Longwall Mining from The Center for Public Integrity

Undermined

2012-05-30T19:39:54-04:00

Rebecca Foley, by contrast, seems desperate to discuss that topic. Sitting at a cluttered desk in her library, she talks a blue streak about the seven-year battle that she’s waged against Consol Energy, the owner of Dilworth Mine. A petite nurse whose golden locks and ruby cheeks belie the warrior within, Foley, 50, lives atop a ridge in Jefferson, just west of the Hatfield’s Ferry coal-fired power plant (among the state’s 10 dirtiest). She moved to the basin in 1986 from the Virginia side of

Washington, D.C., in the hope of escaping the urban tussle. She bought her 1890s house in April 1994 — two months before Act 54 would repeal the safeguards for historic homes — and spent the next five years restoring it, stripping eight rooms, sinking $250,000 into the project. By 1999, not a crack could be found — until the longwall machine arrived.

It took a week for the machine to chew the coal beneath her property. If Foley hadn’t known that it was there, she’d never have suspected the presence of the whirling mechanism. Houses don’t rumble or drop with a thud. Subsidence comes slowly, like a ripple. Foley first noticed its mark on June 22, 1999, when she discovered what she describes as “this unsightly scene”: a gaping crack in the wall, running from the ceiling, three feet long. She remembers peering through it to the outside. She jotted a description on paper labeled “Mining Damages.” Over the next six days, she added more entries, 34 of them in all, including, for example, these:

Master Suite — marble panels pulling away from east wall

Outside of the House — stone addition pulling away from brick

structure

Foundation—cracks with heaving in 2 areas.

Over the years, things got worse — the cracks kept widening; the addition, falling. Foley has done cosmetic work to patch the disrepair, stuffing insulation into holes, hiding them with duct tape and paint-able wallpaper. She’s had to do something because, she says, “It gets very disheartening looking at all these cracks and plaster drops all day.”

As Foley points out the wreckage — noting fractures that inspire nightmares about her house sinking into the abyss — it becomes apparent how insidious longwall mining can be for those on the surface. There are the never-ending disruptions, starting with a letter from Consol or Foundation that starts, “This Notice is sent to you in accordance with ....” The note informs you that a local mine is conducting operations underneath your property, and that the operations could happen anytime in the ensuing six months to five years. At first, a company agent knocks on your door. Scientists then trek through your home, surveying conditions, testing water supplies. Often, the agent appears again — this time, to plug your gas well. You may have to stand by idly as contractors bring bulldozers onto your land, felling your trees, clearing your fields. Then, one day, the longwall machine is moving beneath you and, if you end up like the unlucky ones who’ve reported damages to the state (1,819 at last count), your property is falling apart.

“You feel violated,” is how Ken Hupp puts it. The building contractor lives above Mine 84, in Amwell Township, and has watched the brick house that he built himself drop two inches after the steel shearer passed underneath in February 2006. Hupp and his family didn’t lose their house, although the same cannot be said of their swimming pool. “This has destroyed our lives,” he says. “You’re like prisoners.”

For folks in the coalfields, longwall anxiety can become all-consuming. Many sleepless nights and perhaps heart attacks and strokes have resulted from the longwall experience. Everyone, it seems, has a story about someone suffering from some stress-provoked disease because of it. Hupp believes that his wife, Marsha, has worried herself sick. She was diagnosed with a brain tumor the weekend the mining started, after living in fear of it for years. Laurine Williams, an 82-year-old whippersnapper who lives with her husband, Murray, above Emerald Mine, has fought Foundation for a decade. When they were undermined in March 2001, an event that sunk the house five inches and dislodged 15,000 bricks, she developed asthma for the first time and he, shingles. Foley, too, has bouts of the “three Ds”—“Distressed, Depressed, and Defeated.” She’s gnawed her teeth so hard her crowns have chipped, causing her to lament the “inhumane” way the companies treat people. “The pain and suffering,” she says, “has been so covered up.”

So is the extent of the ruin. Since the practice affects only a handful of landowners at any give time, its destruction can seem limited. But that would be an illusion. Over an 87-mile span, I walked into buildings with shattered foundations, crooked roofs, split beams, broken bricks, shunted doors, and cracked plaster. I saw structures that had tilted 13 inches and fallen five. I even saw wallpaper torn asunder by walls torquing behind it. Virtually every structure above a longwall mine suffered some subsidence. One house, still in disrepair, will cost $113,000 to fix. The compensation tab on another registered $300,000; yet another, $320,000. In a 2001 study of underground mining, the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) calculated the average cost of structural damage by longwall mines at $79,000, based on a limited number of reports.

And that’s a fraction of the plunder. There are countless acres of “slippage,” as the locals describe the phenomenon, where hillsides open up like draining bathtubs. Sometimes, the earth dips where it didn’t before. Other times, it drops inches. People have stuck yardsticks into land cracks without touching bottom. When the longwall machine erupts the surface, it takes the water, too, which drains through crevices by force of gravity. Sources may reappear yards away but, for landowners, they’re gone. Everyone knows someone who has lost a well or a spring. Others have fared worse. Hupp’s daughter, Marcy, lives next door to him on 17 acres; longwall mining dispossessed her of nine springs. The Williamses were deprived of two springs and a pond, which tilted and turned into a silt pool. Their neighbor, Dick Patterson, a cattle farmer who resides 250 feet above Emerald Mine, has watched all seven of the springs he’d developed dry up. Meanwhile, 23 stretches over 97 miles of stream have dammed, diminished, or disappeared.

“I have a hard time explaining to my kids this is okay,” Kim Jones says, motioning toward the dry rock where her children, Kaitlyn and D.J., jump around. They’re playing in what used to be a gushing stream that cut across the 62-acre farm in Wind Ridge, above the Bailey Mine’s 1I panel. The flow meandered through their acreage fast enough to sustain three waterfalls year-round. The falls are gone now, as is the sound of any ripple. “We’re taught from a young age to believe [that] what is put here is by God,” she goes on, as her children stomp on the depleted ground. “So how do I justify to my kids that the taking of our water is fine?”

The daughter of a coal miner, Kim, 43, has round, obsidian eyes that blaze with indignation whenever she recounts what her family

has endured. She and her husband, Kenny, a hulking 46-year-old with a humble demeanor, moved to this village in 1993 to settle into a quiet, agrarian life. Ten years later, they were duking it out with Consol over possession of gas wells, a fight that persists in court today. Since the longwall machine went beneath their property in early 2004, the Joneses have lost wells for not only gas, but also water. They believe it defiled their wood-framed house—hence the ceiling cracks and plaster drops. But what they consider their biggest loss is the beloved stream, which disappeared once the steel shearer came. Scientists say every flow reacts differently to the method: some get de-watered; others lessen in force; still others pool up. Kenny discovered that his creek had drained after trekking to its banks to feed the wild deer. He and Kim walked its length, taking in the drought, recording the broken rock. Consol later sent geologists to monitor Tributary #32596; their pictures show the bed rising, empty, in all four seasons.

Three years later, the company began “restoring” the creek. In her yard, Kim points to a pipe that Consol is using to finish its

state-required remediation. It’s running the line about a mile to the dried stream, where it will unleash public water. The Joneses, like so many in the coalfields, don’t exactly want “city water,” replete with the iron, manganese, and chlorine found in municipal supplies. They especially don’t want it pumped into their stream, as has happened to other runs in the area. But that won’t stop the coal companies from doing it — or the DEP from letting it. Consol scientists say the company pumps water from springs, wells, and public lines into local streams to maintain the ecosystem and, in the words of its hydrogeologist, Joshua Silvis, “to keep the channels wet, as required by law.” It de-chlorinates and aerates the public water first. “Our view is these mitigation techniques will be effective,” Silvis has told me, “and the state has agreed.” On this August 2007 afternoon, contractors have laid the groundwork for the pipe, drilling holes in the bed, filling them with an epoxy grout. Standing on a patch of the gray stuff, the Joneses look as if they’re walking on pavement.

However the remediation turns out, the brook has forever changed for this family. Gone are the days Kim and Kenny would walk along its banks with their daughter, Kaitlyn, now 14. The girl skipped rocks, scoured for salamanders, and marveled in the sight

of deer and turkey. “It was fun,” she says, wistfully. Since the stream vanished, she’s noticed the wildlife don’t come around, and the only salamanders she finds are dead. “I had so much fun in that stream. I said, ‘Mom, what about D.J.?’” Kaitlyn continues, referring to he sixyear-old brother. “He might have seen a dry stream, but he’s never going to experience what I have. I feel bad for him.”

While kids mourn the loss of their childhoods, adults have mourned the loss of something more tangible — their livelihoods. Indeed, among the many hit by longwall mining, the local farmer has suffered big blows. Folks who cultivate produce and breed livestock around here are small-time agriculturists whose 45, 95, or 135 acres represent a fraction of the commercial farms in central Pennsylvania. They can make money off their land, but most work full-time jobs, too. Every farmer knows a colleague who’s had to

grapple with fallout from the longwall machine. They’ve had water dams dry up, cornfields flood, and ranch fences slip down hillsides, freeing 70-strong herds. They’ve noticed their land become harder to till and pastures tougher to cut. Farmers yet to be undermined fear the gamble that comes with it — the way it can suck water from the earth and, in the process, render their land worthless.

King Coal has hobbled the most stubborn clodhoppers. Dick Patterson, the cattle farmer who lost his springs, has 70 cows grazing on 203 acres that he owns and rents, as compared with the 100 cows and 500 acres he’d maintained before the mining in the winter of 2002. He’s had to “raise hell” with Foundation executives to get something like the flow he once enjoyed; currently, the company pumps city water into a pipeline that serves eight fountains for the cows. The animals lap up more than a thousand gallons a day — enough to put Patterson out of business were he covering the cost. Twelve miles north, across the county line, Ellen and Ed Walker (not their real names) are fruit growers whose 121 acres overlie three longwall panels and a conventional corridor for a nearby colliery. They’ve seen their operations shrivel from 90 acres of apples, peaches, and berries to just nine today, largely because of the mining. The longwall machine chewed the coal along the Walkers’ property three times — in 2001, 2002, and 2003 — and took two irrigation sources. The stream they’d dammed subsided; their pond sloped south (the two springs flowing into it also vanished). Both water supplies are now overgrown with green algae; the stream has turned orange. Since they can’t irrigate crops with bad water, the Walkers have had to reduce not just their fruit fields but their vegetable gardens — from 10,000 tomato plants down to 600, for example.

The Walkers have survived, but others haven’t been so lucky. Harold Van Druff is one such person. Rocking in his porch swing, Van

Druff, a squat 76-year-old with a deep, soporific voice, reminisces about the good old days on his 66-acre farm, when he ranked

among Greene County’s top dairymen. In 1956, he took over the Kirby homestead that his forebears had run for two generations, and ventured into the milk business. He pumped 50 cows by hand until the ’70s, when he installed a pipeline and upped production to 8,000 pounds a day. Now, save for the weathered barn’s “Drink Milk” sign and the Dairy Farm Road address, you’d never guess he had a creamery. The dairy cows have faded, a decade-old casualty of longwall mining.

