Kentucky Still Letting Coal Companies Pollute Water

Thirty years ago, Kentucky received "primacy," or primary responsibility, for enforcing the federal surface mining reclamation law.

Today, the coal industry's violations of that law are so common, extensive and blatant that the Commonwealth might lose primacy, giving enforcement responsibility back to the feds.

From the Herald:

Four environmental advocacy groups said Thursday that they have found widespread fraud in the monitoring of water-pollution discharge by Kentucky's two largest strip-mine operators.

The groups have filed a notice of intent to sue International Coal Group of Knott County and Hazard and Frasure Creek Mining for more than 20,000 violations of the federal Clean Water Act over two years.

SNIP

"We have just learned today of these allegations, which we take seriously," said Dick Brown, spokesman for the state Energy and Environment Cabinet. "We will look further into the issues raised in the notice by these groups."

SNIP

Discharge monitoring is important to the health of residents who use the water receiving the pollution, said Ted Withrow, a former state water-quality monitor and a member of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth. Manganese, for example, is being discharged into Kentucky streams at toxic levels and can cause learning disabilities in children and is fatal to aquatic life.

Regulatory agencies in Kentucky are not doing an adequate job of reviewing discharge-monitoring reports, said Donna Lisenby of Appalachian Voices, the North Carolina group that initiated the investigation.

Appalachian Voices partnered with Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, Waterkeepers Alliance and Kentucky Riverkeeper of Berea to make the filings.

Lisenby said in an interview that the group targeted Kentucky because its regulators and operators have not received the same level of third-party scrutiny as West Virginia, where litigation has amped up in an effort to end surface mining there.

Meanwhile, the EPA just slapped the state down for issuing bad permits:

In its latest crackdown on pollution from coal mining in Appalachia, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has objected to 11 Kentucky water discharge permits, saying they fail to protect eastern Kentucky waterways from further degradation.

The letters from the EPA office in Atlanta to the Kentucky Division of Water detailed the state’s own assessment of poor water quality and said state regulators did not conduct analyses to determine whether the proposed discharges from new surface mining would likely violate state water quality standards. EPA officials also said the state failed to include pollution limits in the permits.

In 1966, Kentucky passed the nation's first law regulating surface mining of coal. The 1977 federal law was in many ways modeled on Kentucky's groundbreaking law, although in other ways it was less strict than Kentucky's.

It's to the Commonwealth's eternal shame that in 44 years it has devolved from a strong defender of Kentucky's land and people from rapacious coal companies to the obedient lap dog of even more rapacious companies.