The Price of Strip Mining

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."

The U.S. Interior Department has estimated that to repair damage caused by strip mining in Appalachia would cost at least $250 million of taxpayers' money. About 10,500 miles of once-clear Appalachian streams are contaminated by acids, sediments and metals draining from exposed coal beds. Even worse in the residents' eyes are the landslides of debris from "contour" strip mines, which encircle mountains.

Dumped over deep cuts high in the mountains, the "overburden" piles up --until the rains come. Then the mud and boulders roar downhill, snapping big trees like toothpicks and tumbling onto farms, gardens and homes in the hollows below. "I just dread the day," says Alice Slone, principal of a school in Cordia, Ky., "when I'll pick up the phone and find one of the children has been buried in a strip mine slide."

Ravenous Machines. The effects of strip mining are not confined to the hidden valleys of Appalachia. The flatter the land over coal deposits, the more easily surface miners can deploy their fantastic King Kong technology. Some new power shovels can scoop up 200 tons in a single bite, then take another gulp a minute later. Even with such ravenous machines working round the clock, all 52 motors screaming, the coal will not run out for centuries. Only 4.5 billion of the nation's 108 billion tons of strippable coal have been touched so far.

The great machines are now crawling over new fields in Arizona and North Dakota, gouging up the mineral mainly to fuel new power generating plants. Reclamation efforts are officially described as "behind schedule." More huge reserves will be tapped in Montana, Utah and Wyoming. Even the landowners who stand to gain the most from sale of their property fear the result: 42,000 sq. mi. of land--an area larger than Ohio--might be turned into a sterile wasteland.

Nixon's Way. What can be done? West Virginia Congressman Ken Hechler has proposed federal legislation to outlaw strip mining entirely. Though his bill carries the names of 35 co-sponsors from 16 states, no one expects Congress to pass it. Until other safe energy sources are developed, the nation's power plants demand the cheap coal that stripping can provide. Other critics urge that mined-out areas become garbage dumps for nearby cities which have a pressing need for disposal grounds. The rationale is that decomposing organic matter would eventually enrich the sour earth.

The most likely answer is new legislation to enforce reclamation. Some environmentalists point to laws in parts of Europe that make strip miners restore the land to the condition in which they found it--with rocks and subsoil below and topsoil above, all limed, re-seeded and fertilized. Such procedures in the U.S. would cost more per acre (at least $2,000) than an acre of prime mining land. Even so, President Nixon has already asked Congress to pass a bill that would at least make a dent in the problem--and consumers' pocketbooks. It would impose federal standards on states that refused to draw up adequate strip mining laws in two years. The regulations would be designed to "prevent or substantially reduce" water pollution, landslides, fires and "hazards to public health and safety." The cost of protecting the environment around strip mines would be passed on to coal consumers. But given the alternative of land ruined for all uses for decades, the price does not seem too high.

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