In September 1996, Van Druff was getting it from all sides. Cumberland Mine had come at his property from the west; Blacksville 2, from the south. Subsidence shook most of his structures — the barn, silos, and milk plant — but what did him in was the water loss. It started with his 100-foot well, which lost water and grew polluted with methane gas. Then the cows’ reservoir went dry. Consol hauled municipal water to the farm in two 1,500-gallon tanks twice a week. When the cows first drank it, they got sick. Van Druff figured out that the chlorine was killing bacteria in the animals’ udders, so he fed them yeast and nursed them back to health. It wouldn’t be the last of his troubles. Dairy farmers cannot ship milk unless their water meets government health standards. When inspectors tested the public water, Van Druff recounts, “I had constant problems.” Sitting in those tanks, it collected algae and contaminants. Van Druff can’t remember passing a single inspection. He kept delaying deliveries and losing money. By year’s end, he did what he’d never expected to do: He sold his dairy cows.

“I had cows I was real proud of. These weren’t a bunch of animals on a farm. Giving them up was hard for me,” he says, trailing off. To salvage his farm, Van Druff substituted 25 beef cattle for the dairy cows. But things remained tough — his income plummeted; his creditors sent foreclosure papers. Eventually, Consol paid him six figures for the longwall damage, which hasn’t made up for his lost dairy checks. Nowadays, Van Druff earns about $15,000 a year from his 100-strong herd — one-fifth what he made on the creamery. He drives a school bus for $72 a day to bring in extra money. “Oh jeepers,” he exclaims, with a sigh. “The stress is hard on you. You think you’re getting along good, and then this happens. You just break down and cry.”

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Small-time farmers are no match for the corporate giants of the coal industry — unlike, say, agribusiness giants such as Archer Daniels Midland or Del Monte would be. Still, the longwall machine has managed to wipe out farms — and anything else above its path—with help from the state agency that’s charged with protecting Pennsylvania’s citizenry and environment: the Department of Environmental Protection. In implementing Act 54, the DEP’s mining bureau has the authority to deny permits in key instances: first, if the longwall method is likely to cause “irreparable damage to buildings”; and second, if it is likely to cause “material damage” to certain water bodies. Environmental regulations for “pollution” in streams — including loss of flow — also apply. But the division has rarely rescinded approval for a de-watered stream (one known case in 10 years), let alone for structural havoc. According to environmental activists, the industry plays the system so well that it’s got the bureau in its pocket, working on behalf of the mines rather than the public. Why else would regulators allow coal companies to take the water from farms, like Van Druff ’s, and alter an ecosystem? Or destroy perennial streams, like the Joneses’, and patch them up with artificial materials? Or move the longwall machine under historic houses, like Foley’s, and shake apart their foundations?

“The mining office sees its main purpose as facilitating mining,” says Tom Buchele, the director of the environmental law clinic at the University of Pittsburgh, “not protecting the health and safety of the public and environment.”

Buchele, who describes longwall mining as “the gorilla in the room in southwestern Pennsylvania,” and his students have represented more than a half-dozen residents of Greene and Washington counties in complaints filed with the DEP against coal companies. What’s struck him about the cases is how reluctant the department seems to be to rule against the industry. He’s seen the pattern play out since his first complaint, in 2003, involving a landowner whose well drained within six weeks of the longwall machine’s visit. Inspectors chalked it up to drought and shoddy upkeep — despite the well’s 200-year track record. “The DEP won’t [rule] against coal companies unless the evidence is overwhelming — almost beyond a reasonable doubt,” he says, “and that’s an impossible hurdle for landowners.”

William Plassio, the manager of the DEP’s mining bureau, declined my requests to be interviewed for this article. In response to a list of 12 questions, the DEP’s press office provided a seven-page statement outlining provisions of Act 54 and other environmental rules governing the agency’s oversight of longwall mining. “The actions of the DEP are based on law and regulation” — a law that permits impacts to people’s properties and water supplies, the statement says, adding that “the DEP actively and fully enforces environmental requirements,” citing such actions as “ordering mining companies to restore or replace water supplies and . . . to pay compensation for structure damage.” The agency has also set up a program of subsidence agents to help landowners understand their legal rights, which it calls “very successful.” As the statement has it, “The DEP takes action to require mine operators to meet their statutory duties to landowners prescribed by” Act 54.

But citizens who try to reclaim what the longwall machine took away can end up in the throes of a confusing regulatory system—

only to be left with illogical DEP rulings. Consider the Joneses, who lost their stream to Bailey Mine. On the one hand, the agency determined the mining had sucked the water from the brook and the family’s well, blaming subsidence “in a fragile hydrogeologic setting.” On the other hand, the DEP concluded that the activity didn’t cause the ceiling cracks and plaster drops inside the house because it sits too far from the longwall panel — even though it’s closer (at 700 feet) than the well (at 760). Or take the Walkers, the farmers whose irrigation sources faltered. In May 2003, a year after the machine had gnawed their property 600 feet north and was still gnawing it 40 feet south, Ellen saw what she suspects is subsidence in her 192-year-old house — new wallpaper wrinkled and then split in half outside the seam, for instance. There was also the water trouble. The mine denied liability and, except for the pond, the DEP would agree.

Never mind that the farm is located within the so-called “presumptive zone,” where water damage is presumed to have come from

mining. Act 54 defines the area as a 35-degree angle from a mine; the Walkers’ pond and stream sit 15 degrees from the nearest longwall panels. Never mind that the mine didn’t survey their house before mining — a violation for which it was fined $750. Inexplicably, state inspectors attributed the wreckage to “age of the structure” and “soil shrinkage,” among other factors. Ellen remembers a DEP official telling her that the wallpaper had ripped because of the glue; another said the stream dam had sunk because of tree roots.

“DEP officials don’t have any concern for the average landowner,” says John McGinnis, a 62-year-old entrepreneur who lives above Mine 84’s 3B and 4B panels. “They’re more like middlemen standing between you and the mine.”

Sitting on the porch of his 1880s farmhouse overlooking his 100 acres, McGinnis is a former Marine whose neck turns red whenever he starts in on his four-year battle with Consol. Proprietor of a Pittsburgh food emporium, he moved to the hollow in 1988 seeking the perfect farm. By 2001, he’d gotten notice from the coal company about the mining, setting off the cycle of disruptions. When the longwall machine arrived in April 2004, it totaled the house, three springs, a well, and a pond. “I don’t like anyone stepping on my chest,” he says, explaining why he’s refused to settle with Consol and instead exercised the limited rights afforded landowners in Act 54.

The law requires that landowners report suspected longwall damage to the mines first, a provision that coal executives insist benefits citizens more than it does them. “When I undermine your house, I know it. You know it. All we have to decide is what I owe you,” says Hoffman, of Consol (the only coal company that agreed to comment for this article). “It’s not true that the system is set up with decks stacked against the individual landowner.”

What is true is that you, as an individual landowner, have to negotiate with a major corporation. Under Act 54, you have to sit at the table for at least six months before you can turn to the state for help. Sometimes, the company’s agent fails to inform the DEP about your report — a violation, in McGinnis’s case, for which Consol received official warning. Other times, you have to call and write the agent for months before discovering that the firm has denied responsibility for the damage or low-balled repairs. To challenge its position, you must go to the DEP, which can force payments. You then have to deal with numerous inspectors — subsidence agents, geologic specialists — peering into your private spaces. McGinnis has hired experts — an attorney, an engineer — to help him navigate the process. In July 2007, the DEP ordered Consol to pay him $506,041 for damage to two barns, a shed, and the house, which tilts a dizzying eight feet.

McGinnis hasn’t seen results with his water complaint, however. It may be arrogant for the coal company to dismiss the tie between longwall mining and what happened to his springs and pond — they, like his house, are no longer the same. Right before the mining, he videotaped the springs spilling into his pond. On the tape, the sound of trickling water resonates as he squats at the pond’s edge, his hand immersed in blue liquid. He states, prophetically, “It’d be a real shame to lose this natural resource.” Now, with those springs dried up, the pond has become stagnant, shallow, riddled with duckweed. Consol has argued that the pond never went dry, so the mining hasn’t harmed it. And although Act 54 requires the company to restore water supplies, the DEP has ruled in its favor. The mining bureau seems so willing to back the industry, in fact, that it’s broken agency regulations. In August 2007, its officials ordered Consol to dam another spring on McGinnis’s land that had slid downhill after the mining so as to provide a drinking trough for his 47 cattle. McGinnis had heard that the state doesn’t allow anyone to alter a flow without a permit, so he called the DEP’s watershed division. “I was told,” he recalls, “ ‘Absolutely not — you can’t mess with that creek.’” Only after he wrote the bureau an August 11, 2007, letter — refusing liability for the dam and relaying that his cows weren’t so much drinking the spring as urinating in it — did inspectors change course.

If McGinnis wanted to contact his legislators for help, it’d do him little good. The coal industry pretty much runs the politicians here, though no one will admit it. Mining interests have lined the pockets of elected officials with campaign cash in every way since 2000; by 2007, there were contributions from FORCE ($139,525), the UMWA ($130,459), the Pennsylvania Coal Association ($321,622), and executives at Consol ($253,207) and Foundation ($51,926). They’ve funneled some of that cash into the campaign coffers of the area’s four state lawmakers — Senator Barry Stout, as well as Representatives Bill DeWeese, Pete Daley, and Tim Solobay. Stout, a Democrat who’s served the 46th district for three decades, has raised more money from King Coal than his House counterparts, raking in $32,050 over the past seven years. Twice, the industry has topped his list of market donors. DeWeese, the 32-year Greene County representative and powerful House Majority Leader, has received $15,550 in all. In 2006, in a tight reelection race, he raked in more donations from mining interests, $7,100, than all but one state legislator. Daley and Solobay, two Democrats representing Washington County who’ve been members of the Coal Caucus, took in $8,700 and $8,400. Some politicians have benefited from the coal economy directly. To wit: GDR Management, an affiliate of a firm once headed by Stout’s brother and now by his nephew, has contracted with Consol to turn 1,385 acres above Mine 84 into a housing and office complex, complete with a golf course.

“I’m not doing anything I feel is improper,” Stout told me recently when asked about his ties to coal companies. “I try to be fair and balanced on all issues . . . I’m not in the pocket of any industry.” Solobay (the only other legislator to respond to interview requests) has echoed this sentiment. “I wouldn’t hold back on criticizing the industry simply because I receive campaign contributions from it,” he’s said. “I feel strongly about my integrity. . . . I don’t accept political contributions at the expense of the people.”

