Chapter 24: Mountaintop Removal — When They Blew Up the Mountains

"I looked up one morning and the mountain was gone. I don't mean the trees were gone or the creek was different. I mean the mountain was gone. They took it. They loaded it into trucks and dumped it in the valley and the mountain was just gone." — Maria Lambert, resident of Prenter Hollow, Boone County, West Virginia, testimony to the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, 2008

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

1. Describe the shift from underground mining to surface mining and explain how mountaintop removal mining operates as an industrial process — from the initial blast through the creation of valley fills
2. Analyze the scale of environmental devastation caused by mountaintop removal, including the destruction of headwater streams, the contamination of drinking water, and the permanent alteration of Appalachian landscapes
3. Document the resistance movements that arose in response to mountaintop removal, including the stories of Larry Gibson, the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, and other citizen activists
4. Evaluate the regulatory failures — from the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 to the concept of "approximate original contour" — that allowed mountaintop removal to continue despite its documented harms

Introduction: The Unthinkable Made Routine

There is no way to prepare someone for what mountaintop removal looks like from the air.

You can describe it. You can say that the tops of mountains have been removed — blasted apart with explosives and pushed into the valleys below. You can cite the numbers: more than five hundred mountains in central Appalachia destroyed, more than two thousand miles of headwater streams buried, more than 1.5 million acres of forest erased. You can explain the process in clinical, technical language. You can show the regulatory filings and the reclamation plans and the permit applications.

None of it prepares you. Because when you see it — when you fly over southern West Virginia or eastern Kentucky and look down at the landscape — what you see is not mining. What you see is annihilation. Vast plateaus of gray-brown rubble where ridges and hollows used to be. Enormous ponds of black water where streams used to run. Bare, scalped earth stretching to the horizon, interrupted by occasional patches of brown grass that the coal companies planted and called "reclamation." From the air, mountaintop removal sites look less like mines than like the aftermath of sustained aerial bombardment. They look like a war was fought here, and the mountains lost.

This chapter is about that war — how it started, how it was justified, who fought it, and who paid the cost. It is about a form of coal mining so destructive that it literally reshapes the topography of the earth, turning ancient mountains into flat rubble fields and burying the streams that flow through the valleys in hundreds of feet of rock and dirt. It is about the people who lived in the hollows below those mountains and watched their water turn black, their children develop asthma and cancer, their homes crack from the blasting, and their communities empty out as residents fled or died. It is about the regulators who were supposed to protect those people and instead protected the companies that were poisoning them. And it is about the handful of citizens — outgunned, outspent, and dismissed as backward hillbillies who did not understand progress — who stood up and said no.

The history of mountaintop removal is, in many ways, the logical culmination of everything this textbook has traced since Chapter 15. The extraction pattern that began with the broad form deed and the company town reached its most extreme expression when the coal industry stopped sending men underground to dig coal and started simply removing the mountains to get at the coal underneath. It was more efficient. It required fewer workers. It produced more coal per hour of labor. And it destroyed everything it touched.

From Underground to Surface: How Coal Mining Changed

To understand mountaintop removal, you need to understand why the coal industry shifted from underground mining to surface mining — and what that shift meant for the mountains and the people who lived on them.

For most of Appalachian history, coal was mined underground. Men went into the earth, dug coal from seams that ran through the mountains, and hauled it out through tunnels. Underground mining was dangerous, dirty, and physically devastating — the mine disasters and black lung disease described in Chapter 21 were the products of underground mining. But underground mining had one characteristic that distinguished it from what came later: it left the surface of the earth largely intact. A community could sit on top of a coal mine and not know it was there, except for the tipple at the mine entrance and the coal cars running along the creek.

Surface mining changed the equation fundamentally. Instead of going underground to reach the coal, surface mining removed the earth above the coal — the "overburden," in industry terminology — to expose the coal seam from above. Surface mining had been practiced on a small scale since the early twentieth century, but it was not until the development of massive earth-moving equipment after World War II that it became economically viable on a large scale.

The earliest form of large-scale surface mining in Appalachia was contour mining — also called contour strip mining — which followed the contour of a coal seam around the side of a mountain. Heavy equipment would cut a bench into the mountainside along the seam, removing the rock and soil above the coal, extracting the coal, and then moving along the contour. What was left behind was a long, narrow shelf cut into the mountain, with a vertical wall of exposed rock on the uphill side (the highwall) and a slope of loose rubble on the downhill side (the spoil bank). The spoil — the rock, dirt, and debris removed to expose the coal — was simply pushed over the edge of the bench and down the mountainside.

Contour mining was destructive, but it was destructive on a scale that, while serious, was still comprehensible. A contour mine left a scar on the side of a mountain. A highwall might be fifty or a hundred feet tall. The spoil might bury a section of forest below the mine. But the mountain itself was still there. Its ridgeline was intact. The hollow below might be damaged, but it still existed as a hollow.

Auger mining extended the reach of surface operations by drilling horizontal holes into the exposed coal seam with enormous auger bits — some as large as seven feet in diameter — boring into the mountain like a corkscrew and extracting the coal as the bit advanced. Auger mining was often used in conjunction with contour mining, extending the operation beyond what the initial surface cut could reach.

But none of this was mountaintop removal. Mountaintop removal was something new. It was not an incremental evolution of existing techniques. It was a qualitative leap — a fundamentally different relationship between the mining operation and the mountain itself.

The Process: How You Blow Up a Mountain

The process of mountaintop removal mining (MTR) is worth describing in detail, because the industrial specifics are essential to understanding the scale of what happened. This is not a metaphor. This is not an exaggeration used for rhetorical effect. This is what actually happens.

