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Polluting Appalachia’s Streams With Mountaintop Removal Mining Just Got Harder
Polluting Appalachia’s Streams With Mountaintop Removal Mining Just Got Harder
By Ryan Koronowski
This week the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia tossed out a late-2008 Bush Administration decision to scrap a decades-old rule protecting streams from the spoils of mountaintop removal mining. It said the rule violated the Endangered Species Act.
Use of the word “spoil” is not rhetoric here, it is the technical term for the broken rock that coal mining operators create after drilling, blasting, or bulldozing the tops of mountains to get access to the coal underneath. Since the spoil takes up more room when broken up, the companies cannot put it back where it came from, so they dump it elsewhere — often in the tops of valleys, burying streams.
The rule in question, issued in 1983, established a buffer zone around streams to keep toxic coal mining spoil from entering sensitive waterways. In December 2008, the outgoing Bush Administration issued its own “Stream Buffer Zone Rule” that essentially removed those protections. The National Parks Conservation Association challenged the rule, and lawyers from the Southern Environmental Law Center argued the case. The Interior Department and the Environmental Protection Agency are defendants in the case, though they asked the Court to rule against them in a September hearing. The National Mining Association protested the government’s position as an intervening defendant, arguing that the government erred in partially conceding the case.
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Last year, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that EPA had the authority under the Clean Water Act to veto so-called “dredge and fill” permits that allowed mining companies dispose of waste in streams. The decision confirmed EPA’s rejection of a permit for what would have been one of the largest mountaintop removal mines in West Virginia history.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/02/22/3320911/mountaintop-removal-mining-stream-buffer-rule/
By Ryan Koronowski
This week the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia tossed out a late-2008 Bush Administration decision to scrap a decades-old rule protecting streams from the spoils of mountaintop removal mining. It said the rule violated the Endangered Species Act.
Use of the word “spoil” is not rhetoric here, it is the technical term for the broken rock that coal mining operators create after drilling, blasting, or bulldozing the tops of mountains to get access to the coal underneath. Since the spoil takes up more room when broken up, the companies cannot put it back where it came from, so they dump it elsewhere — often in the tops of valleys, burying streams.
The rule in question, issued in 1983, established a buffer zone around streams to keep toxic coal mining spoil from entering sensitive waterways. In December 2008, the outgoing Bush Administration issued its own “Stream Buffer Zone Rule” that essentially removed those protections. The National Parks Conservation Association challenged the rule, and lawyers from the Southern Environmental Law Center argued the case. The Interior Department and the Environmental Protection Agency are defendants in the case, though they asked the Court to rule against them in a September hearing. The National Mining Association protested the government’s position as an intervening defendant, arguing that the government erred in partially conceding the case.
<...>
Last year, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that EPA had the authority under the Clean Water Act to veto so-called “dredge and fill” permits that allowed mining companies dispose of waste in streams. The decision confirmed EPA’s rejection of a permit for what would have been one of the largest mountaintop removal mines in West Virginia history.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/02/22/3320911/mountaintop-removal-mining-stream-buffer-rule/
23 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
for more solar and wind power. What they are doing to the once beautiful Appalachians (yes, even the part that goes through WV 
) is horrible.