King Coal flexes its political muscle in subtler ways as well. Companies curry favor with the locals through “good neighbor” initiatives meant to burnish their image. There was Foundation’s 2006 donation of $200,000 to remodel a Greene County water park, now named the Foundation Coal Aquatic Center. In July 2007, the company’s executives hosted a dedication ceremony, offering free entry, cutting ribbons with Stout and DeWeese. There was Consol’s 2007 purchase, for an undisclosed sum, of naming rights to a local baseball stadium. All summer, the minor league team played in Consol Energy Park while fans brandished Consol Energy bobblehead figurines. And then there were the perks intended to brush up community relations. Scott Finch, a supervisor in Morris Township, whose 2,090 residents have protested the encroaching footprints of the Bailey and Enlow Fork mines, recalls that while Consol was seeking a permit for a proposed coal facility, the company asked him and his fellow supervisors for a “wish list” of possible contributions. The board demurred, though soon after, Consol pledged $150,000 to the township’s fire department toward purchase of a state-of-theart rescue vehicle. When Consol fixed longwall damages at the park of East Finley Township, officials say, the company did more than fill in the sunken field. It built barbecue pavilions, erected playground equipment, and relocated an historic covered bridge, among other things. In the summer of 2007, at the grand opening, which cost Consol $5,400, festivities included a clown, a magic show, and free burgers for all 1,489 residents. Township supervisors got to feast on a free steak dinner, during which they unveiled an $80,000 dump truck paid for, in part, by Consol.

“People will villainize the coal company,” says Evan Mungai, the district manager for Bailey and Enlow Fork mines, who oversaw the rehabilitation of the park. “But the things we do go so far above and beyond what we’re required to do.”

J. Brett Harvey, Consol’s chief executive officer, has trumpeted these efforts in press releases as well. “We take pride in Consol Energy serving as one of the good business news stories in western Pennsylvania,” he’s said. “We are deepening our commitment to the region by working to add to the quality of life of our employees, their families, and our neighbors.”

It’s no surprise that the industry would push its spin every chance it gets. What bothers people in the coalfields is the way politicians regurgitate the messages. Like when Representative Solobay tells me that tighter controls on the longwall method would lead, inevitably, to job losses. “A lot of products utilize coal,” he says, sounding a lot like a Consol spokesperson, ticking off everything from steel to perfume. “The whole tree of products that stems out of coal is very extensive.” Both the representative and his Senate counterpart defend Act 54 as a fair and effective piece of legislation that’s only strengthened the protections for landowners; before 1994, they note, the coal industry didn’t have to replace water supplies when mining under post-’66 houses. Stout, who voted for Act 54, admits that longwall mining has negatives — “You change the surface water flow; you destroy people’s homes.” But he maintains that the law now provides all homeowners with safeguards while enabling the industry to use modern technology. Act 54 “is not perfect — nothing is perfect,” he says, “but it’s worked pretty effectively so far.”

Neither lawmaker seems much of a crusader for folks in the coalfields. Stout, for one, mentions that “thousands of my constituents” work in the mines, and thousands more in related fields. “I am looking out for their interests,” he says, candidly, sitting in his district office, in Eighty-Four, Pennsylvania, just three miles down the road from Mine 84. Asked about his other constituents — the ones who may feel jilted by the status quo—he replies: “There are people who maybe feel disgruntled . . . There are always going to be complaints, but you try to have a system that works for the majority.” Solobay, for his part, paints the critics as, in essence, frauds. “In all fairness,” he says, “many times people look at the coal companies as deep pockets, and they try to get more money than they deserve.” He’s toured houses whose hairline cracks, he says, don’t look anything like they came from a longwall machine. “I’ve thought, ‘That’s old and you’re looking to make an issue of it.’” The average landowner may not take advantage of the coal companies, he concedes, “but there are people who game the system.” He adds: “I know people who have built brand-new homes or who have gotten city water out of this and now don’t have to deal with wells. They’re happy, so it all depends on what side you look at the issue.”

Coalfield-justice activists relay anecdote after anecdote of fruitless efforts to gain the attention of lawmakers. They’ve made phone calls, sent e-mails, and written letters decrying longwall mining. They’ve shown up at district offices loaded down with documents. They’ve chartered buses to the statehouse for “coalfield communities” days. There, they’ve witnessed King Coal’s clout on display: a framed photograph of House leader DeWeese with UMWA workers that read “Remember who got you here”; a miniature hardhat for Representative Solobay stenciled with the black letters “FORCE.” At home, politicians have shaken their heads in dismay on field trips showcasing the longwall devastation, only to do nothing for change. The sole local legislator to champion the cause — Dave Levdansky, a Democrat whose 39th district dips into Washington County — sponsored a bill in 2004 that would have modified Act 54. It died in committee.

“People in this area are really P.O.’d at the politicians,” says Aimee Erickson, a coalfield-justice activist who lives above Mine 84, in Amwell. “We hear the same story all the time and it’s like a taperecording. We hear, ‘What about the economy?’ and ‘What about the jobs?’”

Erickson offers this observation to me after a meeting of the Ten Mile Protection Network, a grass-roots group pushing for reform. Half a dozen members gathered on a hot, summer’s night at the house of Bill Lindley, the organization’s president, whose family has owned his 220-acre farm since 1849. Sitting in the dining room, surrounded by antique kettles and rifles, the members sipped iced coffee as they ticked off questions they’d like to ask their legislators:

How can the coal economy matter more than its impact on the community?

How can politicians keep up the ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’ mantra when longwall mining has cut jobs in this state?

What’s it going to take to reform Act 54?

On its face, the state’s mining law sounds fair, so it’s easy to blame the injustices that landowners suffer on the way the DEP applies it — as in the McGinnis, Walker, and Jones cases. But activists and their allies pin the problem on the law itself. As they see it, Act 54 fails to protect landowners because it allows longwall mining at virtually any cost, as if everything were replaceable. Coal executives point out that they own the mineral rights to the seams, as well as the right to remove the coal, which they’d bought from landowners back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. “Basically,” Consol’s Hoffman says, “we’re allowed to extract this coal and to do so without ensuring the surface remains as is.” Someone pocketed money from these ancient deals, he argues, even though the coal wasn’t extracted: “You cannot ignore this in the story.” As coal officials see it, Act 54 actually circumscribes their right to get the coal. “On an individual basis, nobody wants to be undermined,” Hoffman explains. “That’s why the government has done what it’s done. It’s recognized that we as a society need the coal, that the rights the company has now are legal and valid rights, [and that] they cannot abrogate those rights.” That’s true, but largely because Act 54 favors the industry’s rights at the expense of other property rights. In the late ’80s, in fact, King Coal sued the state of Pennsylvania over its 1966 mining law, claiming that the then-ban on mining beneath houses and municipal buildings amounted to an unconstitutional “taking” of its property rights. The legal fight went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that, despite the mineral rights, the state can restrict mining under structures to protect the public interest. In other words, the industry lost its argument—until legislators amended the law to clear the way for longwall mining. “You’ve got to understand that the technology had changed,” Senator Stout says today, “so why shouldn’t we allow for new technology? That’s like saying, ‘Keep the horse and buggy and forget about the automobile.’”

Activists and their allies see things differently, of course. “Act 54 as it now exists represents a series of very poor compromises made by the legislature, whose legislative choices were likely influenced more by the coal industry than by citizens living in the coalfields,” observes Richard Ehmann, the retired environmental-court judge. Over the past decade, while representing dozens of Greene and Washington residents in damage complaints, he’s grown convinced that the law’s touted balance between competing rights is “nonsense.” “There are now tens of thousands of tons of coal that these companies can mine without having to use room-and-pillar methodology,” meaning that they make millions off people’s destroyed properties. “How is that a tradeoff for citizens of Pennsylvania?”

Tom Buchele, of the University of Pittsburgh, puts it more bluntly: “They’re destroying people’s homes and wells and streams and the value of their property. And all people get in return is minimal compensation. It’s outrageous.”

Back at the Ten Mile meeting, those in attendance have echoed these sentiments for hours. They’ve discussed the woes of neighbors victimized by longwall mines, and outlined the latest proposals to amend Act 54. They’ve lamented the ills of the status quo — the way the coal industry exploits the little guy, the way state officials turn a blind eye.

“This law is so poorly written it’s as if the coal companies and their attorneys wrote it themselves,” says Richard Yanock, who lives above Mine 84, in South Strabane, as others nod in agreement.

He turns to me and says, earnestly, that the mining companies “will portray us as a bunch of country bumpkins, but nothing is further from the truth.” He motions to the table. “You have a lot of sophisticated minds right here.” Later, in an interview, he has this to say about the landowner’s dilemma: “I don’t think this would ever happen in another state . . . Nobody in his right mind would ever put up with this stuff.”

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Yanock, it seems, has put up with a lot. At 61, the bespectacled retiree has a calm demeanor that must have served him well as a controller for Ford Motor Company, where he worked for three decades. But his equanimity wanes when he recounts his trials with King Coal—and alludes to its crushing maneuvers. A fresh victim of the longwaller, he’s spent tens of thousands of dollars and 18 months trying to protect his newly built home. He’d twice gotten assurances that Mine 84 would not run under his property but ended up in its path anyway. Fearing the worst, he hired an engineer to mitigate for subsidence, using steel girders, wire cables, and compression ditches. The work has paid off; since mining ended in June 2007, he’s seen little more than hairline cracks in the drywall.

Still, Yanock cannot fathom the oddities that occurred while the steel shearer was slicing below his 10 acres. Mining was slated to last three weeks in January of 2007; it would drag on for a merciless five months. Typically, the machine moves under a structure quickly, so as to lessen damages. This time, it stopped in front of his house for three days, and then behind his house for another three. The machine would stall a third time near his garage, 200 feet away, for over a month. Yanock contacted Consol for answers, yet got no response. A DEP official blamed the delays on an “inventory problem,” but Yanock finds that explanation suspicious. Months earlier, he’d asked the DEP to help protect his $166,026 house, setting off a series of firm letters between the agency and the coal company about its “insufficient” mitigation plan. So, he is left to wonder, endlessly. “Was this intentional, to make my life miserable?” he says. “I don’t know.”

He wouldn’t be the first to suspect retaliation. In the coalfields, the industry can intimidate you just by virtue of its influence over your fate. Activists say that it’s almost impossible to organize, for fear of retribution. The more you protest, they maintain, the more the coal company could retaliate—as it undermines your yard, surveys your wreckage, hauls your water. Patterson, the Waynesburg cattle farmer, says he’s learned “to keep my mouth shut, I guess,” after speaking out against longwall mining at community meetings, only to field calls from Foundation agents repeating his complaints. Foley, the Jefferson homeowner, declined to talk publicly about her shattered house for years, until she could buy it back from Consol and never deal with its agent again.

“I have been told to my face, ‘If you don’t deal with us, we will make your life miserable,’” Foley says. “And believe me, they can.”

