Mountaintop Removal And Valley Filling

The State of Colorado has suffered from a water shortage in recent years; a difficult situation which is easily visible when viewing the quickly shortening length of the Colorado River. Lake Mead, for example, is roughly 130 feet lower than it once was, marked by the stained rock which towers above the current water level. “The river has become a perfect symbol of what happens when we ask too much of a limited resource: it disappears. In fact, the Colorado no longer regularly reaches the sea” (Zielinski, 2010). Legislation was implemented early on to address this issue, though the results were (perhaps not surprisingly) rather unanticipated, regarding

Fossil Fuels are extremely harmful to the environment, especially in the ways the fuel is obtained, such as mining or hydraulic fracturing. Coal, a commonly used fossil fuel, can be obtained by strip mining, mountaintop mining, or underground mining (“Coal Explained”). Strip mining has disastrous effects on the environment because of the destructive nature of the process, which removes all soil, rock, trees, and plants above coal deposits. The runoff from this pollutes streams and rivers nearby, which can harm aquatic life and disfigure the body of water,

Valleys aren’t the only natural landscaping to be affected though; streams that had once been clean have now been polluted with waste, or have been buried completely by mountain-rock. And when water becomes corrupt, nearby life begins to suffer as well. Take the people living near mountain removal sites as an example. As the nearby water becomes dirtied, humans must watch as their clean, flowing tap water turns to a murky brown—or even black—substitute (Burning the Future: Coal in America). And think about it, this is the water they use every single day to bathe, drink, clean dishes, wash surfaces, sanitize hands, and cook with. When the water is this unclean, is it really doing its job? Is this really the water a living being deserves to be using?

In conclusion, upstream communities should also be concerned about how water resources are managed in the watershed because of acid rain, and possible contamination of their drinking water. Acid rain not only damages infrastructure, but also tampers with ecosystems, exposing already weak trees and plants to the stressors of nature and negatively influences soil qualities, affecting farmers. The Flint water crises shows that even upstream communities should be concerned about contaminated

There are many factors that contribute to Idaho’s pollution problem, but mining may be the biggest. Mining is a huge industry in Idaho, hence the nickname “The Gem State”. The biggest product from Idaho’s mines is silver. Silver mines are some of the largest polluters in the state. Bunker Hill, or Silver Valley, as the Coeur d’Alene region is known for its numerous mines, was recently named a Superfund site. A Superfund site is a site under protection for removal of toxic wastes by the EPA. Although that beautiful valley was also once known for its abundant wildlife, now the rivers are flooded with phosphorous, selenium, zinc, lead, silver, cadmium, and arsenic, all from tailings of several mines in the region. Lake Coeur d’Alene now contains over 70 million tons of toxic waste sediments in its bottom. This pollution has endangered people in the area for years. In Smelterville, where a smelter ran for nearly 100 years, a large number of people have been diagnosed with health complications caused by extremely high levels of lead and other toxins in their blood. These conditions, for most, have existed nearly all their lives. Many remember being ill for most of their childhood and on. In 1973, before the smelter was closed, the average lead toxin level per deciliter of blood in children tested was 70. A reading of 10 is considered high alert. Rocky Hill, who grew up in Smelterville and

Moving on, there are some issues with the legislation that has been passed in order to conserve the water, especially concerning the Clean Water Act. People are having opposition with the rules of the Clean Water Act. Small business owners feel that this act is restricting the way that they tend to their property. For example, several farmers use pesticides, herbicides, and other fertilizers to keep harmful insects and other animals off of their crops, so they can grow properly. These pesticides eventually end up in our local rivers, lakes, and oceans which are making humans and animals very ill. However, they make money by the crops they sell, and to them, the Clean Water Act has a very negative economic impact on them (Landers). Although

Clean coal technology usually addresses atmospheric problems resulting from burning coal. Historically, the primary focus was on sulfur dioxide and particulates, since it is the most important gas in the causation of acid rain. More recent focus has been on carbon dioxide (due to its impact on global warming) as well as other pollutants. Concerns exist regarding the economic viability of these technologies and the timeframe of delivery, potentially high hidden economic costs in terms of social and environmental damage, and the costs and viability of disposing of removed carbon and other toxic matter. More, the byproducts of coal power production range from fly ash sludge ponds full of mercury, arsenic, and sulfur in unlined ponds that can leak into the water supply.