Step one: Clear the mountain. Before blasting can begin, the surface of the mountain must be cleared of vegetation. Every tree on the area to be mined is cut down. In the early decades of mountaintop removal, the timber was sometimes harvested for its value. More often, it was simply pushed into piles and burned, or bulldozed over the side of the mountain. The topsoil — the thin layer of rich, organic soil that took thousands of years to develop on the mountain's surface — was scraped away and, in theory, stockpiled for later use in reclamation. In practice, the topsoil was often lost, mixed with the rock and rubble of the mining operation, or degraded beyond usefulness by the time anyone got around to spreading it back.

Step two: Blast. Once the surface is cleared, holes are drilled into the rock of the mountain — sometimes hundreds of holes in a grid pattern — and packed with explosives. The most common explosive used in mountaintop removal operations is ANFO — a mixture of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil that is cheap, effective, and available in enormous quantities. A single blast at a mountaintop removal site can use millions of pounds of explosives. The detonation fractures the rock of the mountain, breaking it into rubble.

The blasts are not small events. They register on seismographs. They crack the foundations of houses miles away. They throw rock and debris into the air, and when the dust cloud settles — it can take hours, and on still days the dust simply hangs in the hollows — another layer of the mountain has been reduced to loose rubble.

Step three: Remove the rubble. The blasted rock — now called spoil or overburden — is removed by enormous machines. The largest of these are draglines — massive cranes that swing buckets the size of small houses through the air, scooping up a hundred cubic yards of rock at a time and depositing it somewhere else. A single dragline can cost $100 million and stand as tall as a twenty-story building. These machines are so large that they must be assembled on-site; they cannot be transported on roads.

Step four: Dump it in the valley. The rubble has to go somewhere. In mountaintop removal operations, it goes into the adjacent valleys. The spoil is pushed, dumped, and bulldozed into the hollows that run between the ridges, creating valley fills — massive deposits of loose rock and dirt that bury the valleys, including the headwater streams that run through them, under hundreds of feet of mining waste. A single valley fill can be a mile long and several hundred feet deep. It buries everything beneath it — the stream, the stream banks, the riparian forest, the soil, the aquatic organisms, the microorganisms, the entire biological community of the valley bottom.

Step five: Extract the coal. Once the overburden has been removed and the coal seam is exposed, the coal is scooped up by heavy equipment, loaded into trucks, and hauled away. A single mountaintop removal site might expose multiple coal seams at different depths, requiring successive rounds of blasting and removal.

Step six: "Reclaim." Federal and state law require that mined land be "reclaimed" — restored to an approximate semblance of its previous condition. In practice, as we will see, reclamation on mountaintop removal sites has been a fiction. You cannot restore a mountain that has been blasted apart and dumped into a valley. You can spread some topsoil on the rubble, plant some grass seed, and file the paperwork. But the mountain is gone. The streams are buried. The forest that took centuries to grow is reduced to a few acres of exotic grass species struggling to survive on compacted rubble. The ecosystem is not restored. It is erased.

This process is repeated across the entire area of a mountaintop removal permit. And the permits are enormous. A single mountaintop removal operation can encompass thousands of acres and continue for decades. When it is finished, the landscape is unrecognizable. Where there were once forested ridges and narrow valleys with cold, clear streams, there is now a flat or gently rolling expanse of rubble covered with sparse vegetation. The topography itself has been fundamentally altered. The mountains are gone.

The Numbers: A Scale Beyond Comprehension

The scale of mountaintop removal in central Appalachia defies casual comprehension. The numbers are available in federal and state records, in EPA studies, and in academic research, and they are worth confronting directly.

Between the 1970s and the 2010s, mountaintop removal mining operations in Appalachia:

• Destroyed more than 500 mountains across West Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee
• Buried more than 2,000 miles of headwater streams under valley fills — the EPA's own figures, published in a 2011 study, confirmed that this represented a permanent and irreversible loss of aquatic ecosystems
• Stripped more than 1.5 million acres of hardwood forest — an area larger than the state of Delaware — most of which was never effectively replanted
• Disturbed the watersheds that supplied drinking water to hundreds of communities in the coalfields
• Generated billions of tons of waste rock that was deposited in valley fills across central Appalachia

These numbers are not disputed. They appear in the coal industry's own permit applications, in state regulatory records, and in federal environmental impact statements. The coal companies did not deny that they were removing mountaintops and filling valleys. They argued — and continue to argue — that the practice was legal, regulated, and economically necessary.

But numbers on a page do not convey what the destruction looks like. For that, you needed photographs.

The Photographs That Shocked the Nation

For decades, the coal industry benefited from the invisibility of mountaintop removal. The mine sites were in remote areas, far from major highways. The topography of the region meant that you could drive through the coalfields on the main roads and never see a mountaintop removal site — the ridges blocked the view. Unless you were flying over the region or hiking to a vantage point that overlooked a mine, you could live your entire life in Appalachia without seeing the full scope of what was happening.

That began to change in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when activists, journalists, and photographers began documenting mountaintop removal from the air. Flyovers organized by groups like the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (OVEC) and Appalachian Voices brought journalists, filmmakers, and eventually members of Congress over the coalfields in small planes. What they saw from the air was stunning. The photographs — barren gray-brown plateaus where mountains had been, vast ponds of toxic water, the sharp line between untouched forest and total devastation — circulated through news media, documentary films, and eventually social media with devastating effect.

