Gibson’s water table dropped steadily until 2001, when it disappeared altogether. Today Kayford Mountain has become the iconic face of mountaintop removal mining; Gibson regularly brings groups up to see firsthand what’s at stake.
“It amazes me how they can talk about clean coal technology and have an extraction process like this,” said Chuck Nelson, a friend and miner who spent 30 years running coal carts underground before he spoke up against mountaintop removal’s destruction and lost his job.
He’s distressed by the vast scars mountaintop mining leaves in the rugged hills. “What they’re destroying can never be fixed. What they’re creating is worthless.”
What they’re creating lies up a rutted road, just beyond a rusty, padlocked pipe blocking the path.
Gibson calls it “Hell’s Gate.”
“Over here you have life,” he said before lifting a leg to trespass. “Over there you have death.”
He walks another 100 yards and stops. The point where Gibson stands tops out at 2,400 feet above sea level. The gash below stretches horizon to horizon: Bare rock and earth, where 150-ton dump trucks look like Matchbox toys and big dozers churn the landscape.
That chasm, he says, was once the area’s high point, 3,100 feet high. Now it’s some 800 feet below him.
“The costs to reclaim this is going out to the people of America,” Gibson said.
Stewardship role
An hour’s drive to the east, Andrew Jordon stands on the porch of a hunting shack he had built for his employees and that looks out over a scene of similar desolation.
Except instead of Hell he sees heaven.
Jordon runs a small mining company that is chewing away at 400 acres of the same coal-rich terrain Gibson is trying to keep.
Jordon is the ninth generation of his family to live in that valley. The land he’s leasing is owned by the family of a friend and former high school football teammate. His general manager, Rocky Hackworth, is another high school classmate.
“I hunt in these hollows,” Jordon said. “To me, it’s very important to do it right. Where we’re standing today is an area we took down, took the coal out, and put it back to about where it was.”
Jordon has been mining for 20 years, has 6,000 acres under lease and has mined and reclaimed 2,200.
For every ton of coal he ships out of his mine, he has to move 28 tons of overburden, or rock. He figures he’s pulled 1.5 million tons of coal out so far and has another 6 million tons to go.
Every operation he’s started has run into some sort of inherited environmental contamination: a river running at pH 2 – fatal to aquatic critters – that Jordon restored to a more natural pH 6. Or a previously botched restoration that his crew reshaped and reforested with black cherry, sugar maple, oak and white ash.
Such work tends to get dropped from press coverage of mountaintop removal, advocates note. Confronting the same group of journalists that had crossed Hell’s Gate with Gibson, Coal Association President Bill Raney had to vent a bit of steam: “You say that mining’s not protecting the resources,” he said. “It drives me nuts when y’all use that same paragraph. It’s absolutely meaningless in terms of what we do out here.”
Men like Jordon and Hackworth move the earth, mine the coal, reshape the hills and reforest them. Or they leave a patch of level ground for a school, a ballpark, a Wal-Mart – no small asset for a state with preciously few flat spots.
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23 Comments
Add CommentI live in West Virginia and I can tell you that mountain top removal is a blight on our state. Governor Manchin is planning to build a 3 billion dollar coal to liquid plant and this is going to greatly increase mountain top removal. I wish there was some way Governor Manchin could be charged and convicted with a crime against nature. This man is very distructive.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWho gives them the right to rape the land? The government? Not only are they introducing invasive species, which could cause further destruction of life on the land, but are cutting age old trees to put in babies. This offsets the amount of CO2 that the plants absorb, and put back into the ground. Not only does the coal produce CO2 when burned, but mining the ground releases all of the CO2 stored underground by those age old trees.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy must we be looking to destructive mining to get cheap fuel? When there are other greener, safer ways of using that land to generate power.
Look who benifits from cheap coal...large factories. They burn massive amounts of coal because it is cheap. This inexpensive fuel doesn't make it to people's homes or public places, it makes it's way into the pockets of business men, providing cheap, DIRTY power so the product they make can be a few cents cheaper, and the CEO can have a jet.
For me, I would rather pay a few cents more for the product, have that land in tact (useful to make other $$ from...syrup, the value of the wood, and so on...).
Hell, it's worth it to me to be taxed to keep that land secure!
It will be interesting to see how forest root systems develop on this back-filled land. Here in Normandy, fir trees growing on very deeply disturbed soils grew far taller than adjacent trees on undisturbed soil. Soils in Oregon were reputed to be very deep, thereby explaining the great height achieved by Sequoias.....
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOur governor in Kentucky has coal-to-liquids in our plans as well.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo, a volcano can blow the hell out of a mountain top and that's the nobility of nature, but take a mountain top off to improve the human condition and that's a horrible blight on the land.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy don't you guys just come out of the closet and build and altar to your nature goddess.
