Mountaintop removal threatens communities

On Tuesday, Feb. 23, the UConn Soil and Water Conservation Society presented a talk by David Cooper of Mountain Justice and Laura Steepleton of Climate Ground Zero.

Cooper and Steepleton explained the process of coal mining through mountaintop removal in West Virginia and its consequences for Appalachian communities.

Mountains contain seams of coal, Cooper explained. "You can think about it like the icing in a layer cake," he said.

The traditional method of accessing these seams of coal is underground mining, a dirty, dangerous process in which individual miners work inside the seams to harvest coal. To prevent their work sites from collapsing, underground miners must leave pillars of coal within the seams for support.

Today, coal-mining companies take a more destructive approach to mining these hard-to-reach pockets of coal. Using explosives, they level mountaintops in order to mine the coal from the surface, scooping out coal with giant machines. To illustrate the scale, Cooper showed a picture of an entire high school marching band standing within one machine's enormous claw.

"It takes about 15 to 20 people about a year to take a mountain down," Cooper said. "That's the technology we have now.

"Four people can replace hundreds of [underground] miners," he said.

The extra dirt and rubble gets scooped into natural valleys, flattening the landscape and interfering with natural streams of spring water that serve as drinking water sources.

Cooper said over a thousand miles of streams have been buried by mountaintop removal. "We need this stuff to keep us alive, and we're destroying it with mountaintop removal."

"We're all connected to it because we're all using electricity," he said.

The process of cleaning the coal creates additional waste.  After mining the coal, coal companies wash it with a mixture of water and chemicals.

"The stuff that runs off the coal is this black liquid waste that they have to dispose of
somehow," Cooper said. "So what they do is they build a dam up in the mountains and then they pump the liquid back behind the dam. There are about 600 of these coal slurry impoundments in the mountains of Appalachia and we're very concerned about their safety."

Steepleton, who regularly protests mountaintop removal, spoke about her involvement in community protest movements, invited students to visit West Virginia during spring or summer break. Interested students should go to Mountainjustice.org and climategroundzero.org for more information.

"We take them out a little chunk at a time," Steepleton added.

The UConn Soil and Water Conservation Society meets at 7 p.m. on alternate weeks in the Young building.