Vivian Stockman, a photographer and organizer with OVEC, spent years documenting mountaintop removal from the ground and from the air. Her photographs became some of the most widely circulated images of the practice — showing the stark contrast between the forested ridges that remained and the blasted moonscapes where mining had occurred. "People don't believe it until they see it," Stockman said in a 2005 interview. "They think you're exaggerating. You show them the photographs and they say, 'That can't be real. That can't be in the United States.' But it is real. It's happening right now."

The satellite imagery was perhaps even more powerful than the aerial photographs. Google Earth, which became widely available in the mid-2000s, allowed anyone with an internet connection to zoom in on the coalfields of West Virginia and see, with their own eyes, the scale of the destruction. The technology that the coal industry had feared — technology that made the invisible visible — arrived, and there was no putting it back in the box.

The Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act: The Law That Was Supposed to Help

The federal government's attempt to regulate surface mining began in earnest in the 1970s, driven by growing public awareness of the environmental damage caused by strip mining across the country — not just in Appalachia, but in the coalfields of the western United States, in the phosphate mines of Florida, and in other surface mining operations that were scarring landscapes from coast to coast.

The Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA), signed into law by President Jimmy Carter in 1977, was supposed to be the solution. It was the product of nearly a decade of legislative effort — Congress had passed surface mining regulation bills twice before, in 1974 and 1975, and President Gerald Ford had vetoed both.

SMCRA established the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE) within the Department of the Interior and set out a comprehensive framework for regulating surface mining. The law's key provisions included:

• Performance standards requiring mining operations to minimize environmental damage, prevent water pollution, and restore mined land to productive use
• A requirement that mined land be restored to its "approximate original contour" (AOC) — meaning that the surface of the reclaimed site should roughly match the topography of the land before mining
• A prohibition on mining within certain buffer zones around streams, churches, schools, and other protected areas
• A permitting system that required mining companies to submit detailed plans for mining and reclamation before beginning operations
• A bonding requirement that mining companies post financial bonds to guarantee that reclamation would be completed even if the company went bankrupt
• An abandoned mine land (AML) reclamation fund, financed by fees on coal production, to clean up mines that had been abandoned before the law was passed

On paper, SMCRA was a strong law. It addressed the major environmental problems associated with surface mining, it established a regulatory structure with enforcement authority, and it required mining companies to plan for and pay for reclamation. Environmental groups, while noting that the law did not go as far as they wanted — many had pushed for an outright ban on mountaintop removal — acknowledged that SMCRA represented a significant improvement over the previous regulatory vacuum.

The problem was not the law on paper. The problem was the law in practice.

"Approximate Original Contour" and Other Legal Fictions

The gap between what SMCRA required and what actually happened on the ground was enormous, and it grew wider over the decades as the coal industry and its political allies systematically weakened the law's implementation.

The most consequential weakness was the AOC variance. SMCRA required that mined land be restored to its "approximate original contour" — but it included an exception. If a mining company could demonstrate that restoring the original contour was impractical and that the post-mining land could be put to an "equal or better" use, the requirement could be waived. This exception, which was intended for narrow circumstances, became the loophole through which the entire mountaintop removal industry drove.

Coal companies argued — and state and federal regulators accepted — that the flat plateaus created by mountaintop removal were actually better than the original mountainous terrain because they could be used for "economic development" — commercial buildings, airports, golf courses, housing developments. The fact that virtually none of these proposed post-mining uses ever materialized did not matter. The variance was granted. The AOC requirement was waived. The mountain was not restored because the company had promised to build something on the flattened rubble.

The stream buffer zone rule suffered a similar fate. SMCRA prohibited mining activities within one hundred feet of a perennial or intermittent stream unless the mining company could demonstrate that the mining would not adversely affect the water quality and quantity of the stream. Valley fills, by definition, buried streams — they were deposited directly in the stream channels. The rule should have prohibited them.

Instead, the rule was reinterpreted, weakened, and ultimately gutted. In 2002, the George W. Bush administration revised the rule to allow valley fills within the buffer zone — effectively legalizing the burial of streams under mining waste. Environmental groups challenged the revision in court and won temporary victories, but the legal battles dragged on for years while the dumping continued. The Obama administration attempted to restore stronger protections, but the Trump administration rolled them back again. The streams that were buried during the years of legal uncertainty were not unburied.

Regulatory Capture: When the Watchdog Becomes the Pet

The concept of regulatory capture — the process by which a regulatory agency, created to oversee an industry, gradually comes to serve the interests of the industry it is supposed to regulate — is a staple of political science textbooks. In the history of mountaintop removal in Appalachia, it is not an abstract concept. It is a documented reality.

The state agencies responsible for permitting and overseeing surface mining operations in Appalachian states — particularly the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (WVDEP) and the Kentucky Department for Natural Resources and Environmental Protection — were chronically understaffed, underfunded, and politically pressured. The coal industry was the dominant economic and political force in the states where mountaintop removal occurred. The governors, legislators, and agency directors who oversaw the regulatory process were dependent on coal industry campaign contributions, coal industry tax revenues, and coal industry employment for their political survival.

The results were predictable. Permits for mountaintop removal operations were approved routinely, with minimal scrutiny of the environmental impact assessments and reclamation plans submitted by the mining companies. Violations were documented but rarely resulted in meaningful penalties. Fines, when imposed, were so small relative to the profits of the mining operations that they functioned as a minor cost of doing business rather than as a deterrent. Inspectors who wrote too many violations were transferred or pressured. Agency directors who enforced the law too aggressively were replaced.

