Mountaintop Removal Mining

For mining companies, mountaintop removal mining is cheap, but don’t let anyone ever tell you it is efficient. As coal companies cut costs, residents near mines pay for that savings, often with their livelihoods, and occasionally with their lives.

Mountaintop removal operates exactly as one might think it would - a mountain top over a thin seam of coal is completely removed, and a broad plateau is left where a piece of the Ohio landscape once stood. This form of extraction has been called a "muscled-up form of strip mining." It is far more damaging to families and ecology than traditional mining.

In the mountaintop removal method, forests are clear cut at the pinnacle of a mountain, and top soil is removed, transforming the topography and landscape around the mountain into a moonscape of rock and dirt, making the whole area more susceptible to flooding. Mountaintop removal destroys water quality when the refuse from pot-marked mountaintops is dumped in valleys, covering miles of streams at a time. So far, well over 700 miles of streams in U.S. have been destroyed forever in this way.

Unlike more traditional pillar or long-wall mining, which often requires hundreds more miners to extract coal, mountaintop removal is cost-effective for coal companies because explosives and large machinery does the job which workers used to do. The industry lost 10,000 jobs from 1990 to 1997, as mountaintop removal mining became widespread. Anti-union activity has been associated with mountaintop removal mining because this loss of workforce. Unions and environmental organizations have also called for legal measures to protect communities from the degradation and destruction that results from nearby blasting.

Mountaintop removal usually involves the destruction of vast swaths of forest. West Virginia, were Mountaintop removal mining has gained strength, has lost more than 250,000 acres of hardwood forest to the practice. The damage does not stop there. After vast "moonscapes"’ are created at the tops of mountains after extraction, water quality suffers.

It is virtually impossible to engage in the practice without contaminating nearby groundwater. Again in West Virginia, virtually every stream at a mountaintop removal site becomes contaminated. This is because mining companies, instead of replacing slag at the top of the plateau to rebuild original contours, as is required by law, simply dump contaminated rock and coal refuse in valleys, where streams get buried, waterways get contaminated, and groundwater becomes unfit to drink.

The environment suffers when mountaintop removal is brought to a community, but the people of those communities suffer more. Jobs get eliminated, and homeowners endure huge blasts and illegally overloaded coal trucks that clog their roadways, and occasionally get in deadly accidents with local motorists.

First, there are the job losses. Mountaintop removal mining eliminates jobs and destroys traditional mining communities. The practice is popular with mining companies precisely for this reason. The massive machines that move these mountains have no pensions, no families to provide healthcare for, no children to educate, and no union. These massive machines replace men, and corrupt the environment. The machines are 20 stories high and can pick up 130 tons of dirt and rock with one bite of their shovels.

The savings in labor for mountaintop removal mining over traditional underground forms is immense. In one mountaintop removal site in Wyoming, 450 workers (including supervisors) mined 1.2 tons of coal per second—40 million tons per year—compared to 3 years earlier when 500 workers were able to produce only 33 million tons of coal from the same mine. Such surface mining, including mountaintop removal as its main means, produces 6 tons of coal per labor hour nationally, compared to 2 1/2 tons per hour for underground miners.

Here are some facts from West Virginia, where mountaintop removal has become the mining method of choice. Mountaintop removal employs less than 1% of the state’s entire work force. As a local newspaper commented, "The industry has eliminated 100,000 West Virginia jobs, replacing miners with giant machines. Nearly all profits from West Virginia coal go to out-of-state owners”. Not surprisingly, these job losses have not translated to economic prosperity in the state.

Despite its vast natural resources West Virginia is the second-poorest state in the nation. In Kentucky, another state where the practice is prominent, coal-related employment has dropped 60 percent in the last 15 years. Nationally, coal employment declined from 163,000 to 85,000 nationwide in the 90’s. In 1948, just before the advent of strip mining, the precursor to today’s mountaintop removal, West Virginia alone had more miners than work in the entire nation today. These practices don’t create healthy economies.

But it doesn’t stop there. Mountaintop removal and extensive strip mining not only saps a community's jobs, it can create dangerous health risks to the most vulnerable local citizens. For example, an Eastern Kentucky University study found that children in Letcher County, Ky., suffer from an alarmingly high rate of nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, and shortness of breath, symptoms of something called blue baby syndrome, which can be traced back to sediments of dissolved minerals that have drained from mine sites to community streams.

