The Interior Department announced a new proposed rule Thursday that tackles the water pollution associated with coal mining — particularly mountaintop removal mining.
The proposed rule, which is now subject to a 60-day public comment period, will protect about 6,500 miles of streams across the U.S. from the impacts of coal mining, according to the Interior Department. Up until now, mining companies had been operating under rules that were written in the 1980s. “A lot has changed since then” in terms of technology and scientific understanding of coal mining’s environmental impact, Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell said in a press call Thursday.
The rule seeks to protect water sources from coal mining pollution in a few ways. First, if finalized, it would identify practices that pose the most risk to streams, drinking water, and forests and prohibit companies from engaging in those activities. It would also require more monitoring of stream health by coal companies, and lay out ways to gather pre-mining data on streams, so that an accurate baseline on stream health can be determined. The rule would also mandate that companies restore streams and land affected by mining to a condition that allows them to support the same level of life that they had before mining. That means replanting land alongside streams with native vegetation.
The goal of the rule, according to the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, is to “better protect streams, fish, wildlife, and related environmental values from the adverse impacts of surface coal mining operations and provide mine operators with a regulatory framework to avoid water pollution and the long-term costs associated with water treatment.” The agency also said that the rule would have “minimal impacts on the coal industry or electricity prices.”
The agency also hopes to clear up any industry confusion about mining regulations.
“The rule would make it clear which requirements apply to which types of streams, and how to determine what types of streams are present,” Janice Schneider, assistant secretary for land and minerals management at the Interior, said. “Because of this clarity, companies can better prepare and plan.”
The rule has been long-awaited by those concerned about the impacts mountaintop removal mining has on the environment and the communities that live nearby. Schneider said on a press call Thursday that the agency spent multiple years working on the rule because “we wanted to get this right.” Jewell added that the proposal “was subject to a very robust open public process.”
The agency will hold listening sessions in coal-heavy states to discuss the rule in the coming months.
Mountaintop removal mining has long been known to cause major environmental damage, especially to streams. The process, which involves blasting away the top part of a mountain to get to the coal seams underneath, creates excess rock and soil. That rock and soil waste often contains heavy metals, and is often dumped into streams and valleys, clogging up streams and killing the organisms that live in them. In 1999, Chief U.S. District Judge Charles H. Haden II wrote about the environmental harm inflicted upon streams from mountaintop removal mining.
“The normal flow and gradient of the stream is now buried under millions of cubic yards of excess spoil waste material, an extremely adverse effect,” the judge wrote. “If there are fish, they cannot migrate. If there is any life form that cannot acclimate to life deep in a rubble pile, it is eliminated. No effect on related environmental values is more adverse than obliteration.”
In the last two decades, mountaintop removal mining has buried nearly 2,000 miles of Appalachian streams and destroyed 500 mountains.
In recent years, mountaintop removal has been on the decline in the United States. But the practice still creates problems for communities that live near mining operations. A report published in April by environmental group Appalachian Voices found that these operations are encroaching on local communities, who are having to deal with the noise and water and air pollution that comes along with the operations. Long-term exposure to dust from mountaintop removal has been linked to an increased risk of lung cancer, and residents who live nearby mountaintop removal operations have called on the White House to do more to protect them from water pollution.
Environmental groups weren’t totally happy with the new rule, with several saying that, though the proposal does take some steps forward, they wished it had gone further to protect streams from mining impacts. The Sierra Club said in a statement that the proposal weakened a previous rule that prohibited mining activities within 100 feet of streams in Appalachia.
“Appalachian communities rely on the rivers and streams covered by these protections, and today’s proposal doesn’t adequately safeguard those communities,” Sierra Club Beyond Coal Senior Director Bruce Nilles said in a statement. “We need the federal government to create thoughtful stream protections that ban valley fills and ensure an end to this destructive practice.”
Center for American Progress Visiting Senior Fellow David J. Hayes, who served as Deputy Secretary of the Interior from 2009 to 2013, said in a statement that the proposed rule “addresses key defects in the current rules.”
“With a variety of alternatives outlined in the proposed rule, the public and all stakeholders now have an opportunity to weigh in and ensure that the final rule has the type of strong and clear protections that local communities have a right to expect from our government,” he said.