Misery in the Mountain State: The Catastrophic Impacts of Mountaintop Removal in Rural Appalachia
By: Allie Lowy
Tags: Mining, Environment, Fossil Fuels, Health, Environmental Justice

A mountaintop removal site in West Virginia. Source: earthjustice.org.

In Boone County, West Virginia, residents learn at a young age to avoid all contact with the tap water flowing from pipes in their homes. Ryan Hall-Massey, a seven-year-old boy, has had half of his teeth capped to replace enamel decimated from brushing his teeth with it. An 18-year-old neighbor fared even worse: he has only one tooth remaining. Ryan’s brother is covered with painful lesions on his arms, legs and chest from bathing in the water. In a span of 10 houses in his neighborhood, six people have had brain tumors. 30 percent of the area residents have had their gallbladders removed.

Boone County residents noticed changes in their water right about when nearby coal companies began to inject toxic slurry into abandoned underground mine shafts. When EPA tests found that their wells had arsenic, barium, lead, and manganese well over the healthy rates, nobody was surprised.

Boone County, West Virginia is not an isolated case. Rather, it is emblematic of an entire region — home to 25 million people — that has suffered at the hands of an oppressive fossil fuel industry that prioritizes short-term profits over long-term rights to existence.

Mountaintop removal (MTR) is a form of surface coal mining primarily used in the Appalachian mountains. The process of MTR involves clearcutting — and often burning — forests, and using explosives and heavy machinery to detonate hundreds of feet of rock from mountaintops, exposing coal layers that are inaccessible via other mining techniques.

“The problem is that for every about a meter of coal, you have about 99 meters of rock that you have to put somewhere during this process. And when you’re in a landscape like Appalachia, the place that most of that rock ends up being put is in river valleys,” said Duke biologist Emily Bernhardt, who co-authored a report about the devastating impact MTR can have on the health of rivers.

Standing atop a MTR site in southern West Virginia last October, an Appalachia native explained it to me as such: “If fracking and traditional mining are drawing blood or removing organs from a mountain, mountaintop removal is crushing its bones.”

For this reason, MTR — often called “strip mining on steroids” — is regarded as the most destructive form of coal mining.

More than 500 mountaintops have already been destroyed, more than one million acres of forest have been clearcut, and over a thousand miles of valley streams have been buried under tons of rubble, polluting drinking water and threatening the health and safety of the region’s inhabitants.

Once exposed to oxygen and rain, the newly uncovered rocks and soil begin to leach long-sequestered metals and chemicals. As a result, the water emerging from the base of these valleys is often contaminated by chemicals, which can spread to groundwater, the source of most household tap water. MTR operations began in the 1970s, but did not take off until the ’90s, ironically as a result of Clean Air Act amendments made to curtail acid rain. Because acid rain results in part from anthropogenic emissions of sulfur, in 1990, the EPA amended the Clean Air Act to limit sulfur emissions. One way to reduce acid rain is to use coal with a lower sulfur content. Coal buried deep in the Appalachian mountains is naturally lower in sulfur than that of Western coalfields, which made MTR an attractive alternative to mining.

Justified by research highlighting the adverse effects of air pollution, the Clean Air Act seeks to mitigate the health impacts of burning coal, but neglects to address the implications of mining it. In effect, by regulating coal production on a national level, the Clean Air Act exacerbated environmental injustice in the nation’s mining capital: central Appalachia.

A 2017 mountaintop removal explosion in West Virginia. Source: huffpost.com.

Economic Impacts

MTR perpetuates poverty and leads to mass migration out of Appalachian cities. Most central Appalachian towns have seen gradual population decline since the 1950s. Economic studies in West Virginia and Kentucky have shown that MTR costs the states more revenue than it produces. Compared to traditional mining, MTR is not only more expensive, but is highly mechanized and employs fewer people — heavy machines do most of the clear-cutting, excavating, loading, and bulldozing of rubble. Areas in Central Appalachia with the highest MTR rates also have the highest unemployment rates and lowest income levels in the region.

As former Senator Robert Byrd put it in 2009: “The Central Appalachian coal seams that remain to be mined are becoming thinner and more costly to mine. Mountaintop removal mining, a declining national demand for energy, rising mining costs and erratic spot market prices all add up to fewer jobs in the coal fields.”

Coal companies claim that MTR flattens space for future development, but only 3 percent of former mine sites have been developed. The major developments on MTR sites across Appalachia have been maximum-security federal prisons, which exposes inmates to all of MTR’s adverse health impacts, like air and water pollution. Federal prisons are not the sort of meaningful employment opportunities that will stimulate local economies and bring large swaths of Appalachia out of poverty.

