April 3rd, 2010:

Re: New Regulations Will Put an End to Mountaintop Mining | CommonDreams.org, by Suzanne Goldenberg, Published on Friday, April 2, 2010 by The Guardian/UK

The Obama administration effectively called time Thursday on one of the most destructive industries in America, proposing new environmental guidelines for mountaintop mining removal.

Mountain top removal. I’ve blogged this before, here, here, and here – and at other places inside A Second Look and outside as well. There is no bigger legal crime happening on a continual basis in America, except for the sale of cigarettes. Many peaks in the Appalachian Mountains have lost thousands of feet of height, over 2000 creeks and streams are lost from back fill which is sometimes composed of toxic materials, and the reclamation of the land afterwards more often than not concentrates on soil erosion by introducing fast growing, non-native grasses. Trees planted during reclamation often die due to the difficulty establishing a root system. All in all it is a legal raping of our American heritage.

The economics of mountaintop mining removal involve a highly destructive practice of blasting through hundreds of feet of mountaintop to get at thin but valuable seams of coal. The debris is removed to “valley fills”, and nearly 2,000 miles of streams in Appalachia have been buried beneath such fills.

MTR destroys forests – 2,200 square miles of forest by 2012 – and will mine over 1.4 million acres by the end of this year, an area the size of the state of Delaware.

Today’s guidelines mark a gradual tightening of conditions for mountain coal mining. Last week, the EPA took the rare step of vetoing a West Virginia mine that had already been granted a permit.

The EPA said the Spruce Number One mine, which was approved under George Bush administration in 2007, would bury up to seven miles of stream, and that toxic chemicals would hurt aquatic life. If approved, it would have been the largest mine in West Virginia.

The National Mining Association immediately condemned the move, saying it would cost jobs throughout Appalachia.

The Rainforest Action Network said: “The EPA has finally taken a leap to protect America’s mountains and drinking water.”

Jobs lost? Don’t buy into this BS. These mining operations move into a community and only hire a few unskilled laborers. The skilled heavy equipment operator and other skilled positions are imported. They come with the company. The mining companies themselves have turned a once booming jobs creating industry into another Bush-era jobs dumping industry when they switched to Mountain Top Removal. From wiki:

Historically in the U.S. the prevalent method of coal acquisition was underground mining which is very labor-intensive. In MTR, through the use of explosives and large machinery, more than two and a half times as much coal can be extracted per worker per hour than in traditional underground mines,^[16] thus greatly reducing the need for workers. In Kentucky, for example, the number of workers has declined over 60% from 1979 to 2006 (from 47,190 to 17,959 workers)^[17]. The industry overall lost approximately 10,000 jobs from 1990 to 1997, as MTR and other more mechanized underground mining methods became more widely used.^[18] The coal industry asserts that surface mining techniques, such as mountaintop removal, are safer for miners than sending miners underground.^[19]

The mining companies are responsible for the rampant job loss, not regulations.

It is high time that the EPA is doing their job again. They were handicapped by blind ideology for the last decade. Their hands were tied by high-level Bush appointees who denied environmental science and were sworn to a policy of bad governance.

OBTW. these MTR mines are so big they can be seen from space:

The Hobet mine in West Virginia taken by NASA LANDSAT in 1994

The Hobet mine in West Virginia taken by NASA LANDSAT in 2009

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