The revolving door between the coal industry and the regulatory agencies was wide open and constantly spinning. Regulators left government to take lucrative positions with the companies they had been overseeing. Industry executives were appointed to lead the agencies that were supposed to regulate them. The line between the industry and its regulators blurred until, in many practical respects, it disappeared.

Primary Source Excerpt — Jack Spadaro, former superintendent of the National Mine Academy and MSHA investigator, interview with Salon (2004): "I've worked in mine safety and environmental regulation for thirty years, and I will tell you that the regulatory system in the coalfields is broken. It is not accidentally broken. It is deliberately broken. The coal companies write the permits. The state agencies rubber-stamp them. The federal agencies defer to the states. And when someone complains — a citizen whose water has been contaminated or whose house is cracking from the blasting — they are told to file a complaint with the same agency that approved the permit in the first place. The system is designed to produce the appearance of regulation while providing none of the substance."

Spadaro was removed from an investigation of the Martin County sludge spill (discussed later in this chapter) after his findings implicated the mining company and the regulatory agencies. His removal was widely viewed as retaliation for his unwillingness to soften the investigation's conclusions.

What It Did to the Water

The people who lived near mountaintop removal operations did not need EPA studies to tell them what was happening to their water. They could see it. They could taste it. They could smell it.

When a mountain is blasted apart and its rubble is dumped into a valley, the rock that was buried deep inside the mountain is suddenly exposed to air and water. This rock contains minerals that, when exposed to weathering, produce a range of toxic substances. Selenium, arsenic, lead, mercury, manganese, and sulfate are among the most common contaminants found in water downstream from mountaintop removal operations and valley fills. The chemistry is straightforward: minerals that were stable when locked inside the mountain become reactive when exposed to oxygen and water, producing acidic runoff loaded with heavy metals.

The contamination is not temporary. Valley fills continue to leach contaminants for decades — potentially for centuries — after mining is completed. The fills are essentially enormous piles of chemically reactive rubble sitting in what used to be stream channels. Every time it rains, water percolates through the fill, picks up contaminants, and carries them downstream. The contamination does not stop when the mining stops. It becomes a permanent feature of the watershed.

For the communities downstream, the consequences were immediate and devastating:

Drinking water contamination. Many communities in the coalfields relied on wells and springs for their drinking water. As mountaintop removal operations expanded, residents reported that their water turned colors — orange, brown, black — and developed chemical tastes and smells. Testing confirmed elevated levels of heavy metals and other contaminants. In community after community, people who had drunk well water for generations were told that their water was no longer safe. Some received bottled water deliveries from the coal companies — an acknowledgment, tacit if not explicit, that the mining had contaminated the supply. Others were simply told that the water met regulatory standards, even when they could see and smell that something was wrong.

Sedimentation and flooding. Valley fills altered the hydrology of the watersheds they occupied. Streams that had flowed through narrow, forested valleys now emerged from the base of enormous rubble piles — their flow patterns altered, their capacity to absorb floodwaters reduced. Communities downstream from valley fills experienced increased flooding, as the fills accelerated runoff during storms and reduced the natural water storage capacity of the valley.

Aquatic ecosystem destruction. The burial of headwater streams under valley fills did not just contaminate water — it eliminated entire aquatic ecosystems. Headwater streams are the birthplace of river systems. They are where aquatic insects lay their eggs, where salamanders breed, where the biological processes that sustain downstream ecosystems begin. When you bury a headwater stream, you do not just lose that stream — you degrade the entire watershed below it. The EPA's 2011 study on mountaintop removal found that streams below valley fills had significantly reduced biodiversity, lower populations of sensitive aquatic species, and elevated levels of contaminants compared to streams in unmined watersheds.

What It Did to the People

The health consequences of mountaintop removal for nearby communities have been documented in a growing body of epidemiological research — research that the coal industry has fought every step of the way.

The evidence is not ambiguous. Studies published in peer-reviewed medical and public health journals have found that communities near mountaintop removal operations have:

• Higher rates of cancer — including lung, kidney, and colon cancers — than communities in other parts of Appalachia or the nation
• Higher rates of cardiovascular disease
• Higher rates of respiratory illness, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and asthma
• Higher rates of birth defects — a study published in the journal Environmental Research in 2011 found that the rate of birth defects in mountaintop removal communities was 26 percent higher than in non-mining areas of Appalachia
• Lower life expectancy

Researchers at West Virginia University, the University of Kentucky, and other institutions found that these health disparities persisted even after controlling for other factors — poverty, smoking, age, access to healthcare — that might explain them. The studies consistently pointed to environmental exposure — contaminated water, contaminated air (coal dust, blasting dust, and particulate matter from mining operations), and the stress of living in a community under perpetual industrial assault — as the most likely explanation.

Michael Hendryx, a professor of public health at West Virginia University (later at Indiana University), conducted some of the most extensive research on the health impacts of mountaintop removal. His studies, published between 2008 and 2017, found consistent evidence of elevated mortality and morbidity in communities near mountaintop removal operations. "The evidence is as strong as it can be without a randomized controlled trial," Hendryx told a congressional hearing in 2009. "People who live near mountaintop removal mining die younger and get sicker. The pattern is consistent, it is dose-responsive — meaning the closer you live and the more mining there is, the worse the health outcomes — and it persists after you account for everything else."

The coal industry's response to this research was to attack the researchers. Industry-funded groups questioned the methodology, the sample sizes, the statistical techniques, and the motives of the scientists conducting the studies. This strategy — attacking the science rather than addressing the harm — was familiar. It was the same strategy the industry had used against the evidence on black lung disease, as described in Chapter 21. The tactics were updated, but the playbook was the same.

