E.P.A. Urges Revoking W. Virginia Mining (Mountaintop Removal) Permit

[IDemo]

WASHINGTON — A top federal regulator has recommended revoking the permit for one of the nation’s largest planned mountaintop removal mining projects, saying it would be devastating to miles of West Virginia streams and the plant and animal life they support.

In a report submitted last month and made public on Friday, Shawn M. Garvin, the Environmental Protection Agency’s regional administrator for the Mid-Atlantic, said that Arch Coal’s proposed Spruce No. 1 Mine in Logan County should be stopped because it “would likely have unacceptable adverse effects on wildlife.”

In 2007, the Bush administration approved the project, which would involve dynamiting the tops off mountains over 2,278 acres to get at the coal beneath while dumping the resulting rubble, known as spoil, into nearby valleys and streams. The Obama administration announced last year that it would review the decision, prompting the mine owner, Arch Coal, based in St. Louis, to sue.

In its review, the E.P.A. found that the project would bury more than seven miles of the Pigeonroost Branch and Oldhouse Branch streams under 110 million cubic yards of spoil, killing everything in them and sending downstream a flood of contaminants, toxic substances and life-choking algae.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/16/science/earth/16westvirginia.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

[bbinacan]

1. That'll piss off some miners.

Not too smart during an election year. That is, if there's a win at all cost philosophy.

[thunder rising]

2. Who's the EPA? (snark)

[bbinacan]

4. Just saying

I'm currently working in PA, about 25 miles from WV. This is the kind of stuff I hear. Don't shoot the messenger.

[thunder rising]

5. I'm with 'ya. I am very aware of the double standard for responsibility

If you dump a quart of oil on your lawn you get in trouble. Dump 2B gallons and it's a cake walk.

[lfairban]

6. What I would tell a miner with that point of view.

From the link above:

"Arch Coal had proposed to construct new streams to replace the buried rivers, but the E.P.A. said they could not reproduce the numbers and variety of fish and plant life supported by the indigenous streams."

They are blowing the tops off of mountains and are replanting streams. Don't you think this has gone a little too far!

[MisterP]

7. this shows a major flaw of "developmentalist" approaches to environmental "restoration"

all the organisms, species, and ecosystems weren't created in situ, they evolved over millennia or megayears

it's like the original leg vs. a prosthetic; no matter how good, the leg is not the one that was a part of the organism from embryohood, with the original vessels and innervation

some philistine-pride activists may call this C.S. Lewis-esque maundering, but the cold hard metrics they live on show them wrong

[howaboutme]

3. Unbelievable

how the profits for a few and supposed jobs are permitted to supersede and destroy what has taken nature hundreds of millions of years to create. These corporations have had decades of free reign and have destroyed too much of our environment and they need to be reigned in big time.

There needs to be a massive PR campaign in that direction to offset the manipulation by the likes of Limbaugh, and the foreign Chamber of Commerce, etc. One of the big problems is that corporations don't pay enough taxes and therefore have too much disposable income that they use and spend on lobbying. They need to pay far more in taxes.