Combating Mountaintop Removal: New Directions in the Fight against Big Coal

Part I. The Worst Goddamn Thing I’ve Ever Seen

PART I The Worst Goddamn Thing I’ve Ever Seen The Coal River Valley winds from its headwaters in Boone and Raleigh Counties north through some of West Virginia’s richest coal deposits to the Kanawha River near Charleston. The physical and social landscapes along the way are a study in contrasts: at times cold and hard, at others lush and vibrant; sometimes warm and communal, sometimes divided and confrontational; sometimes organic and renewable, sometimes mechanical and destructive. The coexistence of a distinctive way of life profoundly shaped by the mountain landscape and a nonrenewable fossil fuel resource has created these contrasts. Mountaintop removal coal mining (MTR) is strip mining on an incredible scale that is both intensive and extensive. The method removes several hundred vertical feet of a mountain to extract four or more seams of coal. Many mine sites have come to encompass thousands of contiguous acres, creating vast featureless plateaus. Mining companies have used strip mining techniques in Appalachia since at least the 1920s. MTR differs from earlier forms of strip mining in both scale and procedure. Until the 1970s, most strip mines were so-called contour strips that followed one coal outcrop around a contour of the mountain. Miners would strip the outer edge of the mountain away from the coal seam to create a “bench.” Then machines called augurs would drill into the seam beneath the newly created cliff to extract as much coal as possible. Following the contour around the mountain, this process resembled peeling an apple. Some strip mines resembled 20 PART I MTR in that they removed the top of a mountain from the highest coal seam, but they did not simultaneously extract multiple seams, nor were they as expansive as MTR mines. Several advances in technology facilitated the rise of MTR, among them computer engineering capabilities, large machinery (including draglines—$100 million machines that can move one hundred tons of material with each scoop), and powerful explosives (ammonium nitrate and fuel oil—similar to the Oklahoma City bomb). The process is methodical, rational, and efficient. The people of Coal River are coal mining people, as Sylvester resident Pauline Canterberry said, but the relationship between the industry and residents has become one that many people describe as abusive. Activist Judy Bonds compared the position of coalfield communities to that of a battered wife: they know they are being mistreated but they are unable to break their bond with Coal. In the late 1990s and into the 2000s, communities faced wide-ranging problems attributed to the coal industry: coal dust blanketing homes; overloaded coal trucks barreling down narrow, winding mountain roads; floods caused by increased runoff from strip mines; acid water contamination; and subsidence from abandoned mines. Along with the physical effects of mountaintop removal, the accompanying social disintegration of communities was perhaps the most painful effect for many coalfield residents. Within the complex array of social, economic, and political pathogens, mountaintop removal coal mining became the poster child for the abusive relationship between coal and the people who live around it. Homes shake for miles around under the force of the explosive blasts. Well water becomes tainted, brown, and smelly, or disappears altogether. In September 2004 a boulder sent careening off a mountaintop removal site in western Virginia smashed through a mobile home, killing a three-year-old boy in his sleep. Beyond these direct physical effects of mountaintop removal, its graphic violence—literally blowing up a mountain and dumping it into a valley—offends the most basic moral understandings of the world held by people whose identities and senses of self and place were formed in the forested mountain landscape. Standing on what used to be his own grouse-hunting spot in the woods, it is hard for a coal miner to imagine how the rocky, The Worst Goddamn Thing I’ve Ever Seen 21 grass-covered plateau that is left after mountaintop removal is an “improvement.” Yet, industry officials often described it as such. Hand-drawn football players (presumably from West Virginia University, the “Mountaineers”) on a child’s poster at an activist demonstration asked their coach what they were supposed to be called when all the mountains were flattened. The coach in the drawing suggested “flatlanders.” For decades, the coal industry and the communities that it supported lived in a kind of embattled harmony. Power always rested with the coal operators, but between 1935 and the 1980s...