The community of Prenter Hollow in Boone County, West Virginia, became a symbol of what mountaintop removal did to the people who lived beneath it. Prenter was a small community in a narrow valley surrounded by mountaintop removal operations. Residents reported that their well water had turned black, that they were developing rashes and gastrointestinal problems, that an unusual number of their neighbors were being diagnosed with cancer. Six people on a single road in Prenter were diagnosed with brain tumors. The statistical probability of such a cluster occurring by chance in a community of that size was vanishingly small.

The residents of Prenter organized. They collected water samples. They documented their health problems. They filed complaints with the WVDEP. They contacted journalists. Their story was reported by CNN, the Associated Press, and other national media outlets. The coal companies denied responsibility. The state agency investigated and found that the water met regulatory standards — standards that the residents argued were inadequate.

The people of Prenter eventually received a municipal water line — a tacit acknowledgment that their well water was no longer safe. But the cancers, the respiratory diseases, and the other health consequences of decades of exposure did not go away because the water line arrived. The harm had been done.

Larry Gibson and Kayford Mountain: One Man's Stand

The story of Larry Gibson is told in greater detail in Case Study 1 of this chapter, but it must be introduced here because Gibson became the human face of the fight against mountaintop removal — a small, wiry, fiercely determined man who refused to sell his family's land on Kayford Mountain in Raleigh County, West Virginia, and spent the last two decades of his life fighting to save it.

Gibson's family had owned fifty acres on Kayford Mountain since the late 1700s. By the time Gibson began his fight in the 1990s, mountaintop removal operations had consumed nearly everything around his property. From the porch of his cabin, he could look out in every direction and see devastation — blasted rubble, gray ponds, the machinery of destruction. His fifty acres were an island of forest in a sea of rubble. The coal companies wanted his land. He refused to sell.

What Gibson did next changed the fight against mountaintop removal. He began bringing people to Kayford Mountain — journalists, politicians, students, activists, anyone who would come — and showing them the view from his porch. He understood that the coal industry's greatest advantage was invisibility. Most people could not see what mountaintop removal looked like. Gibson made them see it.

"They can't blow up these mountains if people know about it," Gibson told a gathering of students in 2006. "That's why they do it back in the hollers where nobody goes. They do it in the dark. My job is to turn the lights on."

Gibson was threatened. His cabin was vandalized. His dogs were shot. He received death threats. He was mocked in local newspapers and dismissed by industry spokespeople. He did not stop. He continued bringing people to Kayford Mountain until his death in 2012, at the age of sixty-six. After his death, the Keeper of the Mountains Foundation, the organization he had founded, continued to maintain his property as a public education site — a living demonstration of what mountaintop removal does to a landscape and the people on it.

The Martin County Sludge Spill: Bigger Than the Exxon Valdez

On October 11, 2000, at approximately 2:30 in the morning, a coal slurry impoundment near Inez in Martin County, Kentucky — a massive earthen dam holding back hundreds of millions of gallons of liquid coal waste — broke through into an abandoned underground mine beneath it. The slurry — a toxic black sludge of coal fines, water, and chemical processing agents — poured through the old mine workings and erupted from two mine portals on the hillside below the impoundment, sending approximately 306 million gallons of coal slurry into Coldwater Fork and Wolf Creek.

The spill was enormous. It was more than thirty times larger than the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989 — the disaster that had become the national benchmark for environmental catastrophe. The black slurry flowed downstream through Martin County, smothering more than seventy-five miles of streams, killing aquatic life, contaminating the drinking water supply for approximately 27,000 people, and leaving a thick coating of toxic sludge on everything it touched.

A coal slurry impoundment — sometimes called a sludge pond or slurry pond — is a dam built to hold the liquid waste produced by coal processing. When raw coal is washed and processed to remove impurities and increase its energy content, the process generates enormous volumes of wastewater laden with coal dust, silt, clay, and chemical additives. This wastewater is pumped into impoundments — earthen dams built across the heads of valleys, creating reservoirs of black, toxic liquid that can contain hundreds of millions of gallons.

There were, at the time of the Martin County spill, hundreds of slurry impoundments across the coalfields of West Virginia, Kentucky, and Virginia. Many of them were built on top of, or adjacent to, abandoned underground mines. Many of them held hundreds of millions of gallons of waste. Many of them were in valleys directly above communities.

The Martin County impoundment was operated by a subsidiary of Massey Energy, at the time the largest coal company in central Appalachia and one of the most aggressively anti-regulation companies in the industry's history. Massey's CEO, Don Blankenship, was a combative, politically connected operator who openly dismissed environmental regulations as government overreach and who would later be convicted of a federal conspiracy charge related to mine safety violations at the Upper Big Branch mine (discussed in Chapter 21).

The investigation of the Martin County spill revealed a pattern of regulatory failure that was, by this point, grimly familiar. The impoundment had been built over abandoned mine workings. The risk of breakthrough was known. A similar — though smaller — spill had occurred at the same site in 1994. The regulatory agencies — both state and federal — had been aware of the structural risks and had failed to require adequate remediation.

Jack Spadaro, a veteran federal mine inspector who was assigned to the investigation team, pushed for a thorough investigation that would hold Massey Energy and the regulatory agencies accountable. Spadaro was overruled by his superiors, who wanted a narrower investigation that would not embarrass the Bush administration's Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA). Spadaro went public with his concerns and was subsequently removed from his position, subjected to disciplinary proceedings, and effectively forced into retirement. His case became a textbook example of whistleblower retaliation — and of the lengths to which the regulatory establishment would go to protect the industry it was supposed to oversee.

