As mountaintop mining hearings get under way, WV enviros blast practice, KY expects big crowds

Mountaintop mining meets to draw crowds, conflict

PIKEVILLE, Ky. — Thousands of coal miners fearing the loss of jobs if mountaintop removal mining is curtailed or outlawed crowded public hearings in three states Tuesday on the much-debated practice.

Many in Kentucky wore hardhats and T-shirts proclaiming the merits of coal. Environmentalists who have fought for decades to end the destructive form of mining that blasts away peaks to unearth coal showed up alongside.

In West Virginia, the Sierra Club issued an economic study Tuesday, saying mountaintop mining is too costly to the regions.

“We can have affordable electricity without mountaintop removal, and we can protect our communities, streams, forests and mountains at the same time,” Sierra Club representative Mary Anne Hitt said in a statement.

Many of the 4,500 gathered in the East Kentucky Expo Center in Pikeville, however, showed their disapproval for a move by the administration of President Barack Obama to curb the type of mining. In Charleston, W.Va., an overflow crowd of people clad in coal mining clothes prompted officials to turn away some from a 738-seat auditorium.

Miners and their families were trying to convince the administration to back away from restrictions that would make it more difficult, perhaps impossible, to get the federal permits necessary to blast away mountains.

Miner Junie Halcomb’s T-shirt asked one question about coal: “Can Obama’s America Survive Without It?” Halcomb thinks he answer is no, at least in the impoverished coal mining region of central Appalachia.

“It’s going to put a lot of people out work,” Halcomb said. “We can’t survive without coal money.”

Both sides were drumming up attendance at the Army Corps of Engineers public hearings in West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee and later in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Virginia.

Kentucky State Police from posts in Pikeville, Hazard, Harlan and Ashland assisted local officers in providing security at a sometimes boisterous public hearing at the Expo Center in downtown Pikeville. Pro-mining banners flapped in the breeze outside. One proclaimed: “Coal Feeds My Family.” Another: “Got Electricity? Thank a miner.”

Not all concurred.

David Fields, a retired computer science professor from Richmond, said mountaintop removal is fouling streams and destroying the beauty of the Appalachians. “All of that is going to go by very quickly if something isn’t done,” he said. “It doesn’t take many years to completely undo what Mother Nature has provided us.”

At issue in the public hearings is the regulatory process that coal companies follow to obtain permits to dump rock, soil and debris from the mountaintops into nearby valleys.

Mine operators insist the practice should continue because it supports thousands of jobs and provides inexpensive energy for a broad swath of the eastern U.S.

The Corps is considering banning or suspending a streamlined permitting process in Appalachia.

Either option would force operators to seek permits for individual mines, which is more complicated and time-consuming. Since Obama took office, the Environmental Protection Agency has been scrutinizing individual valley fill permits and recently held up 79 applications for individual licenses for more review.

The actions have created uncertainty for the industry.

“We are very concerned about the continuing lack of direction mine operators are getting” from the Corps and EPA, United Mine Workers President Cecil Roberts said in a statement. The labor union said general counsel Grant Crandall was being sent to Charleston to testify.

U.S. Rep. Nick Rahall, D-West Virginia, said he is pushing the administration to speed up surface mining permits.

The EPA’s power to review the permits for compliance with the Clean Water Act “should be exercised fairly, transparently, and according to current law and regulation,” Rahall said in a statement. “Coal miners want to work and coal operators want to abide by the law, but they need to know the rules by which to operate.”

The environmental group Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, however, contends that federal agencies have been “rubber-stamping the annihilation of Appalachia” by granting permits for coal companies to destroy mountaintops.

“You’re seeing a region that had a mountain profile being turned into something that much more resembles Nebraska or Oklahoma,” said Doug Doerrfeld, a member from Elliottville. “One of the most biodiverse forests in the world is being turned into a barren landscape that can support very little life.”

Mountaintop removal mining supporters see the region’s livelihood at risk.

“I think it’s important to send a message that the local economy is under attack and that coal mining in general is under attack,” said Phil Osborne, spokesman for the group Faces of Coal.

Mountaintop mines in the states where the practice is most used — West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee — produce approximately 130 million tons of coal each year and employ about 14,000 people.

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Associated Press writer Tim Huber reported from West Virginia.