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Either way, a mountaintop
vanishes from the Earth
In western North Carolina,
mountaintop removal is to take out the crushed stone, and in
Kentucky, it is to get the coal
My flyover of an Eastern
Kentucky strip mine
By Tom Bennett
Special to the
Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition
Aug. 15,
2009 -- Here in mountainous Cherokee County, N.C.,
where I live, the N.C. Dept. of Environment and Natural
Resources in 2006 ordered 422 flawed septic-system permits
held up and field-reviewed. The sanitarian that had been
responsible for them was fired.
A resident
here recalls how in the 1970s he saw sewer pipes going
straight into the Valley River. After heavy rains, he could
see toilet paper in the limbs of the river birch trees.
And in 1939,
long before the U.S. Clean Water Act, our county-seat town
of Murphy and the Tennessee Valley Authority reached a
dismal pact reflecting some indifferent water-quality
attitudes that each has long since disavowed. They signed
contract TV39658 to build a septic tank and this stipulated
that “it shall be of conventional design and shall be
provided with sludge blow-off discharging to the Hiwassee
River.”
At least
after those environmental train wrecks, the rivers and
streams of our county are still there.
NOT IN the
coal country of eastern Kentucky, which I visited today. I
saw from the air and on the ground the terrible destruction
caused by mountaintop removal mining of coal in order to
make electric power for the world.
The rubble
left by this type of mining has buried or significantly
impacted 1,400 miles of Kentucky streams, and 1.14 million
acres of Kentucky’s lands, mainly forest, have been cleared
or disturbed for strip mining, according to Jerry Hardt,
communications director of the non-profit Kentuckians for
the Commonwealth.
“And it’s
coming to you,” said Kevin Pentz, a field coordinator for
KFTC, told our group. “It may be next year, it may be five
years from now, twenty-five years, a hundred years, but it’s
coming.”
THE ARID PLAIN OF A SHAVED MOUNTAINTOP
I and 10
others in a N.C. Council of Churches’ Interfaith Power &
Light delegation from Asheville saw this up-close today. We
took turns in a four-seater Cessna 172 flying half-hour
trips over the mining desolation ringing the
private-aviation Wendell Ford Airport (named for a former
governor) near Hazard, Ky. The airplane is owned by the
Asheville-based conservation non-profit South Wings, and the
pilot today was Mel Beckham, a volunteer.
You’ve been
in the air for only a matter of seconds when you’re over one
of the MTR mines of ICG, or International Coal Group of
Teays Valley, W.Va. It mines coal here in Kentucky and also
in West Virginia, Maryland, and Illinois. Its New York
Stock Exchange symbol is ICO. It was formed in 2004 by
Wilbur L. Ross Jr. of New York, who is a billionaire and was
346th on the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans
last year, according to Forbes. He purchased Horizon
Natural Resources’ non-union properties, according to
www.answers.com
“The
bankruptcy regulations allowed him to set up International
Coal Group free of labor unions, health care and pensions,”
states the Answers website, quoting the Aug. 2004
Associated Press article, “Coal miners lose health
benefits.”
(Other
mountaintop-removal companies operating in Kentucky include
Arch Mineral of St. Louis, Mo.; Consolidated Energy of
Canonsberg, Pa.; Massey Energy of Richmond, Va.; Peabody
Coal Co. of Central City, Ky.; Pine Branch Coal Co. of
Chavies, Ky.; and Teco Energy of Tampa, Fla., according to
Kentuckians for the Commonwealth.)
From the
air, even on a Saturday, the arid plain of a shaved
mountaintop is buzzing with activity. The ubiquitous
off-the-highway dump trucks that are the workhorses of
mining scurry around. You see slurry pits and sludge ponds,
and the veins of black coal still to be tapped. (They must
please Wilbur L. Ross Jr. when he makes his own flyover.) A
conveyor moves coal into a long line of rail cars, perhaps
bound for a TVA coal plant, or across the U.S. by rail to go
out to China. This day we didn’t see or hear in action the
AMFO -- the explosive of choice and made of ammonium nitrate
and fuel oil.