The residents of Martin County received a settlement from Massey Energy — a pittance, by most accounts, relative to the damage they had suffered. The streams were "cleaned up" to the extent that a seventy-five-mile slurry spill can be cleaned up. The impoundment was repaired. Life went on.

But the Martin County spill revealed something that the people in the coalfields already knew: the coal industry was operating an infrastructure of waste disposal — hundreds of massive impoundments, many of them in poor structural condition, many of them sitting over abandoned mines, many of them directly above communities — that posed catastrophic risks. And the regulatory system was not merely failing to address those risks. It was actively preventing them from being addressed.

Primary Source Excerpt — Testimony of Donetta Blankenship (no relation to Don Blankenship), Martin County resident, before the House Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources (2007): "My family could not use our water for months after the spill. It came out of the tap black. My children broke out in rashes. My daughter had sores on her body. We boiled water and it was still black. The company gave us some bottled water and told us the water was safe. The state agency told us the water was safe. Nobody who told us the water was safe would have drunk it themselves."

Donetta Blankenship became a prominent advocate for coal slurry regulation, testifying before Congress and speaking at national environmental conferences about the health impacts on her family and community.

The Community Cost: Displacement, Despair, and Disappearance

Mountaintop removal did not just destroy mountains and streams. It destroyed communities.

The hollows of central Appalachia were not empty wilderness. They were places where people lived — where families had lived for generations, in many cases since the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. The hollow was the basic unit of Appalachian settlement, as established in Chapter 1. Families built homes along the creek at the bottom of the hollow, gardened the narrow bottomland, hunted the forested ridges above, and drew their water from the stream. The hollow was a community — a place where you knew your neighbors because your family had lived next to their family for a hundred years.

Mountaintop removal operations destroyed hollows systematically. The blasting cracked foundations, the dust coated everything, the water turned toxic, and the valley fills buried the streams that had been the hollow's lifeblood. Residents who did not want to leave were subjected to conditions that made staying unbearable: constant noise from blasting and heavy equipment, vibration that damaged their homes, dust that made breathing difficult, and water that was no longer safe to drink.

Some residents sold their land to the coal companies — often at prices that reflected the land's diminished value after years of mining-related damage. Others were effectively forced out by conditions they could no longer endure. Either way, the result was the same: the hollow emptied. The community that had existed there for generations ceased to exist.

The losses were not just material. They were cultural, spiritual, and psychological. When a hollow community is destroyed — when the cemetery where your grandparents are buried is surrounded by rubble, when the creek where you played as a child is buried under a valley fill, when the mountain that defined the horizon of your entire life has been removed — the loss is not reducible to property values or economic calculation. It is a loss of place, of identity, of connection to the land and the dead.

Psychologists who studied communities affected by mountaintop removal documented elevated rates of depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions. The term "solastalgia" — coined by the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht to describe the distress caused by environmental change in one's home environment — was adopted by researchers studying the psychological impacts on coalfield communities. People grieved for mountains the way they might grieve for a death in the family, because the mountain had been part of their family — part of their daily view, their water, their air, their sense of who they were and where they came from.

The Resistance: Citizens Who Fought Back

The resistance to mountaintop removal was led not by national environmental organizations — though those organizations eventually joined the fight — but by local people: community members, many of them women, many of them from families that had lived in the coalfields for generations, who decided that they would not allow their mountains and their communities to be destroyed without a fight.

The organizations that formed the backbone of the anti-mountaintop removal movement were rooted in the coalfield communities:

• The Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (OVEC), based in Huntington, West Virginia, organized flyovers, documentation campaigns, and legal challenges to mountaintop removal permits. OVEC's strategy of making mountaintop removal visible — bringing outsiders to see it, producing photographs and video, organizing media events — was central to breaking the industry's wall of invisibility.

• Coal River Mountain Watch, based in Whitesville, West Virginia, focused on the communities directly affected by mountaintop removal along the Coal River in Raleigh and Boone counties. Their organizers were from the communities they served — people who were fighting for their own homes, their own water, their own health.

• The Appalachian Citizens' Law Center, based in Whitesburg, Kentucky, provided legal representation to citizens challenging mining permits and seeking enforcement of environmental regulations. In a region where coal companies could afford armies of lawyers and citizens could not, the ACLC's work was essential.

• Appalachian Voices, based in Boone, North Carolina, worked across the region to document and publicize the impacts of mountaintop removal, building coalitions between coalfield communities and the broader environmental movement.

These organizations and others fought mountaintop removal on every available front: in the courts, challenging permits and seeking enforcement of environmental laws; in the legislatures, pushing for stronger regulations; in the media, documenting the destruction and telling the stories of affected communities; and on the ground, organizing community members to attend public hearings, file complaints, and make their voices heard.

The legal battles were complex, expensive, and frustratingly incremental. Citizens' groups won significant victories in federal court — including a 2007 ruling by Judge Robert Chambers of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia that struck down a Bush administration rule allowing increased valley fills — only to see those victories appealed, delayed, or undermined by subsequent administrative actions. The legal terrain shifted with each change in presidential administration, as Republican administrations generally weakened mountaintop removal regulations and Democratic administrations generally strengthened them.

But the resistance accomplished something that the coal industry had not anticipated: it made mountaintop removal a national issue. The combination of dramatic imagery, compelling personal stories, and persistent advocacy brought the practice to the attention of Americans who had never heard of it. By the late 2000s, mountaintop removal had become one of the most visible environmental issues in the country, covered extensively in national media, featured in documentary films, and debated in Congress.

