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 near Murphy, N.C., was a retired newsman, Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition member/volunteer/donor and recipient of the 2015 Holman Water Quality Stewardship Award. Tom died on December 28, 2020.