Preserving Appalachia

By Margo Pierce 

With Matt Hepler’s help, Appalachians are leading investigations, lawsuits, and economic ventures to reclaim neglected lands and tainted waters. The White House seems determined to get in their way.

When Matt Hepler reached the summit of West Virginia’s Kayford Mountain in 2007, any ideals he held about the Appalachian Mountains were shattered. A native Virginian, he grew up exploring the cool rivers and peaks that dot the Shenandoah Valley. But from the top of Kayford, the formerly lush panorama was unrecognizable. There were no idyllic green hills left for him to admire; they had been blasted away by decades of mountaintop removal and mining. All Hepler could find were barren rock and debris—the scars of coal seams being stripped away.

Since the 1960s, 500 peaks like Kayford have been razed and leveled across West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. An analysis from 2016 shows that the region is now 40 percent flatter, making it more vulnerable to erosion and long-term water pollution. As coal companies ravage the mountains, they rob residents like Hepler of an important piece of their identity.

“Mountains matter to people because they’re very majestic,” Hepler says. “The first time they see [the mining], there’s this visual impact that’s very emotional.” The view of the leveled landscape from Kayford forced Hepler to reorient his entire life. He joined the ranks of the anti-coal movement as an activist and later started working for Appalachian Voices, a sustainability group that fights fossil-fuel exploitation in the Southeast. There, he studies waterways for signs of contamination left behind by coal mining and advocates for state and federal policies that are firmly backed by science.

In his work, Hepler has seen how soils and minerals displaced by explosives settle across the landscape, burying or polluting springs and streams. In 2011, an EPA study showed that water-quality levels in streams near central Appalachian coalfields are “acutely lethal” to macroinvertebrates, fish, and birds. Yet impacts to human health aren’t well known. Last year, that looked like it would change after the U.S. Department of Interior's Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE) funded a $1 million study on cancer and birth-defect rates in mining communities at the request of West Virginia’s environment and health departments. But then, last month, OSMRE issued a "cease all work" order and put the grant up for review.

Cuts of this magnitude would force OSMRE to roll back state grants, technology programs, and restoration plans, leading to reduced monitoring and fewer cleanups overall.

The cancellation of the study is just one example of how Trump’s campaign promise to help Appalachians by bringing back jobs is undercut by harmful policies and decisions for their communities. In February, Congress and the President revoked the Stream Protection Rule, which went into effect a month earlier and updated 33-year-old regulations on coal pollution to protect 6,000 miles of streams and 52,000 acres of forest, largely in Appalachia. Additionally, his 2018 proposed budget would slash 45 percent of funding for OSMRE, the agency responsible for overseeing the million-plus coal-mined acres in Appalachia, along with active and abandoned mines nationwide. Its experts and regulations force companies to comply with environmental laws and seek justice for communities that have suffered from chemical spills and other industry-related damage. Cuts of this magnitude would force OSMRE to roll back state grants, technology programs, and restoration plans, leading to reduced monitoring and fewer cleanups overall.

These new efforts add to a history of neglect, and some residents have been fighting back. Five years ago, the Alliance for Appalachia, an environmental-protection coalition that includes Appalachian Voices and Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards, launched the Appalachian Citizen Enforcement Project (ACE), which gives residents training and equipment to test for pollution in local creeks, streams, and other water bodies. Hepler himself has coached about a dozen volunteers to gather baseline conductivity data near coalfields; the more electricity the water transmits, the more likely it’s contaminated.

The result is a small but determined army of amateur chemists. In 2011, after ACE Project volunteers found unsafe levels of selenium in a stream near the Kelly Branch Surface Mine in Wise County, Virginia, they filed a Citizen’s Request for an Inspection with OSMRE. OSMRE forced the mine owners to do a follow-up test, and it confirmed the initial reports. Still, the community’s requests for remediation were ignored, so Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards and other groups filed a lawsuit against the coal company, A&G Coal.

If they wanted, coal companies could easily afford to clean up mining sites with the billions they extract from the region each year. West Virginia alone produced 95.6 million short tons of coal in 2015, worth $6.7 billion.

After three years in court, A&G Coal agreed to pay $300,000—split between clean-up efforts, government fines, and the alliance's legal fees—and install selenium-control technology in the Kelly Branch mine.

Victories like these entice coal companies to find creative ways to avoid legal responsibility, Hepler says. Following the case in Wise County, the industry lobbied the state to require a fish-tissue exam to prove stream contamination instead of a standard water test. With its complicated sampling process and associated lab and gear costs (between $5,000 and $10,000), the new method would effectively eliminate ACE Project groundwork and make monitoring impossible in waterways too shallow to support fish. The decision is still pending.

If they wanted, coal companies could easily afford to clean up mining sites with the billions they extract from the region each year. West Virginia alone produced 95.6 million short tons of coal in 2015, worth $6.7 billion. But companies prefer to let the acres sit, where they continue to erode and pollute waterways. “Many of the mines around Inman, Virginia, where I live, are now idle, some for close to five years,” Hepler says. “You don’t know how good the reclamations are going to be.” Or whether they’ll occur at all.

Unfortunately, Trump’s budget would eliminate programs designed to help communities near abandoned, closed, or idle mines by rebuilding and diversifying their economies. These include the 52-year-old Appalachian Regional Commission, the U.S. Economic Development Administration (the only federal agency focused exclusively on economic development), and a $90 million OSMRE program for states hit hard by coal’s decline. Appalachian communities might have to further rely on grassroots organizations like Hepler’s to help them transition to new economies. He and Appalachian Voices are currently working on a long list of mine-conversion proposals, including a hydroponic fish farm, a whitewater rafting area, a community agricultural site, and a solar facility. It’s a difficult transformation, Hepler admits, but these projects help communities reinvest in themselves while preserving their homes and their mountains.

 Originally published by Audubon: https://www.audubon.org/news/whats-stake#mine-reclamation