I live in Alberta, Canada where the gigantic Athabasca Tar (OIL) Sands extraction takes place which at first sight is similar to what is happening in West Virginia with the specific difference which contrary to the disaster of West Virginia, the oil sands extraction facilities are required after oil containing sands removal to restore the soil and contour conditions of the land and replant with native flora. There are huge attacks on the oil sands whilst this article is one of the first I have read regarding the much more irreversible destruction of West Virginia which has been going on a long time. I had an uncle who had invested many years ago in a coal site in W.V. and at the end of the coal operation the EPA required that the land be returned to its contour. It seemed that he and others had their way and this was and is not being done. When you hear about the Oil Sands operations think about the fact that the land is not destroyed but is recycled BACK to bushland after extraction unlike W.V.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thislet's blow up whatever YOU live next to
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisthe land can be returned to fertile land and if not required it should be. and for you people whining about it being in your back yard, since this nation is now almost entirely sociolist "the good of the many outweighs the good of the few"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisindeed it should be required, and I believe it is somewhat, but is it regulated? Who is making sure that it is done correctly.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisand as far as the good of the many, you are forgetting all the creatures who inhabit that land before the destruction.
I don't believe the good of the many industrial factories that are getting this energy outweigh the good of the few that are loosing everything, their homes, habitats, and quality of land, which will be like that forever. The coal will be burned for a few hours.
I would like to see more effort on the part of the miners to make sure that the land becomes sustainable again. What they are doing just isn't going to cut it.
Look down. That thing you're standing on, that's America. It's dirt, rocks, trees, plants, and mountains and canyons. Now look at that picture. What was there, was America. Once loved by its inhabitants. Now, it is seen as a big pile of useless crap to be destroyed and turned into money, so that a few people, in the richest nation in the world, can become even richer. Well isn't that special. So they started blowing up the mountains, destroying the rivers, poisoning the soil, and burning all of it, until it became toxic pollution which rained down upon everyone and their crops, and poisoned everything. They then stood with hand on heart, and proclaimed to love this country and did it all for the betterment of everything.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTo take the destruction of this country in one hand, and your wallet in the other, and decide in your wallet is more important, is beyond despicable. I shot and killed lesser enemies of this nation in two wars.
This is deeply disgusting.
Indeed, and all these people have to do is wear an american flag and say god bless america a few times a day, poof, they are patriotic. Then the people defending the land that WAS America are ridiculed.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is enough in america for everyone and everything, but yet not enough for a select few. News flash, there will never be enough for those people, they will cash in on the destruction now, and then pay the outrageous costs for the standard of living they are creating later.
Do you think those farmers will have enough to keep their standard of living after the cheap coal is burned. Not with the way it is being handled now.
It's a good ploy, destroy the land and life of the people that are minding their own business so they have no choice but to join our defences to feed their mouths. When the top 2% of our country is done destroying it, when there is nothing left, there will be nothing left for the other 98% to defend them.
And all they have to do is use meaningless letters c-l-e-a-n in front of what they do to get away with it. It is like the 'definition' of marriage. If defining words is soooo important, where is the definition for clean!
"nothing left for the other 98% BUT to defend them"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMuch reporting on "clean coal"--including SciAm's own special issue on energy a while back-- focuses on what happens after the stuff reaches the power plant. But any complete conversation about the topic must address the full life cycle of coal production, including the processes of extraction, cleaning, sludge storage, and post-mining land reclamation.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCongratulations, SciAm, for beginning to address this disappointing gap in your reporting on coal and energy. Please don't stop here!
Personally, I'm torn on the issue. Rules and regulations should be in place so that streams aren't polluted, and no significant damage is done to neighboring lands. However, remember that many people CHOOSE to have the mining companies come and mine their land.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFirst of all, they get money for it. This is a very poor area of the country, and if you were in the shoes of some people you would have a very hard time saying no yourself. Also, many people want to have it done so they'll actually have some flat land on their property. The picture above depicts what it looks like during or immediately after the mining process. However, the land is generally "restored" afterward. After a period of time vegetation will grow back and the land is no longer such an eyesore. But people can actually build houses, barns, sheds, etc. on land that made it extremely difficult to do these things on before. But it's hard to know about this when you only see pictures of the immediate aftermath as opposed to pictures of the same land a few years down the road. Same thing when you only hear testimony of people upset with the process (and generally, rightly so), but never hear from the people who WANT it done to their land.