Coal ash is a byproduct of burning coal in power plants and is composed mainly of aluminum and silicon oxides. This ash is commonly stored away in dump sites, only to leach out solutions of concentrated toxic heavy metals. Such issues are detrimental to the health of water systems, posing both a human and environmental health risk. However, there are solutions to this problem. Coal ash possesses unique chemical properties that allow for the remediation of other environmental concerns, such as the treatment of soil polluted with heavy metals, the removal of nutrients from wastewater, and the remediation of acid mine drainage in streams.

The Buffalo Creek flood of West Virginia is believed to be the most devastating coal relate disaster in West Virginia history. The flood occurred in the Buffalo Creek area of Logan County on February 26, 1972 when three dams broke and released 132 million gallons of water and coal waste known by miners as “gob,” and is a thick sludge-like material. The gob contains many toxic chemicals and pollutants such as mercury and arsenic that are left behind from the coal mining process. The wastewater would lie in settling ponds and dams until it could be properly disposed of. The water that was left over from processing coal would be disposed of in two different ways. Some of the water would be pumped from the dam back to the “tipple”, otherwise

"Groups Petition U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for Water Quality Standard in Appalachia to Protect Communities from Mountaintop Removal Mining Po

I would have to say that from the reading that it can be very harmful for the coal mining chemicals to seep into the ground into our drinking water.

Are you for coal or against coal? Maybe better yet, are you for the preservation of the mountains and nature or are you against it? These questions held such a deep meaning and understanding that on the surface seemed immaterial to large corporations such as the Coal Mining Industry or political leaders within the State of West Virginia. Combating Mountaintop Removal by Bryan McNeil gives us the views of what it looks like from a grassroots environmental activist within the West Virginia coal country. In the book you see how the social and moral arguments are framed from different agents such as the Ant-MTRM (Mountain top removal) organization, the Coal Miners and Union works, to the Coal Mining Companies, and finally the State through political

The waterways can be divided into categories of water that has been affected by the Summitville mine and water that has not been affected. Based on the location of the waterways, the Beaver Mud Dump, the Headwaters of Wightman Fork, Schinzel Flats, Wightman Fork below mine, and the small creek from tailings pile would be directly affected by the contamination initiated by mining activity, while the Cattle Guard, Iron Creek, Alum Creek, Bitter Creek, and waterways around the Alamosa River would not be affected or as affected by the mining activity (refer to Figure 1). From the data collected this year, it can be inferred that the Beaver Mud Dump is by far the most metal-polluted body of water in the area; though the waterways affected by

Over the course of the past century, much has changed in America. From the rise of factory production bringing people out of the countryside and into the cities, to two World Wars that continued the massive factory production that funded and armed the war effort, to the rise of suburbia and the massive developments that often destroyed or forever altered vast tracks of land where they would sit. In Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, he addresses the politics of water and environmentalism in the West. “Thanks to irrigation, thanks to the Bureau [of Reclamation]... states such as California, Arizona, and Idaho became populous and wealthy; millions settled in regions where nature, left alone, would have

Water contamination is the next major concern of environmental groups. The Environmental Protection Agency, the governmental regulatory agency created in 1970 to manage the enforcement of environmental policy, states its concerns in a letter to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 2009 (United). Specifically addressing mines in West Virginia and Kentucky, the EPA expressed serious concerns over water pollution from strip mining (“EPA”). The rupture of an ash dike at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston Fossil Plant in Roane County, TN on December 22, 2008 granted credibility to the EPA’s concerns. In an article published by in Environmental Health Perspectives, Rhitu Chatterjee comments on the poisonous substances contained in ash produced from processing coal, listing