Companies can silence landowners through more standard tools of persuasion, doled out before the mining begins. There’s the so-called “pre-mining agreement,” featuring an “inconvenience payment,” upfront, worth 15 percent of your home’s market value. Accept this deal, and you effectively sign away your rights under Act 54, getting whatever the company deems for the ruin. Consol spokesperson Joseph Cerenzia insists that people who sign these pacts are not forced to opt out of the Act 54 process—“We cannot stop anyone from exercising their rights under state law,” he’s assured me. But that’s not according to the words of one such agreement I saw: “With respect to any subsidence damage . . . Surface Owner agrees that the remedies provided for under this Agreement shall be in lieu of all remedies provided for under the ‘Subsidence Act,’” it read. Another alternative for landowners is the buyout offer, wherein you sell your house to the mine for 15 percent more than its appraised value. Sometimes, these deals include a confidentiality clause that keeps the landowner silent and the public in the dark about the devastation of longwall mining. No one knows how standard the secrecy agreement is; Consol denies that it requires the clause. Yet I interviewed four property owners who had to abide by such a stipulation, and they all knew somebody who’d done the same. Talk of “gag orders” has surfaced in DEP reports as far back as 1999. Generally, the provision forbids disclosing an agreement’s “terms and conditions,” such as monetary awards. Some attorneys have advised their clients not to admit even having an agreement. Asked about his pact with Mine 84 — one that I found on record at the Washington County Register of Deeds — Yanock declined to confirm or deny it, explaining, “I don’t want to give anyone an opportunity to sue me.”

Even those who availed Act 54 have had to sign settlement agreements with confidentiality clauses to get the payments to which they’re entitled. These folks seem especially outraged by their ordeals yet wouldn’t go public if their lives depended on it. One couple who live in a modest house in Washington County above Mine 84 — among the 450 houses in a 7,500-acre permit — have settled with Consol on conditions of confidentiality and no liability. Alleged longwall damages include a sloping porch, a sagging staircase, a flooded basement, and a smashed-up garage. In 2005, after the DEP sided with the mining company, the couple turned to the Pennsylvania environmental court, as is allowed by law. Things weren’t going well, so recently, they’ve withdrawn their lawsuit in exchange for an amount covering their legal fees. That means they’re stuck with repairs totaling $180,000.

Their wounds remain raw enough that they yearn to tell the world their story — and, yet, they fear reprisals. So they sit on their porch — which tilts three inches north toward the nearest longwall panel — shaking their heads, staring at records from their failed case.

“We’re furious,” the woman seethes, blacking out whole paragraphs before showing me. “All we wanted was the money for the damages.” Her husband interjects: “Now the damages are our nightmare, but we’re not allowed to talk about them.”

No one knows the industry’s hardball legal tactics better than the Walkers. They’ve requested pseudonyms because of that confidentiality clause, and because they don’t wish to give the coal company a reason to come after them — it already has once. Nicknamed the “apply lady,” Ellen looks the part—her strawberry-blonde hair matching her freckles, her candy-apple shorts matching her shirt. She and Ed, a strong-willed, rugged man with a shock of white hair, sit before their historic log home and ruminate about their lives, postmining. They’ve lived on the farm for 45 years, raising four kids, helping to raise seven grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren, and have known hard luck. In 1988, Ed developed a staph infection that would put him in a hospital for 45 days. Three years later, a raging fire wiped out two of their barns. For the Walkers, though, the hardest luck has come by way of the longwall machine.

Their legal battle seems a cautionary tale. In 2005, freshly spurned by the DEP, they appealed to the environmental court. Talk of settlement eventually ensued. The Walkers say that they asked for almost $1 million to fix their house, two barns, a fruit stand, the two irrigation sources, as well as land cracks. Forget all those years of lost profits. The coal company countered with hundreds of thousands less, but even that reduced figure would get whittled down during a visit to the farm by the judge and company attorneys. Ostensibly, the group had come to see the damages; unbeknownst to the Walkers, it turned into a negotiation session. They later discovered that their lawyer had agreed to an even smaller amount. Insulted — “We were screwed, blued, and tattooed,” is how Ellen puts it — the couple refused to sign the papers. That’s when the company would get tough.

In the fall of 2006, it dragged the Walkers into court in an attempt to force their signatures on the proposed settlement. Its attorney filed a six-page motion arguing that the couple’s lawyer “had full authority” to represent them, and that the proposal to which the lawyer consented “constitutes a valid, enforceable agreement.” The judge disagreed, dismissing the petition. Yet the Walkers’ victory would be short-lived. Despite a new lawyer, they settled for what Ellen describes as “a very low” five figures, less than a miner’s $55,000 average wages. Not only did the settlement absolve the company of liability for structural damages, but also for the pending appeals on the couple’s water complaints. Now, the Walkers are in debt from legal fees.

“After all we’ve been through,” Ellen says, as she and Ed walk in their trimmed gardens, “we’ve just lost heart.”

Consol executives readily admit their company offers pre-mining agreements and settlement deals to landowners, which, they stress, it had initiated long before Act 54. To hear them tell it, Consol’s agents handle property owners on a case-by-case basis, offering them options that best address their concerns, building a cooperative relationship. “The goal is not to create a bunch of disgruntled people,” Hoffman says. “That has no benefit to the company. We’re trying to do the right thing within the context of getting our coal.” Oftentimes, they note, the process becomes “emotional” for landowners, who can take it out on the frontline agents. “You get a lot of people’s frustration and anger,” says Pat Wildeman, Consol’s manager for land operations. “They’re mad at the coal company, and we feel it.” His agents always treat people just as they’d want to be treated, he adds: “We believe we’re acting responsibly.” Just because mining dominates the region, representatives of the industry argue, doesn’t mean that it’s responsible for everything that can go wrong on a piece of property. Hoffman relays an anecdote about a woman who’d contacted him not long ago, “in tears, divorced, with a small child at home.” She informed him that she’d lost her well. When Consol’s agents investigated, they discovered that the pump had simply gone dry. They replaced it anyway. “We did it just to do it,” he says. “We’re not the evil empire. We live here, too, and we recognize that we’re in a destructive business.” He later suggests that citizens who fault the way Consol does business can have ulterior motives. “There are those whose only interest is for us to go away,” he says, “and that’s clearly not happening.”

Beyond these individual battles, the industry has worked hard to neutralize its critics. Its self-described “voice” — FORCE — represents a backlash against the coalfield-justice movement. Created in 2002, the nonprofit grew out of a desire to counteract all the antilongwall criticism that was capturing press attention. Says Rainone, of FORCE: “We wanted to get our message out. There were a lot of people who were negative about longwall mining . . . but they never wanted to indicate that they were taken care of. There are laws to protect homeowners, and the industry has to abide by the laws—and they do. But people were out there making accusations and claims. We felt the industry needed to have someone out there to support it.”

Rainone describes FORCE’s mission as spreading the good word about the industry — making sure people know that it powers 55 percent of the state’s electricity, for example. In tax forms, the organization says that its purpose is to provide “safety, financial, and industry standards information” to its 10,000 members — coal executives, miners, contractors, and their families. But it’s hard to tell how that goal is carried out; in its 2005 fiscal year, FORCE reported gross receipts from “membership” ($78,000), a “golf outing” ($40,000), and a “banquet” ($65,000)—the last two annual events catering to politicians. Clearly, the group takes its advocacy seriously. In August 2007, spotted a full-page FORCE advertisement in the Observer-Reporter, the newspaper of record for Greene and Washington counties, touting: “Coal, Pennsylvania’s #1 Fuel for Electricity. Now Clean and Green.” That message could be found plastered on billboards along I-79, as well as at the King Coal Show. Even in the far western reaches of Greene County, in a tiny diner, I stumbled on a FORCE ad on the placemats, featuring a crossword puzzle on the “biproducts [sic] of coal,” as well as the FORCE logo and the words: “Support Coal for Clean Energy and USA Jobs.”

If the propaganda doesn’t work, King Coal has other ways to muffle opposition. Consider Finch, the Morris Township supervisor who’s decried the mammoth Bailey and Enlow Fork mines. At 50, he resembles the Marlboro Man as he drives his pickup truck, puffing away on Wild West cigars. He lives in the verdant village of Prosperity, running a horse stable, atop a ridge that gives him a bird’s-eye view of the site where Consol aims to build a new coalpreparation plant for the mines. Spanning 11 miles, Bailey and Enlow Fork surround Morris — Bailey is southwest; Enlow Fork, northeast — and inch closer yearly. Finch has fought their encroachment on behalf of residents, writing heated letters to the editor, soliciting Buchele’s clinic to review Consol’s permit applications — alone among his colleagues on the board of supervisors. “It has a lot of negative impacts on you,” he says. Finch, who’s a mechanic for a mine-shaft contractor, explains, “I work in the coal industry . . . and I’m out there amongst people who are just not that friendly.”

Yet miners weren’t the ones who would silence Finch. Remember that $150,000 that Consol gave to the Morris fire department? The first check came in the summer of 2006, just as Finch was expressing his blistering dissent. At a July 2006 hearing on a permit to add 7,000 acres to the Bailey and Enlow Fork mines, he bumped into an aide to House leader DeWeese, who’d scribbled his name on paper. When Finch asked why, he got what he calls “a lame answer.” So on July 24, he fired off a letter to the editor, asking hard questions about DeWeese’s relationship to the coal industry, questions like this:

Rep. Bill DeWeese does not represent a single individual in the three municipalities in Washington County overlying this coal mining application. Why are you here? And why do you have my number? Could it be to find out who is stirring up all the bees? Could it be to find out who’s been biting at the heels of one of your biggest benefactors?

The letter doesn’t mention Consol, but it must have annoyed company executives. Within days of the publication of an edited version, in September, Finch was informed that the company was withholding its funding for the rescue vehicle because, as he was told, “upper management is upset at a supervisor’s letter.” When company executives read the letter to the editor, they interpreted it as a direct attack. “I couldn’t believe the allegations he was making in that letter,” explains Cerenzia, of Consol, such as the charge that mining interests had effectively paid off DeWeese. Cerenzia says he was stunned by the letter because, just months earlier, Finch and his fellow supervisors had sought a more cooperative relationship with the firm. “Then I open up the newspaper,” he recalls. “I called up the township, and I said: ‘You want a good-faith effort? You want money, and then you publicly badmouth us.’”

Finch later met with Consol executives behind closed doors, where he says they’d float a kind of political blackmail: Keep your mouth shut, and the fire department will get its money. “I had to agree not to say anything critical publicly,” Finch says. Soon after he’d agreed, the fire department received the first of five $30,000 checks. Cerenzia refutes the idea that Consol muzzled Finch in any way — “It’s not like we restricted him from saying anything,” he says — yet he acknowledges that Consol viewed the letter as the antithesis of cooperation. “We had a meeting and I read him the riot act,” Cerenzia says. “I said, ‘You can’t have it both ways . . . you can’t on the one hand tell us you want a cooperative relationship and then, on the other, make [baseless] accusations about us.’” Consol can take legitimate criticism from public officials, Cerenzia insists. “But if it’s an accusation without any evidence to support it . . . how is a company supposed to respond?”