Coal River Mountain: The Fight for an Alternative

One of the most compelling episodes in the fight against mountaintop removal was the battle over Coal River Mountain in Raleigh County, West Virginia — a fight that was not only about stopping destruction but about proposing an alternative.

Coal River Mountain Watch and its allies argued that Coal River Mountain — which was slated for a massive mountaintop removal operation by Massey Energy — could be used for wind energy development instead. They commissioned a study by a wind energy firm that demonstrated the mountain's ridgeline had sufficient wind resources to support a significant wind farm that would generate electricity, create jobs, and leave the mountain intact.

The proposal put the coal industry's economic arguments in sharp relief. The industry claimed that mountaintop removal was economically necessary — that it produced coal, generated tax revenue, and created jobs. The wind energy alternative offered the same benefits without destroying the mountain, burying the streams, or poisoning the communities below. It was a direct test of whether the region's future lay in continued extraction or in a transition to alternative energy.

The wind farm was never built. Massey Energy's mountaintop removal permit was approved. The blasting began. But the Coal River Mountain campaign demonstrated that the fight against mountaintop removal was not merely a defensive action — it was also a vision for a different future, one in which the mountains that remained could be the foundation for economic development rather than the raw material for it.

The Legal and Political Battlefield

The legal battles over mountaintop removal produced some of the most significant environmental law decisions of the early twenty-first century — and some of the most frustrating examples of how legal victories can be nullified by administrative action.

In Bragg v. Robertson (1999), a federal judge ruled that the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection had violated the federal Clean Water Act by approving valley fills without adequate environmental review. The decision was a landmark — the first time a federal court had directly challenged the regulatory framework that enabled mountaintop removal. But the ruling was subsequently narrowed on appeal, and the coal industry and its political allies responded by weakening the regulations rather than complying with the court's mandate.

The Spruce No. 1 mine in Logan County, West Virginia, became the focal point of one of the most dramatic regulatory battles in the history of mountaintop removal. The mine, one of the largest mountaintop removal operations ever proposed, would have destroyed approximately 2,278 acres of forest, buried more than seven miles of streams, and created one of the largest valley fills in Appalachian history. The permit had been approved during the George W. Bush administration.

In 2011, the EPA took the unprecedented step of revoking the mine's Clean Water Act permit — the first time the agency had ever used its veto authority to revoke a previously issued permit for a mining operation. The EPA's own scientific analysis had concluded that the mine's valley fills would cause unacceptable damage to downstream water quality and aquatic ecosystems.

The coal industry challenged the veto in court, arguing that the EPA had exceeded its authority. In 2014, a federal appeals court ruled in the EPA's favor, upholding the veto. But the legal battle had lasted for more than a decade, and the broader regulatory picture was one of perpetual uncertainty — rules written, rewritten, challenged, upheld, reversed, and rewritten again, with each change in presidential administration bringing a new set of regulatory priorities.

The Decline of Mountaintop Removal — And What It Left Behind

Mountaintop removal did not end because the legal battles were won or because the political system finally acted to protect Appalachian communities. It declined primarily for the same reason that much of the coal industry declined: natural gas.

The fracking revolution of the late 2000s and 2010s — the rapid expansion of hydraulic fracturing technology that unlocked vast reserves of natural gas trapped in shale formations — drove natural gas prices down to levels that made coal increasingly uncompetitive for electricity generation. Coal-fired power plants closed or switched to gas. Demand for Appalachian coal fell. Coal companies went bankrupt. Mining operations — including mountaintop removal operations — shut down.

The decline of mountaintop removal was a relief for the communities that had suffered under it. But it did not undo the damage. The mountains that had been removed were still gone. The streams that had been buried were still buried. The valley fills were still leaching contaminants into the water. The cancer clusters were still there. The communities that had been destroyed were still destroyed.

And the reclamation that had been promised — the restoration of the land to its "approximate original contour," the replanting of forests, the conversion of mined land to productive use — remained, in most cases, a fiction. Post-mining landscapes across central Appalachia stood as vast, barren plateaus of compacted rubble, covered in sparse, non-native vegetation, unable to support the biological communities that had existed before mining. A 2018 study published in the journal Science found that reclaimed mountaintop removal sites in Appalachia supported less than half the forest cover of their pre-mining condition, and that the forests that did grow on reclaimed sites were substantially less diverse and productive than the original forests.

The land was not healed. It was, in ecological terms, permanently diminished. A Appalachian hardwood forest that took centuries to develop cannot be restored by spreading grass seed on rubble. The biological complexity, the soil chemistry, the hydrological connections, the fungal networks, the thousands of species that composed the original forest ecosystem — all of it was gone, and none of it was coming back within any human lifetime.

The Anchor Examples: Mountaintop Removal's Reach

Each of this textbook's four anchor communities was affected by the mountaintop removal era, though in different ways:

Harlan County, Kentucky experienced mountaintop removal operations on its ridges, adding environmental destruction to the economic devastation described in earlier chapters. The combination of mine closures, mountaintop removal, and the health consequences of both left the county with fewer people, fewer jobs, and more environmental damage than at any point in its history.

McDowell County, West Virginia — already one of the poorest counties in America — saw mountaintop removal as the final chapter in a long history of extraction without return. The coal that remained in McDowell County was increasingly accessed through surface mining as underground operations closed. The rubble that replaced the mountaintops was no more useful to the county than the coal that left on the trains had been.

The New River Valley, Virginia was largely spared from mountaintop removal — the coal seams in the New River Valley were not as thick or as economically accessible as those in the central coalfields. But Virginia Tech researchers played important roles in studying the environmental and health impacts of mountaintop removal in other parts of the state, and the New River Valley's relative prosperity served as an implicit contrast to the devastated coalfields to the west.

