of sight. Now, the hollow dwellers have become witnesses more than miners as a fast-moving, high-volume process uses mammoth machinery to decapitate the coal-rich hills. 
“They make monster funnels of our villages,” said Carroll Smith, judge-executive, the top elected official, here in Letcher County, the location of some of the worst flooded hollows adjoining mountaintop removal sites. “They haven’t been a real good neighbor at all.”
With underground mining, coal miners led quieter, more pastoral lives above harsh workplaces deep in the ground and far out of sight. With mountaintop removal, a fast, high-volume process that uses mammoth machinery to decapitate the coal-rich hills that help define the hollows, the residents have become witnesses more than miners.
New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/11/national/11MINE.html