Finch, meanwhile, has kept quiet for more than two years — until now. “I’ve been living with that and I can’t live with that no more,” he confides. “I don’t care if I’m speaking negatively. I’m speaking truthfully and ... sometimes, the truth hurts.”

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The truth about the coalfields battles is that, sometimes, David wins. People like Foley have succeeded by seizing control of their dilapidated homes. In 1999, while logging all that longwall wreckage, she sold her house to Consol on one condition: that she could buy it back after the Dilworth Mine shuttered for good. She got $368,000 for the residence, and lived amid its yawning cracks for seven years, rent-free. In December 2006, she exercised the buyback — for $125,000. People like McGinnis, meanwhile, have come out ahead by funneling their resources into legal action. His property is about as upper-crust as it gets, boasting such creature comforts as a pool, a Jacuzzi, and an outdoor bar. When Consol tried to buy it — or entice him with a $50,000 pre-mining check — he refused. “I didn’t need the money,” McGinnis says. He could afford to not only hire experts, but also fix the direst longwall damages, forking out $50,000 so his family could live in the crooked dwelling until the DEP would rule in his favor.

But what did these victors win? Near-condemned houses and lives consumed by repairs? It’s a minor victory, at best, one that Foley struggles not to regret. She sold her house to Consol for $57,000 less than what she’d sunk into its purchase and restoration. Now, she has to spend another $258,000 to piece it back together again. “Who do you think is the winner?” she asks, answering: “It sure as hell is not me.” And since McGinnis has appealed his failed water complaint to the environmental court in October 2007, he’s up against Consol and the DEP. Their attorneys file joint motions in court, performing what he calls “tricks.” It’s bad enough that DEP officials have denied harm to his pond, but now Consol is arguing that McGinnis refused to let its contractors onto his property to survey his water before the mining—an act that would automatically release the company, and one that McGinnis vigorously denies. By January, McGinnis was estimating that he’d have to spend $50,000 just on the initial legal work in his appeal; “I don’t know if my case is even winnable,” he’s told me. Ultimately, these victors haven’t won anything like the average $39 a ton that Consol has made off the coal. Which speaks to why landowners can’t really compete: The mines cover repair costs and still yield top dollar. In 2006, Consol reported coal-sale revenues of $2.69 million; Foundation, $1.44 million.

“It all boils down to this,” says Murray Williams, rubbing his thumb and forefinger as if handling a dollar bill. He and his wife, Laurine, the Waynesburg couple who fought Foundation for a decade, could be in court today over their cracked pond. But they’ve had enough. They engaged in a high-profile effort to try to save their historic home — one that the DEP could have spared from the longwall machine under preservation laws. Once Foundation claimed that it would lose $4.1 million if it couldn’t extract the million tons of coal under their farm, however, the DEP obliged. “It isn’t love that makes the world go around,” Murray says, dryly. “It’s money.”

“Even if you can afford an attorney,” adds Laurine, who hired a lawyer, as well as an engineer and a geologist, “the coal company can afford 24 more.”

Maybe this explains why so many folks in the coalfields take longwall damage in stride, as if it only warrants a shrug. Maybe it explains the resignation — the ‘You can’t win’ attitude — that prevails even among those who’ve endured lasting destruction. Jean Beame, a polite woman who lives beside Ken Hupp, in Amwell, owns a four-year-old dwelling that, because of Mine 84’s longwall mining in March 2006, slopes sideways 13 inches from the front porch to the back bedroom. Now, Beame can’t set a vitamin pill or a lipstick tube on her countertops without the objects rolling away. She admits that the situation annoys her, yet seems sanguine about it. “We got our money and we were satisfied,” she says. Over in South Strabane, a few miles to the north, Fred and Becky Ricker have given up on their water woes before getting started. Since Mine 84’s whirling wonder arrived five years ago, the couple has had no permanent water supply. In October 2002, they lost their 156-foot well the week they discovered a 400-foot-long subsidence crack in their field. Consol erected a water buffalo while trying to replace their source — drilling a deeper well, installing a 2,500-gallon coyote tank. Yet the Rickers present photo after photo of the tank’s rusty-brown filter and its cloudy-orange flow. Not long ago, they found out their water exceeds safe drinking limits for what the DEP terms “dissolved solids, chloride, and total coliform.” Although Act 54 mandates that coal companies restore depleted sources in three years — or buy the property — the Rickers see no point in filing a complaint with the state. DEP officials have told them the legal deadline doesn’t apply in their case, they say, and after losing their first complaint on structural damages, they’ve pretty much thrown in the towel.

“It’s these little aggravations that, when you add them up, are a lot of frustration. It gets to be . . .” Becky says, holding up her fists near her ears, as if pulling her hair.

“It’s just too overwhelming,” Fred adds, “and you feel you have nowhere to turn.”

For some landowners, it’s been ingrained in their heads that the industry can do no wrong. That’s what they heard growing up, as their parents and grandparents toiled in area mines, and that’s what haunts them today. After clashing with Consol for five years, Kim Jones, the coal miner’s daughter, remains racked by guilt, feeling an allegiance to the industry on the one hand and, on the other, betrayed by it. She still remembers the smell of her father’s lunch-bucket, stinking from sulfur, after his shifts at the now-defunct Maple Creek Mine. As a kid, she was taught that the coal company took care of miners, so she figured it’d do the same with her farm. She’s experienced a rude awakening: Consol cut down her trees, worth $15,000, and plugged her free gas wells without paying her a cent; then, it took her well water and is now proposing to pay her $346 a year for 20 years as compensation — even though her annual city-water bill is $542. Similar injustices have torn a former coal miner from Washington County who worked at Mine 84 for 23 years and who spoke on condition of anonymity. The retiree spent most of his career hanging wires inside longwall panels. On the job, he overlooked the machine’s destruction. “When you’re a miner,” he says, “you know you’re going under a neighbor or a friend, but what can you do?” At home, he cannot brush off the ruin so easily. Since his old employer undermined his land in 2004, he empathizes with the little guy in a way coal executives don’t. Often the lone miner at forums, he sees longwall victims as “lost souls” whose plight would make any compassionate person feel bad. He’s even battled Consol over damages totaling $200,000; the company has offered him $80,000. “They’re just greedy pigs. Yes, I made a decent living off the industry,” the miner admits, as if violating an unspoken code, “but I still think that’s how they treat people.”

In many ways, the whole region has capitulated to King Coal. More and more residents are selling out to the coal companies rather than stick around for the longwall fallout. In Washington County, for instance, Consol has become one of the largest landlords, spending $30.6 million on land acquisitions near its mines over the past seven years. It’s a trend on the rise: In 2006, the company purchased 28 properties for $10 million, compared with one for $76,060 in 2001. Currently, Consol owns 499 properties worth $122 billion, including 254 farms and residences above Enlow Fork and 106 above Mine 84. (Greene County has no electronic records on file with the state’s Registrar of Deeds.) It’s a trend in the industry’s favor, too: Coal companies don’t have to fix subsidence damage on land they own. Consol’s Hoffman says his company often repairs properties in order to rent them. But, he says, “It’s true if we own a house it’s more convenient for us.”

Cruising around the sunken landscape in Greene County, Harold Van Druff, the Kirby farmer, points out what he calls “the wasteland” — the remains of houses bought and then bulldozed by Foundation. Just beyond his farm lie the soppy, cattail-infested pastures that once boasted beautiful farmhouses; all were leveled to make way for coal-slate piles and conveyor belts. Over near Morris, 24 miles northeast, Supervisor Finch passes one vacant residence after another owned by Consol, resembling the days of industry-owned villages in the 1800s. Some dwellings sit destroyed—decks drooped, bricks busted—while others have been reduced to their foundations.

“This is a nice place to live,” Finch says, driving on a country road where Consol has torn down a half dozen or so homes, “but that’s changing.” Gone are the neighbors who’ve helped fix wind-whipped barns or find runaway dogs, and the farmers who’ve spread free fertilizer or doled out equipment advice. Along this road, everyone has chosen to leave the longwall hassles behind.

Even feisty activists have become resigned to their fate. Aimee Erickson, of the Ten Mile Protection Network, also works for a nationwide network of 19 grass-roots and environmental groups known as the Citizens Coal Council. Her house, which serves as its headquarters, features defiant slogans like: “They May Own the Coal. But They Don’t Own the Water.” At 55, with blonde curls framing a birdlike face, she comes across as wholly committed to the cause—“It’s like good versus evil,” she’s said. Erickson first discovered Mine 84’s intent to undermine her Amwell property in 2002, when a notice was posted on the front door of her trailer. At the time, she’d never heard of the longwall machine. One of eight kids, she grew up near room-and-pillar mines and still remembers her mother warning her about abandoned shafts. But longwall mining? She soon got educated, researching the method, calling state officials, organizing neighbors.

Now, like so many in the coalfields, she’s hamstrung by the system. She doesn’t have the resources to avail the Act 54 legal process to protect her double-wide trailer — the first home she bought on her own — so she’s negotiated with Consol. Selling wasn’t an option after all her efforts to upgrade the one-acre plot, erecting a façade on the trailer, trying to landscape the field. Yet when the company held out a $21,000 pre-mining check in March 2007, she figured she didn’t have much choice but to sign on the dotted line—and, in her words, “sign away my right to complain to the state.” She knows her actions betray the movement. Even her teenage son’s given her a hard time.

“I’ve felt bad,” Erickson says. “But I cannot afford to hire an attorney to fight this battle for years and years.”

And so, she’s been undermined in every sense of the word. Crushed by King Coal, Erickson has been flicked away like a gnat, left to deal with its destruction on its terms. For much of 2007, she readied herself for the longwaller, surveying neighbors who’d stayed, pushing Consol to mitigate her trailer, which sits on 36 thin piers. An engineer friend predicted it would drop a foot, buckling the roof and bending the walls. As she waited for the steel shearer to slice toward her, Erickson grappled with the same nightmare, “the kind where you’re in your house and it’s falling apart.” At every delay, she clung to hints of hope. The latest was Consol’s September 7, 2007 announcement that it would “indefinitely idle” Mine 84 not long after removing the 8B panel, over which Erickson’s trailer stands.

“I am hoping to God it shuts down before it gets to my house,” she wrote me in an e-mail, dated October 16, 2007, as the machine was chewing the coal 700 feet away. By then, she’d been anticipating its arrival for three months, mulling possibilities in her mind. What am I going to do when it comes? Should I be here? What if I lose my water? What if my land sinks and turns into a swamp? Will I have anything left?

Sixteen days later, on November 1, she got the dreaded call from Consol. “They started mining under your house,” a company agent told Erickson, assuring her that an employee would be checking on her property daily.

