Where Hominy Falls: Mountaintop Mining Buries Headwater Streams in the South

This article was originally published in the December 2005 issue of Fly Fisherman.

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The locals have long been compelled to call West Virginia's Hominy Creek the "Run of Amnesia" because it fishes so well and they wanted to keep it secret. Recently, however, they began talking about it to anyone who will listen, for fear that the stream would be erased not only from memories, but from maps.

Hominy Creek's headwaters are being lost to mountaintop removal coal mining, an incredibly destructive technique being practiced throughout more than 12 million acres of the southern Appalachians in eastern Kentucky, southern West Virginia, western Virginia, and scattered parts of eastern Tennessee. In mountaintop removal mining operations, the upper slopes and summits of mountains, sometimes up to 600 feet's worth, are blasted and scraped away to expose underlying coal seams. But first the forests on them are clear-cut and the topsoil stripped away. The rubble that used to be ridge is then dumped into adjacent valleys, too often at the top of the deep coves that define this region, burying the clear streams that once began here.

Mountaintop removal is the coal industry's preferred alternative to less-destructive high-wall mining, and the industry refers to the practice as "steep-slope" mining or a similarly antiseptic name. To the industry the most relevant facts are these: Mountaintop removal allows the extraction of high-value, low-sulfur coal deposits at about one-third of the cost of other techniques. While it employs relatively high-paid mining specialists, it takes relatively few of them to carry out a job, meaning lower human resource costs. And when the coal seams are reached, their recovery rate is about 100 percent, as opposed to a conventional average of about 70 percent.

There are two primary tools for the execution of a mountaintop removal operation. The first is a dragline, a huge cranelike machine with a base whose size surpasses many warehouses, equipped with a scoop capable of picking up 100,000 pounds, or approximately 500 average-size American men. The second is lots and lots of explosives. The blasting is so intense at many sites that mining companies routinely buy adjacent homes after residents complain about noise, dust, and airborne rubble.

In the early 1980s, Congress, chafed by the 1970s fuel crises, approved the technique. But could it have imagined the scale such operations would reach after a boom in the last two decades?

The short answer is no. Mountaintop removal was initially portrayed as a boutique application. But in the late 1980s, coal operators began using super-size equipment designed for strip mining on mountaintop removal sites. Only then did the true destructive potential of the prac­ tice become clear.

A highly politicized environmental impact statement was belatedly issued by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 2003.It identified "1,208 miles of direct impact to stream systems in the study area based on permits issued in the last 10 years."

Were you to drive 1,208 miles, incidentally, you could leave New York City and go through Trenton, Philadelphia, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Louisville, Saint Louis, Kansas City, and then stop in Topeka to consider the following: By "direct impact, "the report means death. It explains, "When streams are filled or mined all biota living in the footprint of the fill or in the mined area are lost."

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The environmental assessment wrestles with its inability to accurately assign a quantitative value to two types of additional damage caused by mountaintop removal. First, it cannot measure the number of interconnected stream miles that have been weakened by the loss of streams at the tops of watersheds.

"The headwater stream," according to the EPA report, "is the origin for energy processing within the river ecosystem." Does any machine run without a spark? Yet so long as mountaintop removal sites are approved, we needlessly ask natural systems to do just that. What's left is unbalanced nature, in which some species thrive as others perish, and where new gaps open every time nature closes a wound. Yet we wonder why Appalachian songbirds and salamanders are in record decline and why deer and turkey are more elusive than in days past?

The second place the EPA struggles to quantify the damage from mountaintop removal is in a category of water known as the "intermittent stream," where water runs only part of each year, usually after precipitation events. More commonly known as cricks, ditches, nooks, crags, and crannies, these small waterways run through the Appalachian woods.

The pieces of the southern Appalachians being carved away by mountaintop removal-more than 1.4 million acres already have been lost-are among the richest in the world, situated where countless southern species converge with their distinct northern counterparts. "Countless" may be the wrong word, if only because researchers have in recent years attempted to tally the number of species in the nearby Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Their work provides a good indicator of what we might find in the general vicinity of mountaintop removal sites, if we choose to look closely enough, and in time. Researchers estimate that more than 100,000 species of plants and animals live there and have in the last decade identified some 425 species new to science, including a four-foot-long earthworm.

Driving through southern West Virginia late one autumn morning, I thought to myself that the worm's shape must have been somehow known and copied by the engineer who planned the road on which I drove. Thankfully, my maps told me I was getting close to my destination as I felt my way through a foggy corner of Monongahela National Forest. Half-an-hour later I was dead smack in the middle of the current fight over mountaintop removal's future.

In a blink-and-you-missed-it West Virginia village, the Green Valley Coal Company's offices rose on my left. Hominy Creek ran on my right. Knowing something of the company's role in the fight over mountaintop removal, I chose to first explore Hominy, of which I knew nothing more than the locals' promises of trophy trout.

At the village's edge I pushed up a road named “Hominy Falls” twisted around the mountain, and came back upon the creek much higher in elevation. I parked and began pushing my way to the creek's source on foot, with a rod in hand. This stretch of Hominy Creek turned out to be magnificent-sparkling, fast, and tumbling, with a story-high cascade marking its midpoint. Rimmed in a lush mixed forest dominated by unruly rhododendron and flourishing hemlock, however, any pool with the potential to hold good fish was completely guarded. Casts were complicated.

