Place: Appalachia (West Virginia)
Threat: Mountaintop Removal Mining
 Streams are not only a beautiful part of the Appalachian landscape, they are essential to
the Appalachian way of life. Streams provide clean drinking water and they are a place
where families and visitors fish and swim. They have been the sites of baptisms for
generations, and in Appalachia whole communities are built around these streams.
However, rather than protecting these treasured streams, the Bush administration is
making it easier for mining companies to destroy them. When mining companies blow
the tops off mountains to get to a seam of coal, tons of mining waste is left over leaving
the Appalachia communities devastated.
Bill Price, with the Sierra Club in West Virginia, sees the weight of this issue on the
shoulders of the Appalachians: “This issue affects the people of Appalachia who have
little resources or traditional political power,” says Price. “Their homes are being
devastated by the flooding and blasting from this mining. They are bearing the brunt of
this cheap energy source.”
The stream buffer zone rule, aimed at protecting streams from being buried by mining
waste, prohibits surface mining or mining activities within 100 feet of streams unless the
government finds that the mining won't adversely affect the water quality or quantity.
Filling an entire stream with mining waste, as mining companies do during mountaintop
removal mining, is a violation of this rule--but the Bush administration hasn’t enforced
this protection.
Instead, the administration has turned a blind eye while mining companies have leveled
mountain ranges and valleys. After thousands of miles of Appalachian streams have been
buried, the Bush administration is weakening the protections for streams instead of
enforcing them. The proposed rule allows companies to mine next to or through streams
if they can show, regardless of the damage, that mining operations won't increase the
mud and other mining waste within 100 feet downstream. The coal companies also have
to minimize the destruction of fish and wildlife “to the extent possible,” a term that is
hard to measure. This proposal lets mining companies off the hook for dumping mining
waste into streams.
The public has commented on this rule change and is waiting to see who the Bush
administration will listen to – residents of Appalachia or mining companies. Before the
administration proposed this dangerous rule change, well over 80,000 Americans in
Appalachia and around the country already let them know that they did not want the
devastation of mountaintop removal to continue burying streams in Appalachia.
“The Bush administration should have listened to the community so that the policies
would not have changed on the stream buffer zone and the comment period would have
been taken seriously,” says Price. “Unless change is brought to the mountaintop removal
situation, there will be continued destruction and devastation to Appalachia to the point
where the area will be unlivable.”
There is a better way. Coal mining can be done in a responsible way and that means an
end to mountaintop removal. West Virginia’s communities can transition to a more
diversified economy that includes more small businesses, cleaner energy sources and
tourism. Finally, the Bush administration must reign in mining companies, many of them
major contributors to the Bush campaign in 2000, and protect Appalachian communities
from water pollution, blasting and flooding.
Sierra Club Contact:
Bill Price, West Virginia: (304) 854-1179
bill.price@sierraclub.org
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