“I haven’t seen anyone,” Erickson informs me, four days later. She figures Consol has offered another empty promise — it never did that mitigation work. On this brisk autumn day, the trailer has tilted enough to make you dizzy walking across the floor. Earlier, stepping into the shower, Erickson felt “gravity pull you to one side.” Now, she places a level on her kitchen countertop; it shows the house leaning toward the longwall panel. There are other signs of damage. Twenty-four hours after the machine had arrived, she spotted flakes on the carpet — pieces of gypsum falling from the ceiling. Now, that crack has widened and splintered into about a half dozen. Outside, hairline cracks spread and grow around nearly every window.

“These weren’t there last night,” Erickson mutters, pointing out cracks in the façade. She’s trying not to become “too obsessive” about the damage, she says. But she found herself in the pitch black last night, donning a flashlight, measuring the crevices. Kicking at one such crevice now, she says, “This wasn’t here.” Neither were the five cracks forming below the kitchen window. Or the piece of roof littering the yard.

Sizing up the damage so far, Erickson stands beside the water buffalo in her yard, the same giant tank that decorates so many front lawns here. It arrived, like clockwork, just days before the longwall machine did. “I’m thinking to myself, ‘This is all about the bottom line and profit,’” she says, with a sigh. Reflecting on her activism, she cannot help but see the irony. “To fight this battle for six years and now, here we go, they’re undermining my own house,” she adds, shaking her head in disbelief. “I’ve devoted blood, sweat, and tears to this issue. And, now, look at me.”

Research for this article provided by Sarah Laskow.

The big seep

2012-05-30T19:22:44-04:00

The sound of the longwall machine hits you first, a steady churning, methodical chomping that seems to emanate from everywhere at once. Stand before the six-foot-high layer of coal — the “coal face,” in mining parlance — and you’ll witness the source of this cacophony. It thunders like an industrial slicer: you can hear the steel shearer’s engine swirling away as cutting blades lop off the jet-black bed and crush it to chunks. The machine passes by, leaving the seam face three feet thinner than before. The sound continues around the clock, from deep inside the earth, wherever coal can be had.

On this January morning in 2008, it radiates from the heart of Pennsylvania “coal country,” in northern Appalachia, where the mining industry reigns. It originates 600 to 1,000 feet below ground, about three miles into the second largest underground colliery in the United States: the Bailey Mine, which snakes beneath 144 square miles of sparsely populated terrain. Owned by Consol Energy, the largest producer of underground coal nationwide, Bailey operates in the remote village of Wind Ridge, a 90-minute drive southwest of Pittsburgh.

At the Bailey Central Preparation Plant — located nine miles by conveyor belt from this mine’s tunnels — 70,000 tons of “clean” coal are loaded every day onto trains bound for some of the coalfired power plants that produce more than half of the country’s electricity. The 110-car trains chug up and down the East Coast to 42 locations, from New Hampshire to Florida. Of all the coal extracted from Bailey and its “sister mine,” Consol’s Enlow Fork — more than 21 million tons in 2007 — 90 percent will run the lamps, TVs, and computers in four million households east of the Mississippi River, making the longwaller a critical link in America’s energy infrastructure.

But that energy comes at a steep environmental price. Older mines use a technique known as “room and pillar,” which leaves blocks of coal to support the earth. Bailey Mine, by contrast, employs the brutally efficient extraction method known as “longwall mining,” which chews up the coal seam and leaves the groundcover to cave into the void. Inside Bailey, the longwall machine cuts a swath of coal bed called a “panel,” which in this case runs 1,100 feet wide and 10,560 feet long. The machine works its way down the length of the panel, eating away the entire layer. Longwallers are protected by 192 hydraulic roof supports, each bearing 800 tons of overlying dirt. As the shearer progresses, the supports advance forward, leaving rock and soil to simply collapse. Oftentimes, the ground above sinks three to five feet in an outcome the industry delicately labels “planned subsidence.” Folks living above Consol’s mines describe the effect more like a “continuous earthquake.” For them, the longwall machine — which keeps gobbling coal as if a famished monster — has jolted houses, roiled farms, and disturbed something far more precious: the aquifers.

Fly over Bailey and the five other longwall mines in southwestern Pennsylvania, within the county lines of Greene and Washington, and you’ll get a hint of the havoc the coal industry has wreaked upon the region. The Bailey Central Preparation Plant, where coal is sized, cleaned, de-watered, and stored for shipment, looms darkly over pastoral fields, its silos towering above the surface, its spotlights flickering in the sun. Smoke spews from mammoth stacks; conveyor belts extend like tentacles across the land. In the sky, you take in lustrous lakes of black sludge known as “slurry,” where waste gets dumped. Railroad tracks jut from the complex between humble houses and roadside barns. At times, you sense the industry’s hold on the countryside, which locals dub “the coalfields.”

Yet it’s on the ground — on the back roads not far from the West Virginia border — that ravages of longwall mining really come into focus. That’s where you’ll discover what “planned subsidence” has meant to folks here: the road bumps big enough to pass for speed bumps; the hillside splits deep enough to swallow a yardstick; the field cracks vast enough to strike fear into one farmer that his tractor would tilt on its side. In Pennsylvania, the law decrees that coal companies may burrow beneath any residence so long as landowners are compensated for damages. In the coalfields, houses look like they were shaken by Mother Nature — sagging porches, tilting floors, twisting walls. It’s not unusual to find insulation shoved in plaster cracks, or cribbing stuffed below foundation beams — the makeshift attempts of property owners to salvage their homes. Undermined properties sit vacant, the ghostly remains of residences ripped apart by subsidence. “Anyone who is affected by longwall mining sees death and destruction,” says Scott Finch, a supervisor from Morris Township who’s fought the encroaching footprints of Bailey and Enlow Fork mines. “It’s like a path of destruction.”

But for all the structural damage caused by longwall mining, it’s brought about a more lasting environmental harm: It’s sucked the water into the recesses of earth, leaving behind disrupted aquifers. Throughout the region, water in all forms — springs, streams, wells, ponds — has fallen victim to the practice, draining through fissures by force of gravity. Farmers have lost springs; residents have lost wells. Streams have diminished in flow or disappeared; alternately, they’ve pooled and flooded fields. Stretches of once-lush farmland have collapsed and then collected water, creating instant wetlands.

Longwall mining, says John Hempel, a geologist and president of EEI Geophysical, who has testified in lawsuits challenging the coal companies, in Elkins, West Virginia, “is absolutely draining the aquifers.” He describes the effect on surface and ground water as “quick and catastrophic,” so much so parts of Greene and Washington counties have turned almost arid. Likening the phenomenon to pulling the plug in a bathtub, he notes, “Every drop of water will leave that tub … until the tub goes dry. That happens everywhere longwall mining is going on.”

Even Duke Lake, the 62-acre centerpiece of Ryerson Station State Park, in Greene County, apparently vanished because of the longwall machine. The only state park for 38 miles, Ryerson Station boasts more than 1,100 acres of forest and greenery overlying Bailey Mine. But when the mine expanded underneath the parkland in 2005, the Ryerson Dam cracked, prompting the draining of Duke Lake. Now, three years later, what used to be a favorite swimming, boating, and fishing spot remains baked and riddled with cattails — a vivid reminder of the steel shearer’s plunder. On January 28, 2008, the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources filed an unprecedented lawsuit against Consol, suing for $58 million in damages to the dam, lake, and natural resources, claiming the coal company downplayed the risks of longwall mining beneath the park. The case is currently pending in the Fifth Judicial District of the Pennsylvania Court of Common Pleas.

Consol executives deny their operations had anything to do with the ruin at Ryerson, although they don’t doubt the practice generally has an environmental price. “Consol will not make a case that damage from longwall mining doesn’t occur,” says Thomas Hoffman, the vice president of external affairs at the company. “We say, in fact, that any damage that occurs will occur right away.” Still, the industry downplays the fact that longwall mining drains water from the region. “There are geologists who say all of Greene and Washington counties will become arid,” Hoffman adds, “but we’ve used this technique for decades and there’s still water. The idea that longwall mining is sucking up the aquifers doesn’t hold up.” He may be right. But no one — not regulators, not policy-makers, not Consol scientists — know much about the long-term consequences on the hydrologic cycle here. And in the meantime, as the longwall machine churns and chomps, the waterways continues to dry up.

Kim Jones never imagined her farm without natural water. Standing on the porch of her home overlooking her 62 acres, she lays out all the things she’d envisioned — vegetables here, sheep and cattle there, alfalfa fields down there. Yet such ventures depend upon water, and sources come in short supply at KD Farm. “I had water here before the mining,” says Jones, a Wind Ridge resident who lives 641 feet above Bailey Mine’s 1-I panel, “and I just want it back.”

The daughter of a coal miner, Jones, 43, has round, obsidian eyes that burn with frustration when she contemplates how her dream of owning a cattle farm has turned into fantasy, post-longwall. She and her husband, Kenny, a hulking 46-year-old with a humble demeanor, moved to the village in 1993 to settle into an agrarian life. Soon, they were planting a half-acre garden, cultivating a hay field, helping their daughter raise lambs for auction. But by 2003, the couple was duking it out with Consol over the plugging of gas wells, a fight that persists in court today. Mining cost them not only free gas, but also $15,000 in felled hardwood trees, Jones says. They believe it defiled their wood-framed house — hence the ceiling cracks and plaster drops in the front addition.

Like so many in the coalfields, though, water woes vex them most. Since the longwall machine went beneath their property in 2004, the family has seen the moisture dissipate from the soil and on the surface. Gone are two wells and two springs, along with a stream that cut across their acreage. It had flowed fast enough year-round to sustain three waterfalls — until the mining busted its rock and dewatered its bed. Jones bought her property for a purpose, she says: This was where she was going to raise her kids and live happily ever after. But how can she without water?

It’s a common sentiment in the coalfields, where it seems like everyone has a story about the longwall machine draining a source, or diminishing its flow, or dirtying it with toxins. Leigh Shields, who keeps an herb-and-flower farm on 47 acres above Consol’s Blacksville #2 Mine, in Spraggs, was undermined in March 2001 — an event that plunged his house, shop, and greenhouses four feet and left dry the four springs and four wells he’d developed with $700, half from agricultural grants. Or take Laurine Williams, who lives just outside the county capital of Waynesburg, nine miles north, above a mine owned by the nation’s fourth largest coal supplier, Foundation Coal Holdings. When the Emerald mine wrested the coal beneath her land in March 2001, she was dispossessed of two springs and a pond, which tilted and turned into a silt pool. Thirty miles to the north, across the county line, Ken Carter (not his real name) lives on 160 acres above three longwall panels and four conventional corridors for Mine No. 84. The Consol colliery chewed the coal below his plot seven times — from 1998 to 2000 — and took eight sources. First, the well curdled yellow from hydrogen sulfide and methane gases, making his family sick. Then, he lost three springs and four ponds. Consol grouted the ponds’ fractured bottoms — claiming to spend $100,000 in cement — but none of the ponds can replenish without the springs.

