New Mining Map Tool from Environmental Activists Finds West Virginia Most at Risk

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Environmental activists said that mountaintop removal coal mining has been expanding closer to communities in central Appalachia in recent years, with nearly half of the 50 areas most at risk in West Virginia.

As part of its campaign to end that type of mining, the North Carolina-based nonprofit Appalachian Voices unveiled an interactive map that identified 50 communities in 23 counties most at risk from mountaintop mining. Those communities included 22 in West Virginia and 18 in eastern Kentucky. Southwest Virginia had 10 at-risk communities despite accounting for only 8 percent of central Appalachia’s surface mine coal production last year.

The map, which combined U.S. Geological Survey data, satellite imagery, mine permit databases and an online mapping tool, was developed in consultation with SkyTruth, a Shepherdstown-based nonprofit that uses satellite images to study environmental changes.

Mountaintop removal mining is a cost-effective but particularly destructive form of strip mining that blasts apart mountain ridge tops to expose multiple seams of coal. Debris is dumped into the valleys below, often covering streams and creating so-called valley fills that remain intact when the mining ends.

“We’re not telling the community members anything that they didn’t already know,” said Erin Savage, Appalachian Voices’ Central Appalachian campaign coordinator. “I think what we are doing is helping to bring that to a larger audience, hopefully a national audience.”

Appalachian Voices studied the proportion of communities within a one-mile radius of active mountaintop mining operations last year and the changes in those areas between 1990 and 2014.

It also studied U.S. Census data to show that communities where surface mine encroachment is increasing have slightly higher rates of poverty and are losing population more than twice as fast as nearby rural communities with no mining in their immediate vicinities.

In West Virginia, surface mining has grown closer to some communities since 1999 even as coal production from those mines has declined, the group found.

The 23 at-risk counties highlighted account for more than 85 percent of Central Appalachia’s surface coal production last year.

Pike County, Kentucky, had the most communities at risk with seven, followed by six in Wise County, Virginia, and five in Boone County, West Virginia, Appalachian Voices said.

West Virginia Coal Association President Bill Raney called the Appalachian Voice project a “ruse.”

“It should be good to live close to a mining operation because it means there’s employment there,” Raney said. “This group has done nothing but drive employment out of the areas they’re talking about and shut the employment opportunities down. It’s enormously hypocritical of them to point fingers.”