Environment: The Price of Strip Mining

• Share

The bleakest landscape in the U.S. can be found where miners have torn away the earth's surface to get at coal deposits. Huge piles of gray debris, aptly called "orphan soil banks," stand like gravestones over land so scarred and acidic that only rodents can live there. The sight is not rare. Using dynamite, bulldozers, great augers and earth movers, working on the surface rather than below ground, strip miners now produce 37% of the nation's annual coal output. They have already ripped up more than 1,800,000 acres. By 1980, if present trends continue, an area roughly the size of Connecticut will have been blasted, gouged, scraped and quarried for coal. After such mining, the land is usually abandoned.

In the ravaged hills of Appalachia, long a focus of conservationists' outrage, surprising steps are being taken to reform surface mining practices. Last week, West Virginia's legislators took into conference committee a bill, passed by the Senate and weakened by the House, that would ban strip mining in 36 still unspoiled counties for one year and limit its growth elsewhere in the state. The battle started last December, when State Secretary John D. Rockefeller IV promoted a bill to abolish surface mining "completely and forever." He was supported by well-organized citizens' groups and the state's underground miners, who want to keep their jobs. But leaders of the United Mine Workers and the coal industry raised key objections. For one, strip mining is more than twice as productive per man day as deep mining. For another, it is safer; about 3,000 of the U.S.'s 104,500 underground coal miners have "black lung" disease, and another 200 die each year in roof falls and related accidents. Whatever the controversial bill's fate, observers were amazed that it got as far as it did.

TVA's Role. In another attack on stripping, three national conservation groups recently filed suit in a federal district court against the Tennessee Valley Authority, the nation's largest purchaser of strip-mined coal and producer of electricity. The Sierra Club, National Resources Defense Council and Environmental Defense Fund seek to void $101 million worth of TVA's contracts for strip-mined coal and to enjoin further purchases. The litigants argue that TVA failed to comply with the Environmental Protection Act's requirement that federal agencies file "impact statements"—in this case, detailing the environmental effects of strip mining. TVA has not yet answered the charges.

The environmentalists designed the suit to force TVA—whose charter includes conservation—to use its influence as a major coal buyer to control the surface miners' practices. The suit names the Kentucky Oak Mining Co. as TVA's principal supplier in eastern Kentucky. Although state reclamation officials have praised Kentucky Oak's efforts to plant apple and peach trees on stripped land and its experiments with terracing, successful reclamation is extremely difficult on the steep slopes. Indeed, residents have few kind words for the company. "They've destroyed the mountains," says Paul Ashley, a leading local opponent of surface mining. "They've destroyed the timber. They've destroyed the streams, and their coal trucks have destroyed our roads."