The coal companies want to extract the coal that’s under the Appalachian Mountains in West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee. Companies have forgone traditional mining techniques in favor of less expensive mountaintop removal. It has become cheaper to blow the tops off of mountains, resulting in millions of tons of rock, dirt and vegetation raining down on the surrounding area.
Entire valleys are blanketed with debris, and whole streams are poisoned. Before companies can blow up the mountain, they need to clear-cut the entire mountainside so it is free of trees and brush. What’s left in the aftermath are large expanses of gray plateaus spotted with dark craters and large black ponds filled with a toxic byproduct called coal slurry.
Billions of tons of coal slurry are stored by the destruction sites in dams within the nearby communities. Large numbers of residents living in close proximity to the dams have suffered ailments such as shortness of breath, asthma, nausea, diarrhea, vomiting and oral blisters. These can be linked to coal dust in the air and high levels of contaminants such as mercury, nickel and cadmium in the drinking water. The long-term implication of what these people are ingesting is fatal.
Despite big coal’s insistence that their services provide jobs and boost the local economy, the opposite is true. It takes few people to run a mountaintop removal operation, with giant machines doing most of the labor. Although coal production has increased by more than 30 percent in the past two decades, mining jobs have dropped by a similar amount. The property value of areas in Appalachia has taken a huge hit. It’s hard to sell your home when there are constant blasts raining down rubble, simultaneously poisoning your air and water. These communities have become impoverished because their land is worthless, and other businesses won’t invest anywhere near there.
Naturally, residents in these areas have been fighting the coal companies tooth and nail but with little luck. Not only does big coal have more resources at its disposal, but the government hasn’t intervened. In fact, the very agencies that are supposed to be regulating these corporations are disregarding the law and in some cases, changing it to convenience big coal. The grossest example was when Steven Griles, the former deputy secretary of the Interior Department, had the Clean Water Act changed to redefine all waste from mountaintop removal that goes into streams, calling it harmless “fill material.” Would it surprise you that Griles was a former coal lobbyist?
The people of Appalachia have worked in the coal mines for decades. They’ve been the lifeblood of this country, and the reason our energy is cheap. Now they’re being exploited for profit. This is the economic argument that says we should burn coal rather than use cleaner and more socially just alternatives, which would actually be the economic shot in the arm these people need. So much attention is focused on the pollution from burning coal that it’s too easy for the casualties of its extraction to be swept under the rug. As easy as it would be to place the blame squarely on big coal and government negligence, we need to hold the mirror up. We pay for that coal in Maryland and Washington. Big coal has sold us its soul, and it’s time to find the receipt and return it.
Matt Dernoga is a junior government and politics major. He can be reached at mdernoga@umd.edu.
