ACT NOW

There are alternatives that are less damaging to the environment than completely destroying mountains, streams, wildlife and communities.  The deadline for submitting comments has been extended to January 21, 2004.  Send comments by email using our draft action letter or send your own comments to  mountaintop.r3@epa.gov

On May 29, 2003, the Bush administration released a draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) assessing the environmental destruction and social harm caused by mountaintop removal coal mining -- a form of strip mining in which the coal companies literally blast hundreds of feet off the tops of mountain peaks in their search for coal, pushing millions of tons of mining waste rubble into surrounding valleys and burying hundreds of miles of streams.

The data contained in the draft EIS and its accompanying studies confirm that the environmental harm caused by mountaintop removal and valley fill operations is significant and mostly irreversible. The data show that over one thousand miles of headwater streams have been destroyed or degraded, including 724 miles of streams that have been buried forever under huge piles of waste generated by blowing up mountains. The report states that it is difficult if not impossible to reconstruct free flowing streams on or adjacent to mined sites. So-called reclamation of the leveled mountains converts what had been biologically diverse native hardwood forested mountaintops to grassland plateaus.

Economic studies prepared for the draft EIS indicate that significant restrictions on the size of valley fills would not cause serious economic harm. In a December 2001 final report to EPA, Hill & Associates, an economic modeling firm, concluded that even the most severe restriction on valley fills studied in the report (limiting valley fills to 35 acres in size) would raise the price of coal by only $1 per ton and raise the cost of electricity by a few cents per megawatt-hour. EPA officials characterized these effects as a minimal impact on the price of coal and virtually NO impact on electricity prices. While earlier versions of the draft EIS and accompanying studies evaluated the costs as well as the environmental benefits of limiting the size of valley fills, no such restrictions on valley fills were even considered as an alternative in the draft EIS finally released by the Bush administration.

The environmental and economic studies prepared for the draft EIS do not lend any support to the administration's proposed "preferred alternative" that recommends weakening existing environmental laws that limit the size and location of valley fills. In fact, the studies support the opposite conclusion: mountaintop removal must be much more strictly limited to head off additional and significant devastation of the Appalachian region's natural resources and the communities that depend on those resources now and for future generations.

Read more about mountaintop removal mining.