I want to be
fair. There is reclamation. You see it on formerly
worked areas now covered by green quilts of grass. There
are employee benefits. In green hollows reached by
remote roads that wind through mined areas, I saw two
recreation centers. They must have been built for the
miners and their families, with ball fields, gymnasiums and
tennis courts. However, I’ll bet those parents would trade a
tennis racket for medical coverage or a pension any day.
COAL IS KING
Kevin Pentz
of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth said he never has heard
of Cement Roadstone Holdings of Dublin, Ireland. It is the
firm with headquarters in Belgard Castle that has the
Danville, Va. subsidiary APAC Atlantic Inc., that has the
Alcoa, Tenn., subsidiary Harrison Construction. The latter
has taken (modest by Kentucky coal standards) at least
499,767 tons of granite from Shewbird Mountain in Clay
County in western North Carolina, according to N.C. Dept. of
Transportation public records.
“I do recall
that a Dublin firm bought a mine here in Kentucky on Pine
Mountain,” Pentz said.
Anyone with
a set of the World Book Encyclopedia knows the Appalachian
coal vein runs down the Cumberland Plateau from near
Charleston, W.Va., to west of Knoxville, Tenn. Meanwhile,
here in our Blue Ridge Mountains, the target for mountaintop
removal, for example by Harrison Construction, is crushed
stone for highways. That’s why Kevin Pentz’ dire prediction
how MTR, ostensibly for coal, might reach us in western
North Carolina in a year, 25 or 100 seemed unlikely.
However, as
I drove home over Tennessee’s Rarity Mountain, I realized I
should have asked Pentz about “cap-and-trade.” The Obama
administration has introduced legislation that would “cap”
greenhouse gases. To keep all the companies under the cap,
they would trade carbon permits, according to Duke Energy.
Coal
companies still are shaving off mountains nearly 40 years
after the passage of the Clean Water Act, so their law firms
are skilled at blocking change. The attorneys accurately
cite our voracious appetite for electric power. However, if
cap-and-trade ever shifted the coal companies’ emphasis to
the Blue Ridge and its granite, we would be vulnerable. That
is especially true here in the eight counties of western
North Carolina, whose local governments have no mountain
protection ordinances.
AND NOW BACK TO THE BLUE RIDGE
During all
of this, I was thinking of a series of news developments:
The N.C.
Southwestern Commission’s $400,000 Mountain Landscapes
Initiative last year;
State Sen. John
Snow’s (and others’) Mountain Resource Planning Act that, as
I read it, could commence some level of land planning out
here;
The Safe
Artificial Slopes Act parked in a House committee and
sponsored by Reps. Ray Rapp of Mars Hill and Philip Haire of
Sylva, both from towns near Asheville;
N.C. DENR’s
location of its regional office in Swannanoa just outside
Asheville, and our ability as citizens to go there and
inspect public records first-hand;
The mining
permits listed on DENR’s web site and how they are renewed
every five years; and
How these
renewals occur following Basinwide Water Quality Plans, and
you can attend public hearings and comment, even vent alarm
about mountaintop removal mining if you wish.
WHILE
FOLLOWING closely and keeping faith with citizens of Eastern
Kentucky who are living their lifetimes amid an
environmental horror, we also should get informed about
western North Carolina issues, in my opinion. I sought to
engage my N.C. Council of Churches in a thoughtful review of
the six developments that I list above, and I didn’t succeed
when we were together in the coal fields. I’ll keep trying.
What an
opportunity Google and Yahoo searches present each new
non-profit start-up! These miracles of the PC provide the
chance to spend one leisurely hour pulling up on your screen
and studying all the back-breaking work done over decades,
with grants earned through years of persistence, by earlier
organizations and reformers.
Wouldn’t it
be best for Asheville’s Interfaith Power & Light to identify
what’s already happening and see how to meld our efforts
into what’s been achieved so far? The environment, a
longsuffering thing patiently awaiting human cooperation,
will benefit if we do.
* * *
Tom Bennett of the Martins Creek Community west
of Murphy is a Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition member and volunteer.
E-mail him at
farblumtn@gmail.com
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