GAO: 2 Billion Cubic Yards of Mine Spoil Bury Hundreds of KY Watersheds

Strip mining in Eastern Kentucky is so overwhelmingly destructive in so many ways, that even the dry statistics in a government report have the power to shock.

Coal companies got approval to fill hundreds of hollows in Eastern Kentucky during the last decade, according to a new federal report.

Such fills, called hollow or valley fills, are controversial because they often bury stream areas.

Regulators gave coal companies permission to put up to 2.15 billion cubic yards of spoil — rock and dirt left over from mining operations — into 1,488 fills in Eastern Kentucky between 2000 and mid-2008, the U.S. Government Accountability Office said in a report issued this week.

Nearly all those were hollow fills, which are smaller and located higher in the watershed than valley fills, one official explained in the report.

SNIP

"I think it adds weight to the argument that the scope of the surface mining that has taken place and is taking place is truly massive," said Ed Hopkins, director of the Sierra Club's environmental quality program. "That is a huge amount of rock and dirt."

Tierra Curry, a Knott County native who is now a scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity, said there have been conservative estimates that 2,000 stream miles in Appalachia have been buried under hollow fills and valley fills. Mining also removes mature forests from large areas, she said.

"It is time to say enough is enough and end surface coal mining in Appalachia," Curry said.

Read the whole thing.