“Water is a big issue,” concedes Patrick Wildeman, Consol’s general manager for land coal operations, which negotiates damage settlements with property owners. “People realize coal companies can restore houses,” not necessarily water supplies.

Under Pennsylvania law, coal companies must provide affected landowners with a temporary source of water within 24 hours, if they do not have access to an alternate supply. A common solution is installing a giant tank, or “water buffalo,” which often holds up to 2,500 gallons. The companies have three years to restore or replace an affected supply with a permanent one. Such provisions are mandated by 1994 amendments to the state mining law, known as Act 54. Since residents had no prior safeguards against water losses, state officials paint the provisions as a broad expansion of rights. “Act 54 provides necessary protections to surface owners. It requires water replacement,” says State Senator Barry Stout, a Democrat representing the region and a supporter of the amendments. “This requirement is the best thing to come out of Act 54.”

Coal executives insist the affected supplies rebound. Springs may re-appear yards away, they say, but few disappear. Wells may get interrupted, but few are de-watered. And while they acknowledge that their companies often provide public water to property owners, they claim to re-establish springs at a 99-percent success rate.

Things on the ground seem less fruitful, however. More often than not, the 20 landowners whom I interviewed have had to rely on “city water” pumped from afar, and nearly all have gotten minimal compensation for what they lost. To wit: Carter lived off a water buffalo for 30 months while Consol conducted pump tests on his domestic well. Yet it’d fail to produce enough flow to meet state standards. For taking his free supply, he says Consol paid him $12,000 for a “lifetime” of public water. In three years, he’s spent nearly 20 percent of that sum on his $58 monthly bill.

Local politicians like to point out that coal companies have benefited this impoverished region by developing public-water mains. “Companies pay for these lines,” notes State Representative Tim Solobay, a Washington County Democrat, “so they’ve brought infrastructure to communities that wouldn’t be here otherwise.” Indeed, from 2000 to 2006, coal companies subsidized 23.4 miles of new mains costing $1.5 million in Washington County alone — mostly because mining disrupted sources. Benefits aside, the industry’s installation of water lines reflects its bleeding of area aquifers.

This siphoning has had dramatic consequences in West Finley, on the premises of Charles Whitlatch and his wife, Patricia. Tall and mustachioed, with a tight helmet of hair, Whitlatch, 61, has lived on 40 acres above Bailey Mine’s 17-C panel since childhood, when Patricia knew him as the boy next door. By the late ‘80s, the couple was clashing with Consol over plans to undermine a cemetery where relatives are buried, thus violating state law. A veteran Consol miner, Whitlatch was fired. He and 29 other plaintiffs sued for damages to sacred grounds, and, in 1996, won a $4.8 million verdict that would be erased on appeal. Seven years later, Consol undermined the couple again — this time, their property. Two pending suits involve ruin to the house, two trailers, a barn, and a garage that teeters near collapse.

But what have devastated the Whitlatches are water woes. They delighted in the clear, cold, and gushing liquid from their 80-foot well, which the longwall machine would taint milky white in 2003. Consol refused to haul temporary water — citing a settlement agreement from another undermined property the couple owns — and thus forced them to spend $5,000 on a tank. For the next three years, they’d fork out another $6,000 on water deliveries until the state ordered the company to cover costs. In November 2006, regulators still detected unsafe bacteria levels in the well. By then, two additional wells, three springs, and two streams had also vanished.

Even before the longwall machine reached the couple’s property in August 2003, it had totaled the creek crossing the front of their acreage, depleting it in a burst of bedrock. Patricia remembers hearing a thunderous boom and feeling the earth rumble, as though a bomb detonated. A few days later, Charles walked down to the valley and discovered the source of this explosion: his stream. All along a thousand-foot stretch of streambed, huge portions of sandstone had heaved into the air, forming a tee pee, emptying the bed of every water droplet. Consol’s geologists had conducted pre-mining surveys on this tributary, known as #32511, and identified habitats in its flow: “riffle/run at 813 feet; step pool habitat at 281 feet; waterfalls at 129 feet.” But after the steel shearer chewed up the panel, the reports stated, simply, “no flow.”

“I don’t think I’ll see this stream again,” says Whitlatch, shaking his head, staring at a bed barren save for dead leaves.

His creek isn’t confined to his yard, of course. Tributary #32511 cuts across a neighboring farm and feeds into the North Fork of Dunkard Fork, one of five streams cascading into Ryerson Station. Along the way, residents have used it like any run in southwestern Pennsylvania: Children slide down waterfalls; parents stroll along banks; naturists flip rocks for frogs. Farmers let cattle wade in local streams, while fishermen hunt for bluegills, bass, trout. In this way, the loss of tributary #32511 can be felt by not just the Whitlatches, but the public at-large. Maybe this explains why streams damaged by longwall mining have become a rallying cry in the coalfields.

“There’s a close relationship between residents and their land,” says EEI Geophysical’s Hempel, who’s worked for citizens on water complaints dating back to the ’90s. When swimming holes and fishing tides go dry, he adds, “People wonder what’s new and start associating water loss with longwall mining.” Scientists say every flow reacts differently to the method: some get de-watered; others lessen in force; still others pool up. In the most striking cases, subsidence bursts the bedrock so water seeps underground, or slips below the surface and returns downstream. Often, water swells in spots where the bottom has dropped, filling with sediment. To date, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has reported 23 instances over 97 miles of mined streams now dammed, diminished, or disappeared in Greene and Washington counties. In 2000, biologists with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service conducted field investigations on tributaries overlying eight longwall mines and, in data never made fully public, recorded more widespread destruction. Of 131 tributaries surveyed by FSW biologists, nearly half had either pooled or lost flow.

In and around Ryerson Station, the site of the now-drained Duke Lake, the longwall machine has caused such hydrologic chaos that Consol hydrogeologist Joshua Silvis admits the need for state-required remediation is “quite large.” Here, in the western reaches of Greene County, a dozen brooks are undergoing the latest in “restoration,” complete with cement mixers, pipes as wide as eight inches, and industrial-sized bulldozers. At the Jones property, two miles from the park, Consol has spent months mitigating the depleted tributary, drilling holes in the bedrock, filling them with epoxy grout. On this November 2007 afternoon, the scene looks more like a construction site than a family farm. Truck tracks criss-cross the creek and converge on cement bags stacked near a cranky machine that reads CHEM GROUT. Dozens of tiny holes riddle the bed. Some are stuffed with pipes, others with wet cement. Kim Jones points to a hose that leads to a valve and, beyond that, a pipe where Consol will unleash city water — mitigation approved by DEP. She’d prefer a natural flow to what she considers “this charade.” But, she says, flatly, “It’s either public water pumped in or none at all.”

The unnamed tributary, known as #32596, has also disappeared on a neighboring plot, which Consol owns and which overlies Bailey Mine’s 3-I and 4-I panels. In September 2007, the DEP ordered the company to fix the stretch. Last year, Consol hydrogeologists estimated using 14,000 bags of grout over 21,000 feet of stream in the area’s remediation above the Bailey Mine. They’ve told Jones the company has spent $2.5 million on tributary #32596 — $850,000 on her stretch alone.

All this work doesn’t exactly impress the Joneses. Their teenage daughter, Kaitlyn, has spent her life playing in the stream, scouring for salamanders, marveling in the sight of deer and turkey. Since it vanished, she’s noticed the wildlife don’t come around, and the only salamanders she finds are dead. “It’s kind of sad,” she says, motioning to the machinery, “so I don’t bother coming here anymore.” About the only folks who do are environmental activists like Attilia Shumaker. A retired school teacher, Shumaker has wise eyes and a wizened face that suffers fools poorly. In 1998, while teaching biology, she led a high school “stream team,” which studied the destruction caused by the longwall machine. Now, she does much the same as head of the 100-strong Wheeling Creek Watershed Conservancy. One fall morning, she takes me on a tour of the watershed waterways undergoing mitigation, stopping at an Aleppo cattle farm above Bailey’s 7-I and 8-I panels. A hillside stream cuts a withering path. Its once seemingly indomitable rock strata exploded after the steel shearer had gnawed away the underlying coal two years before. Shumaker remembers driving 18 miles from her Ninevah farmhouse just to see the mess. Since then, she’s monitored its state-approved remediation. This day, Consol has laid a pipe along the banks and tapped into a nearby run to add flow. Spotting a valve, Shumaker turns it and releases a minor tidal wave. Water pours into the bed through pipes hidden by boulders. She encounters another valve further up the hill. This time, water spews in the air as if it were a miniature geyser. She repeats this scenario again and again, opening six valves over a stretch of two football fields.

“Oh, isn’t that cute?” Shumaker quips, her lips taut as she stares at the fake flow.

Across the road, she takes in a more high-profile mitigation effort: the South Fork of Dunkard Fork. Since its undermining in the summer of 2007, the tributary has become a curious sight for many locals. “Everybody was down here looking at it,” Shumaker says, referring to initial damages. She and fellow activists snapped photos that show parts of the stream pooled up and parts dried out. Some reveal a giant pipe running down the bed. More recently, she’s watched Consol contractors blanket South Fork’s banks with an elaborate arrangement of hoses that squirted water like fountains. The hoses are gone now, and the stream trickles at a soothing pace. Still, Shumaker cannot help but notice the mature trees delineating an old shoreline higher than the new one. When a pool of minnows glides by, she clicks her tongue in dismay. To her, South Fork doesn’t look anything like its old self — not in water level, nor aquatic life. Despite the restoration, she sees a stream undone by the longwall machine.

“There’s no way to describe the destruction except to say your heart’s sick,” she confides. “You know there’s no way they’ll get this stream back to the way it was.”

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That pool of minnows swimming in South Fork of Dunkard Fork would be a welcome sight to Joshua Silvis, the man behind the restoration. The Consol hydrogeologist has devised remediation plans for this and 11 other streams impaired by Bailey Mine. Strapping in build, with spectacles and a goatee, Silvis stands on South Fork’s banks yards from all the piping and gravel at the company’s central station, Aleppo Grange. He’s made a point to survey aquatic life in the current — shiners, darters, tiny trout. “I’ve also seen snakes,” he says, smiling, “and I’m not a big fan.”

Silvis is smiling not because of this warm winter day so much as because his crew has finished mitigating South Fork. Not long ago, the stream looked like most remediation sites in the vicinity — a construction eyesore. The longwall machine crossed South Fork in 2006 and in 2007, and will do so two or three more times. Subsidence has slumped the bottom three feet, spawning two 700-foot-long pools, stagnating water. When Silvis saw the swelling, he relays, “I was ecstatic we still had flow.”