Asheville, North Carolina was geographically distant from the mountaintop removal zone, but the city's growing environmental consciousness — and its tourism economy, which depended on the scenic beauty of the southern Appalachian mountains — made it a base for anti-mountaintop removal advocacy. Organizations in western North Carolina raised awareness and funds for coalfield communities fighting the practice.

The Moral Calculus: Who Benefited, Who Paid

The history of mountaintop removal in Appalachia is, at its core, the same story this textbook has been telling since Chapter 15 — the story of extraction. Outside capital came to the mountains, extracted the resource, and left the communities with the cost. The broad form deed, the company town, the black lung denial, the mine disasters — and now the removal of the mountains themselves — are all chapters in a single narrative of wealth being generated in Appalachia and exported out of it.

The coal extracted through mountaintop removal was burned in power plants across the eastern United States, generating electricity for cities and suburbs hundreds of miles from the coalfields. The profits from that coal flowed to corporate headquarters in Richmond, Charlotte, and St. Louis. The shareholders who benefited lived in Connecticut and California and London. The cost — the destroyed mountains, the buried streams, the contaminated water, the cancer, the displacement, the grief — was borne almost entirely by the people who lived in the coalfields.

This is not an accusation. It is an accounting. The arithmetic of mountaintop removal is straightforward: the benefits were exported and the costs were localized. The people who received the electricity did not have to look at what was done to produce it. The people who lived with the consequences could not escape them.

The People Who Are Still Fighting

The fight against mountaintop removal is not over. The practice has declined with the coal industry's decline, but the consequences remain, and new threats — natural gas pipelines, fracking operations, data center developments — continue the extraction pattern in new forms.

The organizations that were forged in the fight against mountaintop removal — OVEC, Coal River Mountain Watch, Appalachian Voices, the Appalachian Citizens' Law Center — have adapted to address these new challenges while continuing to push for the cleanup and genuine reclamation of mountaintop removal sites. The people who led the fight — many of them now in their sixties and seventies — have trained a new generation of organizers who carry the same commitment and the same anger.

The question that mountaintop removal poses to the rest of America is the same question that coal mining has always posed: Who pays? Who pays for the electricity that lights distant cities? Who pays for the profits that flow to distant shareholders? Who pays for the roads, the hospitals, the schools that serve the communities whose mountains were sacrificed?

That question has never been adequately answered. The people who live in the coalfields are still waiting.

Community History Portfolio Checkpoint

For your selected Appalachian county, investigate the following:

1. Surface mining history. Was surface mining (including mountaintop removal) practiced in your county? If so, what was the approximate acreage of surface mining permits? How many valley fills were created? What streams were affected? The OSMRE maintains records of surface mining permits that can be searched by county and state.

2. Water quality. Has your county experienced water quality issues related to mining — either from surface mining runoff, coal slurry impoundments, or other mining-related sources? Check the EPA's water quality monitoring data and your state's environmental agency records.

3. Community impact. Were any communities in your county displaced or significantly affected by surface mining operations? Look for oral histories, newspaper accounts, and county historical society records that document the experience.

4. Regulatory history. Review the surface mining permit history for your county. Were there permit violations? What were the penalties? Were there legal challenges to permits? The OSMRE's enforcement data and state regulatory agency records are primary sources for this research.

5. Current landscape. If possible, view satellite imagery of your county (Google Earth or similar) and identify any visible surface mining scars. Compare current imagery with historical aerial photographs or USGS topographic maps from before the surface mining era. Document the landscape change.

Write a 500-word assessment of how surface mining — if applicable — affected your county and its communities. If your county was not affected by surface mining, explain what was different about its geography, geology, or economic structure that prevented it.

Chapter Summary

Mountaintop removal mining represented the most extreme form of the extraction pattern that has defined Appalachian history since the arrival of the coal industry. By literally removing the tops of mountains and dumping the rubble into valleys, the practice destroyed more than 500 mountains, buried more than 2,000 miles of headwater streams, and contaminated the water supplies of hundreds of communities across central Appalachia.

The regulatory framework that was supposed to prevent this destruction — particularly the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 — failed because of industry-friendly loopholes, chronic underfunding of enforcement, and regulatory capture that turned oversight agencies into industry allies. Legal fictions like "approximate original contour" allowed the coal industry to destroy mountains while claiming to restore them.

The human cost was borne by the people who lived in the coalfields: contaminated water, elevated cancer rates, respiratory disease, community displacement, and the psychological devastation of watching the mountains that defined their world be blasted into rubble. The benefits — cheap electricity, corporate profits — were exported to distant cities and shareholders.

The resistance to mountaintop removal — led by people like Larry Gibson of Kayford Mountain, by organizations like the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition and Coal River Mountain Watch, and by thousands of citizen activists across the coalfields — broke the industry's wall of invisibility and made mountaintop removal a national issue. That resistance did not stop mountaintop removal — declining coal markets did — but it forced a reckoning with what was being done to the mountains and the people who lived on them.

The mountains that were removed are not coming back. The streams that were buried are not being unburied. The communities that were destroyed are not being rebuilt. The question of what America owes the places that were sacrificed for its energy supply remains unanswered.

In the next chapter, we turn to another institution that shaped Appalachian life and identity — education — from the one-room schoolhouses of the nineteenth century through the settlement schools that sought to "uplift" mountain communities, the Highlander Folk School that trained civil rights leaders, and the school consolidation battles that tore rural communities apart.