Stripping Mountains to Power D.C.

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Coal Does More Than Keep the Lights On

Some communities in West Virginia say Washingtonians are unaware of the true cost of "mountaintop" mining.

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Coal companies say these methods provide valuable jobs. The companies can extract coal efficiently from places where tunneling would not work, such as where the rock is too weak to hold up a roof.

"There's one big reason you mountaintop mine. That's where the good Lord put the coal," said Bill Raney, president of the West Virginia Coal Association. He said that about 70 percent of the coal from surface mines in this part of Appalachia originates at mountaintop mines.

The Washington region does not account for all the coal mined here: The rest of the world is demanding more, and paying more for it.

"Any coal coming from central Appalachian strip mines is almost certainly coming from mountaintop-removal-type mines . . . that bury streams and that permanently destroy, you know, many, many miles of forest," said Joe Lovett, executive director of the Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment, an environmental group in West Virginia.

The story of mountaintop mining here begins with the mountains themselves: They have been carved over 140 million years, making them older than the Himalayas but only a fraction of their size. Inside, there are shiny, uneven layers of bituminous coal, like icing in a layer cake somebody dropped.

Starting in earnest in the 1980s, mining companies began extracting the region's coal by removing the mountains on top of it. At these sites, the top 100 feet or more of a ridgeline is shaved of its trees, blasted with explosives and then scraped away by shoveling machines the size of small office buildings.

At some sites, the companies try to rebuild the silhouette of the old mountain. At others, often called "mountaintop removal" sites, they leave it roughly flat. At both kinds, companies often perform "valley fills," in which tons of excess rock and dirt are dumped into nearby stream valleys.

In all, the federal government has said, these mines have affected, or could affect by 2012, about 816,000 acres. That is an area 20 times the size of the District, scattered in patches across Appalachia.

Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency said they have pushed the coal companies to make mines smaller as well as to rebuild and reseed more mountains. They said, however, that the coal inside the mountains -- known for producing less-harmful emissions -- is too valuable to stop the practices.

"You've got a decision that's got to be made, on a daily basis, about the energy needs of this country," said Greg Peck of the EPA's Office of Water.

But not everybody looks at these mines as a divine gift.

"It just doesn't seem real because of the way it used to be," said Lucille Miller, looking out at the gravelly mesa that used to be Sugar Tree Mountain. In the 1960s, Miller said, she would walk on the hill and describe the trees and flowers to her father, who was blinded in a mining accident.