MTR eliminates the potential for development based on ecotourism and sustainable forest products. The environmental degradation of MTR makes the land unattractive for future alternative economic development. One study found that, contrary to pro-MTR arguments, MTR did not positively contribute to employment in surrounding areas; in fact, MTR counties had lower income levels and higher unemployment rates than non-MTR regions.

“Blowing up mountains, deforesting large tracts of land, polluting streams, destroying roads from all the trucks going by, coating the landscape in dust, making people sick — what other employers are going to move into that area?” said Michael Hendryx, a Mountaintop Removal researcher at Indiana University. “If you aren’t lucky enough to have one of those jobs, you’ve probably got nothing, you’ve got maybe a part-time job at the Dollar Store. Because there aren’t other opportunities, the economic base has been destroyed.”

Contaminated water near an MTR site in Morgantown, West Virginia. Source: MountaineerNewsService.com.

Water contamination

Perhaps the most egregious impact of MTR on these montane communities is water contamination, which makes itself felt through an array of peculiar health impacts in neighboring communities. Post-MTR, toxic slurry has leached arsenic, chromium, mercury, and lead into groundwater, which has led to elevated rates of these chemicals in groundwater and in residents’ private wells.

Mountaintop removal “valley fills” are responsible for burying more than 2,000 miles of vital Appalachian headwater streams, and poisoning many more. In the words of U.S. District Judge Charles H. Haden II: “If there is any life form that cannot acclimate to life deep in a rubble pile, it is eliminated. No effect on related environmental values is more adverse than obliteration. Under a valley fill, the water quantity of the stream becomes zero. Because there is no stream, there is no water quality.”

Indeed, in large swaths of Eastern Kentucky and Southern West Virginia, the dearth of clean, safe drinking water is a regular fact of life. In West Virginia, a boil-water notice is posted whenever a system’s water quality is compromised by factors like chemical contamination, line breaks that lead to sediment build-up, or inadequate disinfection. Boil-water notices urge residents to boil water coming from their household pipes before using it, or avoid using it until further notice. From 2013 to 2018, West Virginia counties posted more than 7,000 boil-water notices, many of which lasted months, and even years. In O’Toole — a small town in the heart of coalfield country — residents were on a continuous boil-water notice for more than 17 years.

Residents of these communities recount bizarre experiences reminiscent of horror movies, such as Fanta orange-colored water flowing from sinks, children emerging from baths covered in bleeding sores, and sudden, inexplicable cases of incontinence.

For months on end, Appalachians are denied the comfort of showering and bathing in their homes; they collect rainwater in buckets; and must buy bottled water or drive to natural springs in search of potable water. As contamination takes its toll across the state, many counties fall short of federal water quality standards. One 2019 study found that more than 65 percent of West Virginia counties consistently rank among the top third in the nation for violations of the Safe Drinking Water Act, a federal law that protects the quality of drinking water. In some wells, manganese concentrations reached 4,063 parts per billion (the EPA recommends that manganese in drinking water not exceed 50 parts per billion).

A map depicting the correlation between lung cancer deaths and MTR mine sites in Appalachia. Source: appvoices.org.

Health impacts

The health impacts of MTR are well-documented. Over the last decade, more than two dozen peer-reviewed studies have found correlations between mountaintop removal coal mining and increased rates of cancer, heart and respiratory diseases, and other negative health outcomes. Research shows that MTR-related toxins found in water can jeopardize human health, even when the water is not directly consumed, but merely used for activities like bathing, brushing teeth, and washing clothes and dishes.

In 2016, the Obama Administration authorized a National Academy of Sciences study into the health effects of mountaintop removal mining, but the Trump administration cancelled the study without explanation in mid-2017. Despite a lack of federal funding for MTR research, university researchers have produced an abundance of robust studies demonstrating the deleterious effects of MTR.

One study — which examined nearly 2 million live birth records in central Appalachia over a period of 7 years — found that communities near MTR sites had higher rates of six out of seven types of birth defects, and residents in closer proximity to MTR sites saw higher rates of birth defects. Another concluded that, since the passage of the Clean Air Act, MTR regions have seen a disproportionate increase in mortality rates related to respiratory cancer, respiratory disease, and other respiratory illnesses.

In a particularly groundbreaking study from Michael Hendryx’s team at Indiana University, researchers found that ecological impairment of stream ecosystems is directly correlated with human cancer mortality rates in surrounding areas.