The Bush administration is writing one more sad chapter in the long, tortured history of Appalachia’s coal-rich hills. Last week, the Interior Department’s Office of Surface Mining proposed a revision, amounting to a repeal, of one of the last regulatory protections against an environmentally ruinous mining practice called mountaintop removal.
Mountaintop removal is just what the name suggests: enormous machines scrape away mountain ridges to expose the coal seams. The leftover rock and dirt are then dumped into adjacent valleys and streams. The practice has gone on for years. By one estimate, 1,200 miles of Appalachian streams have been buried this way and hundreds of square miles of forests damaged.
No recent administration, Democrat or Republican, has made a serious effort to end the dumping, largely in deference to the coal industry and the political influence of Robert Byrd, West Virginia’s senior senator. But beginning in the late-1990s, concerned citizens tried to slow things by invoking the so-called stream buffer zone rule, which seeks to protect water quality by prohibiting any mining activity within 100 feet of flowing streams.
With the urging of the coal companies, the Bush administration started looking for creative ways to ensure that this destructive practice could continue. In 2002, for instance, the Environmental Protection Agency found itself inconvenienced by a rule explicitly prohibiting the use of mining waste as “fill” in streams and wetlands for development and other purposes. So the administration simply rewrote the regulations.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/21/opinion/21tue2.html?th&emc=th
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