Future Grows More Hazy For Mountaintop Mining

EPA's Fluctuating Messages Concern W.Va. Residents

ETHEL, W.Va. -- In one of the deepest, steepest corners of Appalachia, where the most important industry is shearing mountains down to flat-top stumps, everybody wants the same answer.

What did Washington just do?

About two weeks ago, the Environmental Protection Agency seemed poised to crack down on the "mountaintop" coal mines that are common in this region, which industry officials say would threaten thousands of jobs.

The EPA said it had "significant concerns" about the mines -- in which peaks are legally blasted off to get at coal seams inside -- because neighboring streams are buried under displaced rock.

But later that day, the EPA suddenly seemed to play down its own worries, saying it thought the bulk of the projects would "not raise environmental concerns."

The episode has been seen as an early unsteady attempt by a White House with environmental ambitions to confront one of its most vexing problems: polluting, carbon-heavy, economically vital coal.

This week, EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson -- making her first public comments about the letters -- said her agency did not intend to send a mixed message.

She said that the EPA was not trying to stop all mountaintop removal but that it "is going to do its job" in checking 150 to 200 projects for environmental impact.

"This was not about making any kind of value judgment on a practice of mining," Jackson said in an interview.

"This is about science. And what the law tells us to do is review these permits."

But here in southern West Virginia, the EPA's moves have left a powerful sense of uncertainty about the future of mountaintop mining.

People also see this issue as a microcosm of the nation's ambivalence about coal.

"We don't have a clue" what the federal government is planning, said Roger Horton, a truck driver at a West Virginia mine who heads the group Citizens for Coal.

"We want clarity. To do this, to me, is inhumane."

As Washington has become more focused on climate change, coal has become something like the new tobacco: publicly reviled, at least by some, but still deeply embedded in the economy.

Coal produces dirty water when it is mined and greenhouse gases when it is burned, but it also accounts for about half of U.S. electric power, and coal mining provides about 82,000 jobs.

What happens here, in the heart of mountaintop-mining country, might be considered coal's unfiltered version.

"You know 'Almost heaven, West Virginia'? Well, now it's 'Almost level, West Virginia,' " said Teresa Perdue, 50, a resident of Ashford, W.Va., who has spoken out against mountaintop removal.

Perdue was looking down at a vista that once included a rounded mountain and a valley, Bull Creek Hollow.

But the peak was blasted and scooped away by heavy machinery to get at thin seams of coal near the surface. Excess rock was dumped into the valley. The resulting landscape was flatter and browner, with plenty of bare rock.

"Who said it's okay to bury streams, it's okay to cut the tops off mountains to get coal?" Perdue said.

She still takes senior photos for local high-schoolers there, but now she has to crop the photos tighter: The background has an unnatural amount of sky, at least for West Virginia.

Some environmentalists think the science is overwhelming that mountaintop mining is harmful.

Pro-coal people think the economy trumps everything: "There's nothing to replace [coal] right now," said Jim Taylor, a 73-year-old with long, white George Jones sideburns who manages a hydraulic and machine repair shop in Logan, W.Va.

Sitting in front of a former service station in Blair, W.Va., Carlos Gore, 57, a mountaintop mining opponent, said previous experience shows that mining companies usually win: "They take the rules, and they bend it and twist it like a pig's tail."

Mountaintop mining is also called "mountaintop removal," although in most cases, rock is piled up to re-create the mountain's contours and replanted with grass and trees. The practice is centered in eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia, although there are some mines in Tennessee, southeast Ohio and southwest Virginia.

At the EPA's last count, in 2001, the mines' "valley fills" had buried 724 miles of stream valleys, about 1.2 percent of the region's total.

The industry says the mines produce about 10 percent of the country's coal. Last year, a Washington Post analysis found that the area's coal-burning power plants purchased 32 percent of their fuel from surface mines in this region, which often involve mountaintop mining.

Lately, mountaintop mining's opponents had been on a losing streak.

In December, the Bush administration approved a rule that environmentalists said would make it easier to dump waste rock near streams. And in February, a U.S. appeals court rejected environmental groups' challenges to certain mining permits.

Then, on March 24, EPA officials released two letters that had been sent to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which handles permits for valley fills. The letters said that two mines -- one here near Ethel and the other in Pike County, Ky. -- could harm aquatic life in the buried valleys and downstream. It sent three more letters this week, expressing concerns about valley fills at a mine in southwest Virginia and two in West Virginia.

To the coal-industry, it looked like a torpedo, aimed at mountaintop mining.

"EPA: End Production in America," said Chris Hamilton, a vice president at the West Virginia Coal Association.

He said it is wrong that in a worldwide economic crisis, "here we're almost trying to find a way to force these, you know, mining jobs to go elsewhere."

In her interview with The Post, Jackson said that the EPA had just begun to review these permit applications and that although "the sense right now is that the vast majority of them are not significant" concerns, she could not predict the final outcome.

She said that the White House Council on Environmental Quality has convened officials from the EPA, the Army Corps of Engineers and other federal agencies to talk about the future of mountaintop mining more generally.

In Logan County, W.Va., County Commission President Art Kirkendoll said he was worried that the EPA will eventually turn against coal mining in general, which would remove his area's economic bedrock. He said each mining job supports six or seven jobs in other sectors -- and provides another valuable service in a highly vertical area.

"We need this flat land" to build new factories and stores on, Kirkendoll said. "For our county, it's everything."

A few miles away, though, the town of Ethel -- nearest the mine that the EPA singled out -- shows that, although coal mines have long made this area work, they have never made it rich. (uranium mining will be the same, only the uranium corp will get rich, the rest of us will live on worthless land!)

Ethel is a string of mobile homes along a narrow valley floor, with the most prominent building a decades-dead Methodist church, with tablecloths still on the tables and a loaf of bread turning to dust in a dark hall.

Across the street, a rock the diameter of a large pizza and six inches thick slammed into 81-year-old Madelena Hanshaw's bedroom while she slept. (remember, the uranium corp will be blowing up Coles Hill)

Hanshaw thought it might have been dislodged from a vast mining site just over the next hill.

"I don't sleep good of a night. I just take pills," Hanshaw said. "I moved into the living room. I sleep there now."