Things didn't get easier as I pushed upstream. After several hours, I finally came on a promising split in the creek–the left fork turbulent, the right fork calmer–with the Pacific part unfurling at the base of a three-foot waterfall at the pool's head about 50 feet away. Limbs reached down within inches of the water's surface right in front of me, forcing a belly crawl.

Admittedly, the move's not my best, but I did enough not to create wake while clearing the obstacle. Then, just as I braced myself to stand up, I found my chin inches from a trout, a rainbow with shoulders. It was lolling in the skinny water below me, scanning the surface just beyond my shadow. I froze, and the rainbow held momentarily, then disappeared into deeper water.

As daylight began to wane, I turned downstream, having already reached two landmark disappointments. The first was in my fishing, which had been outclassed by wild fish. The second was in a broken piece of the watershed, a stretch of bare bottom carpeted in brown silt, where the only visible life forms were schools of bottom feeders. Just above me, below where a tributary joined the flow, the channel unnaturally widened into a sort of banked outwash plane. Signs of coal mining damage dotted the area, such as in one wide swath of streambed where the substrate flushed from upstream had all been machined into a standard size. Here, Hominy Creek lost a measure of its wildness. My topo map told me I was just below Blue Branch, and Green Valley Coal Company re-entered my consideration.

A subsidiary of Massey Energy Company, the largest producer of central Appalachian coal and America's fourth largest overall coal producer, Green Valley has designs for Blue Branch. Specifically, the company wants to continue its efforts to bury Blue Branch's upstream reaches under 20 million tons of waste, rock, and dirt. Officials from the state and the Army Corps of Engineers responsible for permitting such operations initially told the company that for such a large fill it would need an individual Clean Water Act permit. This includes a detailed environmental assessment and can take two years. The company complained that the process took too long, and that it would likely run out of waste­storage capacity before a permit could be issued, purportedly forcing the plant and two mines to close. The company then appealed to state and federal regulators to approve the first part of the project, giving it eight months worth of dumping capacity atop more than 400 feet of stream. The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection approved the permit, and the Army Corps authorized it, eight days after Green Valley filed its request.

I had spent one day exploring Hominy Creek and hadn't even begun to under­ stand its complex natural systems well enough to once match the hatch. And yet it took state and federal regulators roughly a week to declare the destruction of its headwaters benign. The Army Corps had done so under something called Nationwide Permit 21 (NWP 21), a category of general permit outlined by Section 404 of the Clean Water Act. General permits allow activities to gain approval on a statewide, regional, or nationwide basis provided that compa­nies meet general conditions. In practice, as long as companies promise to meet those conditions, and the corps can find "only minimal cumulative adverse effects on the environment," general permits are freely issued.

At least they were until July 2004, when a federal district judge ruled that NWP 21 violated the congressional intent of the Clean Water Act, meaning that about 30 permits for valley fills would be reconsidered under the more-rigorous requirements for individual permits. The same judge has since been compelled to issue an additional order to the Army Corps to enforce the ruling, after it was documented that operations at several illegally approved sites had continued even after the judge had decreed they must stop.

In September 2004, the Bush administration appealed the judge's ruling, again notching the headboard of the bed it shares with the mining industry, on whose behalf the administration had acted enough times to dispel any doubts of the romance. In the last five years, the administration systematically and astutely aided the dismantling of challenges to mountaintop removal, building on a precedent it established early in its term when it rewrote the "fill rule," a Clinton era attempt to close the loophole that allowed the rubble that used to be mountains to be dumped into streams.

A federal judge had in 1999 ruled that the Army Corps was violating the Clean Water Act every time it characterized that rubble as clean "fill," which could be legally introduced to streams, instead of "waste," which is illegal to dump. The 1999 ruling was overturned on appeal, but not before the issuance of an executive promise of closer scrutiny of mining permits and the commissioning of the previously cited environmental impact statement. A key part of the pledge was narrowing the definition of what consisted acceptable material.

In 2001, the Bush administration, fresh from meetings with industry executives, announced an expansion, rather than the promised contraction, in the definition of what consisted "clean fill." Only garbage was expressly forbidden, but materials ranging from sand to plastics to mining overburden were all deemed legal.

Meanwhile, a prominent Bush administration appointee-who formerly lobbied for the mining industry-issued broad guidance inexplicably directing those working on the environmental impact study to shift their focus to finding ways to streamline coal-mine permitting. The executive committee overseeing the study also rejected the survey team's proposed approach to the report, which was likely to include recommendations that mountaintop removal be slowed or stopped and made it clear that any such policy prescriptions were instantly considered outside the report's scope.

Perhaps the most egregious of the Bush administration's machinations to ease restrictions on mountaintop removal mining can be found in the attempted rewriting of stream buffer laws that had been in place since the Reagan days. Those laws forbade surface mining within 100 feet of perennial or intermittent streams. The Bush administration has proposed granting the mining industry exemptions from the law so long as it minimizes disturbances "to the extent possible, using the best available technology." While the Office of Surface Mining has declared that such a change requires an environmental review that could take two years to complete, the administration's message to the mining industry is clear:

Mine away, and at the end of the day, don't let streams get in your way.

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Tim Zink is the media relations manager for Trout Unlimited. He lives in Hyattsville, Maryland.

[The opinions expressed in Forum are those of the authors who appear here and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policies or views of FLY FISHERMAN.]