Mountaintop Removal: Once It's Gone, It Won't Come Back

Tucked away in a small West Virginia town, Kayford Mountain  is now an island in the vast desert that has been created by a process known as mountaintop removal. To put it in layman's terms, a company takes control of an area, clears it of all forests and vegetation, blasts open the top of the mountain, rips the coal out of the earth, dumps the waste from the process into the now empty strips, and bulldozes over it.  The result is a series of dusty, jagged plateaus where a mountain used to be. Mountaintop removal is the poster child for industry taking advantage of the land for its own profit with no regard for the resources or the citizens it affects.

Although this is happening in select mountain areas, the effects of mountaintop removal are widespread.  Towns located near sites must contend with tons of toxic sludge and dust, which settles on homes and washes into the water supply. Blasts from the site endanger not only the lives of workers, but citizens too.  Flooding from a lack of trees and wildlife in the area occurs while air pollution spans the east coast.  Dust and contaminated waste also seep into the headwaters that flow throughout the United States. Even more streams are buried forever along with the waste of the mountains, cutting off water supply for many areas. And once the mountains are gone they will not resurface naturally for thousands of years, if at all.

Three Virginia counties are home to mountaintop removal sites: Lee, Dickenson, and Wise County. Wise County is also welcoming a new coal fired power plant, which will be fed coal from the removal sites. Many grassroots organizations around Virginia have mobilized to stop both the plant and the removal operations that supply it from occurring.  In 2005, The Clean Water Protection Act was introduced in Congress. By mandating that fill material cannot contain waste, the CWPA would essentially ban mountaintop removal.  The bill has resurfaced in the current Congress, and states have begun to fight back too. Georgia and North Carolina (the two largest consumers of coal produced from mountaintop removal mining) have both introduced legislation to ban mountaintop removal.  Many Virginia representatives have thrown their weight behind the CWPA. Although legislators are taking baby steps in the right direction, without the passing of the CWPA it is very unlikely that mountaintop removal will be halted in the near future.