The evidence is now crystal clear. The leadership of West Virginia needs to put the citizens of West Virginia--its people--ahead of corporate profits. Today we should all be calling for West Virginia political leadership to rally together to plan for an orderly end to mountaintop mining.
This is a watershed moment in the history of mountaintop removal mining.
If anything, most stories on the study understate the magnitude of the findings. If you can spare the time, listen to the press conference the science team gave yesterday at the press club or to this interview by Bob Kinkaid. (Heck, listen to both! I learned something new in each one.)
The science team entered the project with no preconceived notion about how effective mountain top removal mitigation might be or how damaging MTR is. After this study the interdisciplinary team of 11 scientists reached this conclusion (summarized by McClatchy):
The consequences of this mining in eastern Kentucky, West Virginia and southwestern Virginia are ""pervasive and irreversible," the article finds. Companies are required by law to take steps to reduce the damages, but their efforts don’t compensate for lost streams nor do they prevent lasting water pollution, it says.
The article is a summary of recent scientific studies of the consequences of blasting the tops off mountains to obtain coal and dumping the excess rock into streams in valleys. The authors also studied new water-quality data from West Virginia streams and found that mining polluted them, reducing their biological health and diversity.
Surprisingly little attention has been paid to this growing scientific evidence of the damages, they wrote, adding: "Regulators should no longer ignore rigorous science."
New permits shouldn’t be granted, they argued, "unless new methods can be subjected to rigorous peer review and shown to remedy these problems."
In the Kinkaid interview one of the scientists said it'll take 10,000 years for mountain top removal sites to return to pre-mining condition.
Another scientist said that residents living near mining operations should consider moving to protect their health.
Another said that no known restoration/mitigation plans could work--even if you could restore water flows and vegetation mixes (something we have no idea yet how to do), there are still major down stream chemical pollution problems.
Another scientist points out that the chemical pollution problems (e.g., selenium) are not just trace amounts that could theoretically be a problem, they've already shown up in concentrations higher up in the food chain. Animals are showing up with selenium poisoning and there are no health advisories for residents in West Virginia not to eat fish from streams below certain mines out of concern of selenium exposure.
What happens next?
The most comprehensive study ever on MTR coal mining appears in arguably the most prestigious scientific journal it could appear in. It confirms what coal mining community members have been saying all along: we're dying out here.
The scientists agree: they have called for a halt to mountain top removal mining because of public health hazards.
The most responsible thing for West Virginia leaders to do today is rally together on behalf of all citizens of West Virginia--develop a plan for phasing out all existing Mountain Top Removal coal mining.
