Shocking, huh? Study Shows Strip-mined Regions Of Appalachia More Vulnerable To Flash Floods

[hatrack]

EDIT

With the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers forecasting more rain and significantly increased stream flows due to climate change in a region that includes the coalfields of eastern Kentucky and West Virginia, this kind of life-and-death drama on landscapes heavily strip-mined for coal could happen more frequently in the coming years. Heavier rainfall could also mean more polluted water washing from coal mines, environmental experts say, damaging streams and aquatic life already marred by mining.

A new analysis of satellite imagery conducted for InsideClimate News by two Duke University scientists shows how the risks related to strip mining and climate change are spread broadly across the region. It found that a total of 1,400 square miles of Appalachia within the Ohio River basin has been scarred by strip mining, with the tops and sides of mountains blasted away and steep mountains valleys filled with so-called "waste rock."

The area with the largest extent of strip-mining damage in the entire Ohio River basin—almost 500 square miles in the Big Sandy watershed, including Pigeon Creek—is also the most threatened by extreme weather related to climate change, according to the new analysis. Straddling the state line between West Virginia and Kentucky, the Big Sandy watershed could see up to a 25 percent increase in stream flow by 2040 and 35 percent by the end of the century from climate change alone, according to the Army Corps, making hazardous flooding conditions even worse.

The other eight watersheds in the analysis, containing more than 900 square miles of mining-altered landscapes, could see stream flow increases of up to 15 percent by 2040, and one could be as high as 25 percent by then. Six of those watersheds could see increases up to 25 percent by the end of the century, the new analysis shows. The findings suggest that long after the coal mining stops, its legacy of mining could continue to exact a price on residents who live downstream from the hundreds of mountains that have been leveled in Appalachia to produce electricity.

EDIT

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/21112019/appalachia-mountains-flood-risk-climate-change-coal-mining-west-virginia-extreme-rainfall-runoff-analysis

[Newest Reality]

1. Well, golly,

It's not like everything and everyone on this planet is somehow interdependent, right?

I mean, isn't it obvious that we all live in hermetically-sealed bubbles and our egos could even survive in space and withstand it because we really don't need anything else. That's so obvious. Of course, everything we do has no relationship or bearing to anything else and the outcomes are only relevant if and when we say they are and to a very small degree.

We Americans are rugged individualists, self-made and doing it on our own because, ah, somebody, (God?) said so!

Silly things like the butterfly effect are just nonsense and the idea of the potentially cascading effects of a simple act or motion are totally preposterous, like the myth of a little snowball growing gigantic and destructive as it rolls down a mountainside. Phooey!

[eppur_se_muova]

2. No one could have predicted ... nt