W.Va. town copes with mountaintop mining
Coal demand scars landscape
MUD, W.Va. - This is a place where moving mountains is no longer a figure of speech. Here, among the steep green Appalachians, mining companies are moving mountaintops off their pedestals to get the kind of coal that Washington needs.
It happened here, on a ridgeline called Sugar Tree Mountain, where locals once hunted for squirrels and puckery sour grapes. Then, the top was scraped off to expose the black seams in its innards, leaving a rock-strewn plateau.
"It used to be West Virginia," said Vivian Stockman, an environmental activist. "And now it's Mars."
Though this isolated mine is more than 400 miles from Washington, the two places share a powerful connection: coal. The D.C. region, with its need for electricity skyrocketing, has been steadily burning more coal, buying almost a third of its supply from this part of Appalachia.
And that, analysts and environmentalists said, means that Washington's air conditioners and iPods have helped drive the region's "mountaintop" mining.
The coal industry and the Bush administration say the benefits of these mines, measured in jobs and energy, outweigh the damage.
But in West Virginia, where mining opponents can face back-roads intimidation, some neighbors say that Washington area residents might not know the true cost of their power.
"We have to go through a lot for them to get their electric," said Lucille Miller, who picked the grapes on the vanished mountain.
The links that bind the suburbs of Washington to the mines of West Virginia can be traced through federal energy records. The
The records make one thing clear: The plants have been buying a lot more coal. Total purchases were more than 40 percent higher in 2006 than in 2004. The increase came as the Washington region's demand for electricity grew 18 percent since 2001, driven by population growth and an increasingly wired culture. D.C. area plants do not send their electricity straight to local homes, but feed it into the regional power grid.
Records also show that about 32 percent of the coal the plants bought came from one kind of mine in this corner of Appalachia - a "surface" operation, where miners do not have to tunnel.
The region, where southern West Virginia meets Virginia and Kentucky, is home to the vast majority of mountaintop mines in the United States.
Coal companies say these methods provide jobs. The companies can extract coal efficiently from places where tunneling would not work, such as where the rock is too weak to hold up a roof.
"There's one big reason you mountaintop mine. That's where the good Lord put the coal," said Bill Raney, president of the West Virginia Coal Association. He said that about 70 percent of the coal from surface mines in this part of Appalachia originates at mountaintop mines.
"Any coal coming from central Appalachian strip mines is almost certainly coming from mountaintop-removal-type mines . . . that bury streams, and that permanently destroy, you know, many, many miles of forest," said Joe Lovett, executive director of the Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment.
