Mountaintop Removal Mining

Where strip mining involves clearing away the layer of earth above a seam to access coal deposits, mountaintop removal is strip mining on steroids. It means complete deconstruction of once ecologically diverse and verdant mountains, the suffocation of biologically rich headwater streams and the displacement of generations-old communities.

In central Appalachia, hills are steep and valleys narrow. Coal seams are layered throughout these mountains much like the frosting in a multi-tiered layer cake, proving often difficult to deep mine. Until the mid-1980’s miners used traditional deep mining to remove the thicker seams of coal that honeycombed the steep mountains and traditional surface mining to expose and remove the outer edges of the thinner seams close to the surface around the sides of the mountains.

Technological advances have hit Appalachia like a sledgehammer. Today, huge mining machines tear away at mountaintops, first blasting apart the uppermost layers of rock, pushing it into valley streams below to expose a seam of coal and then bulldozing the coal into huge trucks to be transported to preparation plants.
The process is repeated over and over again until at last the entire mountain (often 600 – 1,000 feet) has been dismantled, all the coal removed (often 6 to 15 different seams), and the leftover millions of tons of rock and debris that now fill the stream valleys are “sculpted” into short flat or sloped hills.

Over 800 square miles of the most productive and diverse temperate hardwood forests no longer exist. Twelve hundred miles of streams have been buried or otherwise impacted by these operations. Groundwater – perched aquifers that once fed mountain springs and replenished streams in dry times – have been eliminated, ancient mountaintops replaced with rubble and rock that has been put through the giant mix-master of modern day mining, spit out and bulldozed into sterile, manmade moonscapes.

Mountaintop removal mining has already turned hundreds of thousands of acres of Appalachia’s mountains into a barren wasteland. Lives are destroyed as families are uprooted and forced to move, communities disappear and a chain of generations living from the land is broken. No one can question that moving mountains has a certain god-like quality about it. But these arguably amazing engineering feats have consequences of unbelievable proportion.