The practice also increases the incidence of flooding. On Island Creek in Grapevine Kentucky, shearing of the mountaintop upstream of a small town resulted in 2002 in three so-called one hundred-year flood events in a span of 10 days. In the last five years, coal-related flood events have killed 12 people in Kentucky.

Mountaintop removal needs to end. It is not a viable, sustainable practice – environmentally, socially, or economically. There are ways to stop it. One would be to enforce the laws already on the books. Many of these mines are probably illegal. If the 1977 SMCRA legislation were fully enforced by the Office of Mining Safety, coal companies might be forced to cease dangerous valley fills and rebuild the mountain approximately as it was before. This would certainly make the practice less attractive to coal companies.

Iif water quality rules and permitting were enforced, the valley fills, which make mountaintop removal possible, could not take place. An outright ban would definitively end the practice and move the U.S. mining sector towards a sustainable future.

Limestone Mining

There are many areas in Ohio where over the years limestone has been mined and gaping holes remain in land that once was farmland. Today, this land is often described by county assessors as "wasteland." These lands add little or nothing to the local tax base. As is, mining companies can walk away from liability when they donate these lands to a county or municipality for a park, leaving no tax revenue or local benefit for the mined and depleted acreage. This circumstance is bad for local communities and bad for the state of Ohio.

These actions damage local character, community heritage, and weaken the tax base for communities which are already facing large cuts to local government funds.

As an example, a few years ago a large cement company in Xenia Township (Greene County) told neighbors living around a large parcel of land held by the company that the company was planning to create a large quarry on the acreage. Heretofore, the land had been a buffer between the homeowners and the company's large manufacturing plant and existing mining operations. Local concern grew. Should rezoning take place and mining operations begin, then property values would drop, the air would be more fouled, the noise would be constant, and the truck traffic ceaseless. Furthermore, questions lingered about what would happen to the water that supplied the wells of the homeowners.

The homeowners organized and created a local action committee, X-TAG, to challenge the rezoning from agriculture to industrial/mineral extraction. These residents went to their township trustees for support and help. A forward-looking Xenia Township Trustee suggested a stakeholder group be formed to try to agree upon resolutions whereby the land, owned by the company, could be mined with the least harm to the neighbors and the township. One representative from the zoning commission, one representative each from the neighbors' group, a local environmental group, the cement company and a sand and gravel company met weekly for more than 6 months to come up with a set of resolutions they could all accept. These resolutions are listed at www.x-tag.org. After nine months' work the Zoning Commission and the Xenia Township Trustees passed the new resolutions. To date the cement company has not applied for a change of zoning from agriculture to mineral extraction, however, it is eminent.

Mineral extraction interests have urged Ohio lawmakers to remove township authority to zone for mineral extraction, arguing that township trustees are not sufficiently informed or educated to make these important decisions. Industry’s position is that township trustees should cede decision making authority to the Ohio Department of Natural (ODNR). It would be very convenient for mineral extraction companies to be able to go to ODNR to request a change of zoning on the property they hold, pay the department a fee for a permit, then carry out their business unimpeded by the interests of the local community. The General Assembly must stand up for the rights of townships and their residents by restoring local control for these important zoning issues.

Senate Bill 18 (effective May 27, 2005) was yet another blow to local control, removing zoning authority from townships to act in the interest of “public convenience, comfort, prosperity, and general welfare.” Business interests, by going to the state level, had hoped to gain economic "certainty" and "predictability" for their ventures. But democracy is not these, and though it is "messy," it serves the people.

Local government actions are the most transparent of any actions in government. Good business is conducted with the public good and the future of the State of Ohio in mind. Local control helps to ensure both of these.

Policy Recommendations: Ohio was blessed with limestone. Today, society needs concrete for construction. There should be a sustainable level of mineral extraction that will last over time. However, our state leaders should respect the interests of township residents, and place faith in their competency to know what is best for their communities. Local elected government officials should be authorized to zone for mineral extraction with this in mind. Our townships are the fundamental building blocks of democracy. Placing this zoning control with townships protects and respects citizen rights.

The General Assembly must consider and pass a protective law that requires a multi-stakeholder process when writing zoning ordinances that have such a great potential to impact the public interest, health, and well being of Ohio.

Mining Issue Briefing (PDF)