Plus, I've lived in Kentucky my entire life, and we have cheaper electric rates than much of the country. While I would love to see greener and cleaner fuels come on line, many of them aren't nearly as feasible from a cost perspective, and much of the population would not sit well with significantly higher utility bills and higher taxes to subsidize energies. It's not an easy issue to solve. There are pros and cons to each side, and ultimately it will come down to some sort of trade-off. I'm not here to necessarily defend all forms of mountain top removal, but just trying to present the other side.
Of course the best solution is to be efficient in the use of energy ressources and consume but the basic essential of what we really need. Our descendants depend on our ecological wisdom, where each eco-citizen is directly responsable for his ressource usage.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUnity is important for everything.To producing million tons of coal is such a big target..A main appeal for using a gas grill over a coal grill is its capability to light quickly and easily. With a coal grill, you will need lighter fluid, matches and newspaper to light the initial fire.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFollow the link:http://www.lincenergy.us
First frgough,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEven a blown up volcanoe is microscopic to the scale of destruction in the Applachians.2nd, without diversity,your ability to survive is lessend since everything you use is from nature.The Appalachians are 2nd only to the Amazon in biodiversity.Mountaintop mining isn't sustainable.Live next to a coal plant or a polluted river from the mining and take a dose of that mercury and arsenic. Mmm good. Now that's what I call "improving the human condition"!
First frgough,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEven a blown up volcanoe is microscopic to the scale of destruction in the Applachians. 2nd, without diversity,your ability to survive is lessend since everything you use is from nature. The Appalachians are 2nd only to the Amazon in biodiversity. Mountaintop mining isn't sustainable. Live next to a coal plant or a polluted river from the mining and take a dose of that mercury and arsenic. Mmm good. Now that's what I call "improving the human condition"!
I live in southern West Virginia where this is happening and they DO NOT put it back and NO they can't put it back. The Appalachian Mountains are the worlds most diverse temperate hardwood forest. After the coal industry uses 3 1/2 million pounds of explosives daily to blow up to 700 feet of the mountain up and dump the waste into the valley streams below -there is nothing left. Ginseng can not grow back as well as ramps and black cohosh and other medicinal herbs as well as the wildlife and the life giving streams that are polluted. I am an underground coal miners daughter and granddaughter so don't tell me anything about coal mining or sacrifice. How about you energy hogs sacrificing some. It is time for renewable energy now. BTW--what will you all do when the coal is soon gone here in Appalachia in about 15-20 years. Better figure it out now and switch.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI live in southern West Virginia where this evil is happening. The Appalachian Mountains are the worlds most diverse temperate hardwood forest and YOU CAN'T PUT IT BACK. And they don't even try to put it back. After the coal companies use 3 1/2 million pounds of explosives daily to blow up the mountains there is nothing left. Ginseng will never grow back there. I am an underground miners daughter and granddaughter so don't try and tell me about sacrifice-time for all you energy hogs to sacrifice some. Better switch to wind and solar now because what will you all do when the coal in Appalachia is soon gone in 20 years.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Improve the human condition" ? Which condition is that... ignorance or arrogance?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBeing human doesn't give us the right to destroy the planet to advance the interests of a few.
Yes, nature recycles a few mountains a year... but man levels & DESTROYS hundreds of mountains a year... leaving many of them poisoned, and re-planted with non-native species that fail to thrive and are therefore unable to sustain native animals.
If we continue to waste and pollute, we WILL have a dying planet on our hands.
Our planet is a complex living organism... and we've been blindly rooting around it's innards for millenia. Only the last 100 years, the industrial revolution has provided us the tools to do irreversible damage.
"Clean Coal" is supposed to capture the carbon and pump it into high pressure repositories underground. However the coal industry has never tested this because they demand immunity from liability law suits before doing the test. They fear that the CO2 will leak up and fill low laying area (such a basements) smothering people and they don't want to be sued.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFurthermore a bit more than half the energy that the coal generates must be spent to trap, and compress the carbon dioxide (CO2) and pump it underground. This will double the cost of coal power and will make nuclear, solar and wind much more attractive. It would be the end of the industry so of course they talk big about "clean coal" and will do nothing as long as they can.
"Clean Coal" is an oxymoron.
Warm regards, Rick.
"Clean Coal" is supposed to capture the carbon and pump it into high pressure repositories underground. However the coal industry has never tested this because they demand immunity from liability law suits before doing the test. They fear that the CO2 will leak up and fill low laying area (such a basements) smothering people and they don't want to be sued.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFurthermore a bit more than half the energy that the coal generates must be spent to trap, and compress the carbon dioxide (CO2) and pump it underground. This will double the cost of coal power and will make nuclear, solar and wind much more attractive. It would be the end of the industry so of course they talk big about "clean coal" and will do nothing as long as they can.
"Clean Coal" is an oxymoron.
Warm regards, Rick.