When was strip mining invented

Blasting and bulldozing had lowered ridges and mountaintops by as much as six hundred feet as well. A steep terrain with sharp contrasts between high ridges and low, stream-cut bottomland is becoming a muddled average of its original topography.

Where it has not been subjected to mountaintop removal, Appalachia is a region of slopes. There is precious little level ground aside from narrow ridgelines and narrower valleys locally called hollows. In the 10 percent of the study area that has been mined, a terrain dominated by steep hillsides has been replaced by a mix of plateaus with remnant or reconstructed hillsides that are shorter and blunter than before mining. The most common pre-mining landform was a slope with a pitch of 28 degrees, about as steep as the upper segments of the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Today, the most common is a plain with a slope of 2 degrees, that is, level but uneven. Across the entire study region, mining has filled a steep landscape with pockets of nearly flat ground.

For comparison, that is 32 times the volume of material that the Mount Saint Helens eruption deposited in the northern Cascades. He noted that 6. In place of mountains formed from layers of solid rock and coal, with a thin layer of dirt at the surface, there are now deep sinks full of compacted rubble, which works as a sponge.

As water lingers in the porous fills, it takes up chemicals from the shattered rock. It also absorbs alkalinity from carbonate stone that mining companies deliberately mix into overburden to prevent the disturbed stone from producing acidic runoff, which has turned many streams in mining regions bright orange and lifeless.

In the study region, streams emerging from valley fills are as much as an order of magnitude more alkaline than neighboring streams, and also show high levels of toxic selenium. The streams are not dead, unlike those in acid-runoff watersheds, but the mining pollutants reduce fish and plant life well downstream of the valley fills. Coal is an inexpensive source of energy, economically speaking, and a costly one in ecological terms. Its carbon emissions are the highest of any energy source.

In , coal accounted for 25 percent of American greenhouse gas emissions and 44 percent of global carbon emissions.

In the past few years, atmospheric carbon has continued its upward climb and now averages over parts per million. It was only around that it passed parts per million, the number scientists have converged on as the threshold of potentially catastrophic climate change. Twice, in and , federal district courts in West Virginia found that valley fills violated legal duties to protect streams.

In and , the federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, reversed those decisions, allowing valley fills to go forward. Those booms seem to be over. During the mid s, most counties in the Appalachian coal fields were dotted with hundreds of small surface mines. Small operators were often heavily in debt and light on experience. One unanticipated event could easily lead to a total business failure. In contrast, large operators supported local economies by providing large numbers of jobs, related infrastructure, and a local revenue stream.

From both the small and large operations I saw streams choked with sediment, and spoil and rocks dumped on the downslope in steep terrain. I witnessed the results of unpredictable blasting events and saw the exposed highwalls and abandoned entries that were left behind.

These failures to reclaim the land resulted from many failures in the system that existed then -- under-capitalized operators and highly variable regulatory standards and inconsistent enforcement from one state to the next. This created an economic advantage for operations in states with low reclamation standards or lax enforcement. In short, the reclamation principles now embodied by Congress under SMCRA were not used in a consistent way by state regulators or by the industry prior to its passage.

Chairman, you were there, and you don't need to be reminded that SMCRA was hotly debated, vetoed twice and remained controversial for years. Given this tense environment, it is amazing to me that the authors of the SMCRA had the foresight to see so far into the future and give us such a coherent framework in a very complex document. SMCRA leveled the playing field in a number of ways. It standardizes coal mining and reclamation regulations from State to State. It assures that coal mining operations in one State do not have an economic advantage over operations in another State.

It requires the companies to take responsibility for the impacts of their operations. Perhaps most importantly, it requires that citizens have a voice in the permitting process, enforcement of regulations, and rulemaking. The State agencies just could not imagine someone telling them how to permit or inspect operations within their boundaries.

The coal operators disliked OSM even more and often attempted to play us and the states against each other. Finally, there were the citizens. They were upset because they thought we should put an end to all surface coal mining operations. Despite the resistance to change, OSM inspectors marched on. If someone threatened us, we figured they were just having a bad day; if our tires were flattened, we simply changed the tire; if we were refused entry at the mine, we returned with the U.

We did not go away, and slowly, we began to see a change. In those early years, OSM experienced one of its first course corrections. Initially, each violation carried a mandatory civil penalty that increased daily if operators did not comply.

Very soon, using our enforcement authority, OSM had issued thousands of violations and assessed millions of dollars in unpaid federal civil penalties. However, OSM was doing little to compel compliance beyond requiring cessation of operations, and basically nothing was done to collect outstanding penalties from the under-capitalized small operations that found it easier to quit than to comply, particularly when facing penalties that were increasing each day.

Further, some of those same individuals that abandoned sites created new companies and came right back in business under a new name. Citizens groups sued OSM because of the huge backlog of unpaid fines that had developed. In , OSM revised its rules to place a cap on penalties for unabated violations and required the use of one or more alternative tools to achieve compliance.

Soon after, my job changed from being an inspector to being an investigator for a task force created specifically to deploy one of those alternative tools from the tool bag Congress gave us in Section c of SMCRA. This provision authorizes OSM to compel individuals who own or control coal mines to correct violations attributable to a corporate permittee. Members of the task force worked closely with the Solicitors Office to determine if owners or controllers had sufficient corporate or personal assets for us to compel them to reclaim the land.

That Task Force and resulting case law established the principle that the ability to control a coal mine creates the duty to comply with environmental aspects of SMCRA.

I investigated a number of these cases and when it was all said and done the result was thousands of acres of land reclaimed and collection of many outstanding penalties. Nonmetallic substances that are commonly mined but not considered to be ores include coal , phosphate, and sand and gravel.

The term groundwater mining is sometimes Earth movers strip mining for coal in West Virginia. Photograph by Chris Jones. Stock Market.