Casey over at ModernHiker has a post this morning on mountaintop removal in Southern Appalachia and a link to a website of articles, videos, pictures, and Google Earth files of the devastation in East Tennessee, West Virginia, and Kentucky.
“Mountaintop Removal†is the surprisingly accurate name for a popular type of mining in Appalachia. Basically, to get at coal veins, the top of a mountain is deforested and exploded, with the debris pushed into neighboring valleys. The coal is processed, leaving huge lakes of toxic slurry behind, and then the mine operators plant some non-native vegetation and move on to the next mountain.
Obviously, this causes some problems. Deforestation increases the risk of landslides, and several slurry ponds have burst through their dams or through old mine shafts, wreaking havoc on the communities below them. The 2000 Martin County Sludge Spill contaminated the drinking water of 27,000 people and was 30 times larger than the Exxon Valez spill.
As the push for “clean†coal escalates in the coming years, mountaintop removal is likely to increase … unless more people know about it.
The website is called ilovemountains.org, a memorial to the mountains destroyed by mountaintop removal. The Cumberland Mountains and Plateau are already home to natural gas wells and coal mining. Now, they have added pressure from oil wells (see Tennessean).