Typically, flow loss calls for a complicated mitigation regime whereby coal companies drill holes 3 feet to 20 feet deep in the bedrock, then clog them with grout. The cement is supposed to plug fissures like it plugs, say, dam foundations. Silvis finds it “less intrusive” than such methods as lining the bed with plastic. His crew mixes clay with the cement in hope of ameliorating its content. Companies can supplement the regime with “flow augmentation,” pumping water into a dry bed from wells, springs, municipal lines. The measures amount to stream illusions — “They’re not natural,” Silvis cedes — but they’re meant to help the real ones “heal.”

At South Fork, Silvis had to correct a pooling rather than a dewatering problem, so he turned to a technique called “gate cutting.” Companies excavate the bumps in the bed marking tunnel “gates” to longwall panels, which eases the swelling. Before dredging South Fork, contractors spent six hours catching fish in buckets to drain 800 feet of it. They kept water flowing by tapping a hose into another tributary. Recently, they’ve landscaped the channel to encourage life — placing boulders as “hideouts” for fish, for example. Standing on anti-erosion fiber laid on the banks, Silvis soaks up what he considers a restoration “success.”

In 2007, Consol finished mitigating four of the Bailey Mine streams; one still had what Silvis calls “issues” — a diminished flow — while the rest had “restored” flows after grout and piped-in water. After a year’s worth of monitoring in 2008, Consol is now planning further mitigation on two of the four streams because of occassional flow loss, Silvis says. And that’s just the results for one mine. Not long ago, Jonathan Pachter, Silvis’s boss and Consol’s general manager of environmental services, escorted me to remediation sites above Enlow Fork Mine. “We believe we’re doing things in an environmentally sensitive way,” assures Pachter, a boyish mid- 50s, as we approach a repaired run named Rock Hollow. It was dewatered after a pass of the longwall machine; DEP ordered Consol to cement its bedrock last summer. Despite recent rainfall, the brook looks barely wet, save for shallow puddles.

Pachter sees progress nonetheless. “There’s water under the rocks,” he notes, whereas they used to be “bone-dry.” Earlier, he told me that it’s virtually “impossible” for coal companies to repair a damaged stream to its pre-mining state. What Consol strives to do is return it to a normal range of conditions. “I know the concept is that every stream should be returned to the way it was,” he said, “but that’s not the way any industry in the United States operates.” Now assessing the shriveled Rock Hollow, Pachter cannot declare success or failure yet. Consol has to collect information for three years before the state decides whether a restoration is successful. But, he says, “Consol has done what it’s supposed to do.”

Back at South Fork, Silvis has just begun to measure the flow to compare with data taken before mining. A perennial stream of considerable size, South Fork draws off a 27-mile watershed, and has gushed as fast as 30,000 gallons a minute. Silvis doesn’t know if the repair will measure up. For now, he says, “It turned out to look pretty good.”

And it does. To the untrained eye, South Fork epitomizes the beauty of Mother Nature, with its lulling ripple and sun-spotted current. Yet longwall mining has managed to harm tributaries inways folks cannot detect unless they know something about fish, amphibians, and bugs. Scientists say any alteration in a flow as a result of mining can have devastating consequences for species living in its habitats. To quantify these effects of subsidence, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service returned to Greene and Washington counties in 2001. Agency documents show that biologists sampled five waterways — three were undermined; two were not — and found that three quarters of all subsided reaches had morphed into murky pools, thick with silt, which smothered the fish, mussels, and mayflies growing on the bottom. Two of the three habitats in every stream — riffles and runs — had been virtually wiped out, as had the darters, stonerollers, and other fish sensitive to sediment. In a June 2003 report of the FSW findings, which has never been made public, the biologists explain:

Although longwall mining did not create this sediment (except where steep banks have slumped into the stream), it has created conditions that facilitate sediment deposition ... [which] … has eliminated fish intolerant of excessive sedimentation, and introduced a long-term instability into the stream.

Ed Perry, a retired FWS biologist who supervised the 2001 study and who hasn’t spoken publicly about it until now, puts it this way: “The study shows there were statistically significant differences between subsided reaches of streams and un-subsided reaches. The streams were statistically different and that means a lot.”

“Streams don’t come back,” echoes Ben Stout, a biology professor at Wheeling Jesuit University, in Wheeling, West Virginia, who’s studied “headwater streams,” the small runs that fuel larger ones, for the past two decades. In 2001, citizens asked him to examine those headwaters undermined by the longwaller in southwestern Pennsylvania. By then, Perry and FWS biologists had documented the degradation in mid-level streams, where fish and shellfish thrive. Headwaters support the benthic macro-invertebrates on which the aquatic community depends; they’re where the insects lay eggs and mature. Stout evaluated four headwater streams in Greene County, and compared mined to non-mined stretches. In all four, he recorded the same result: “These aquatic insects were disappearing,” he relays.

In his study, Stout found subsided stretches had high conductivity because such metals as calcium and arsenic had dissolved in the flow. He also found the four springs were partly or totally de-watered, which decimated habitats for amphibians and bugs. The message of his work seems bleak: “Longwall mining results in the loss of approximately one-half of southwestern Pennsylvania’s headwater streams,” states the July 2002 report on his findings. Back then, he considered issuing a warning to locals: You’re being undermined. Get ready to lose your streams.

Tall and lanky, with a shock of white hair and an all-consuming grin, Stout’s now standing beside an undermined spring in Waynesburg, holding a multiparameter “magic wand” to measure its alkalinity level. Dry for 300 meters, its bedrock bears gaping cracks and is overgrown with wildflowers. Water funnels into it from a two-inch pipe that Foundation Coal spiked from a nearby spring. Stout had recorded salamanders, toads, and shrimp here — a total of 12 aquatic species. Now, he spots one frog, “not half eatin’ size,” sitting in a puddle. Sizing up the damage, he says, “This stream is never going to come back. Not on its own.”

Not if his work serves as an indication. By 2003, Stout had broadened his investigation of headwaters in Greene County to Marshall County, in northern West Virginia. He spent two years studying the area, comparing data from streams that endured the longwall machine to those that didn’t. To test the theory that tributaries “heal,” he re-visited those undermined as many as a dozen years earlier. But he saw more of the same. “Overall,” his August 2004 report concludes, “longwall mined streams fail to support biological communities in approximately one-half of the headwater streams across the region.”

Perry, who served as assistant supervisor of the FWS Pennsylvania field office, found similar results. He cannot forget the valley of bluebells, warbles, and other wildflowers alongside one Washington County stream, Enlow Fork, which tracks the border between Washington and Greene counties. It had been a prime fishing spot, its pristine flow cascading from mountains, its gravel bottom perfect for small-mouth bass. After the longwall machine went beneath it in the late 1990s and early this decade — eating up the coal in multiple panels — its bed collapsed and capped with silt, making it more suitable to what he calls “trash fish,” like carp. Perry and his colleagues evaluated Enlow Fork in October 1999, and determined 22,000 feet had sunk. Perry recalls sampling 1,000-foot-long pools with Consol consultants, who collected 29 fish of 14 species. By comparison, he’d recorded “thousands” in the un-subsided reaches. “That pool was a biological desert for fish,” he says. “It was an incredibly poor habitat.”

Over the years, as he and FWS biologists conducted field work, Perry walked the length of dozens of streams and waded through knee-deep muck from subsidence. He saw firsthand how the longwall machine has destroyed streams. Reflecting on the plummeting diversity in undermined streams, he says, “There might not be streams of any value left in southwestern Pennsylvania. We’re headed in that direction, and I don’t understand why people aren’t up in arms about it.”

Not surprisingly, coal executives dismiss such predictions. One even claimed the restored streams end up “better” than their premined predecessors. “If there was the kind of devastation that folks on the other side would have you believe, it’d be obvious as you drive down the highway,” says Hoffman, Consol’s vice president of external affairs. He points out that his employer has mined beneath hundreds of miles of tributaries in this area, yet has mitigated “relatively few” — DEP records mention 36 over three mines. “It’s erroneous to look at a stream and say, ‘This is one of hundreds of losses.’” Recently, coal companies have worked with the state to turn subsidence pools into wetlands, leading the industry to tout the steel shearer’s “positive” environmental impacts.

Maybe more surprising is the way lawmakers echo the industry. Solobay, the Washington County state representative, says he’s heard the complaints and seen the studies on environmental impacts of longwall mining. “The horror stories that opponents try to put out there don’t bear themselves out,” he says. Solobay is an avid sportsman who hunts and fishes in game lands above the mines. “I’ve seen none of the quote-unquote devastation,” he goes on. Though he recognizes “isolated” cases of drained streams and water sources, nothing has convinced him of a wide-scale problem. DEP reports on the matter have concluded as much. “These mining companies have been good stewards,” he adds. “Sometimes, people hug environmental trees too tight.”

No state official or coal executive gives credence to a long-term water crisis. Though in moments of candor Consol scientists acknowledge some lasting impacts. Joshua Silvis recognizes that longwall mining has disrupted aquifers, lowering the water table, perhaps changing stream “flow regimes,” or maybe even reducing “gaining sections” where ground water channels into tributaries. He doubts that it’s destroyed aquifers, given recharge from precipitation. Still, he admits, “There is some environmental destruction. I’m not going to lie.”

Stout is clearly more alarmed and more emphatic about his findings. “Everything adds up,” he tells me, taking samples with his wand from the depleted Waynesburg spring. He likens headwater streams to human fingers: you can lose some and not be crippled. “But if you lose all your fingers, one by one, you’ll be f**ked,” he says. “That’s what happens when longwall mining takes away these streams.”

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In May 2005, eight months after he’d published his last report on headwater streams, Stout attended a conference on the topic hosted by mining regulators. To his surprise, he’d been invited to present his data on those impaired by the longwall machine. He showed some slides and declared the results “obvious.” He remembers a supervisor at DEP — the agency charged with protecting Pennsylvania’s citizenry and environment — rose to speak. The supervisor alluded to studies that DEP had commissioned to assess longwall mining on a Washington County stream, which found similar results yet didn’t attribute them “with absolute certainty” to subsidence. The supervisor insisted damaged tributaries recover, sparking a rebuke from Stout, who motioned to the 150-strong audience and announced, as he recalls: “Everybody in this room knows these streams have subsided but you!”

Stout recounts the anecdote with a mischievous grin, as if delighting in the tussle. “Are you familiar with environmental regulation?” he asks. “The agency falls into bed with the corporate entities it’s supposed to be overseeing.”

Stout’s echoing a common perception in the coalfields. Environmental activists pin the blame for regional water woes squarely on the DEP, which oversees the mines. In implementing Act 54, the DEP has authority to deny permits in key instances: First, if the longwall method will cause “irreparable damage” to certain buildings; and second, if it is likely to cause “material damage” to certain water bodies. Environmental regulations preventing “pollution” in streams — including loss of flow — also apply. But the division has rarely rescinded approval for longwalling because of a de-watered stream (one known case in 10 years), let alone because of structural havoc. Activists say the coal industry plays the system so well it’s got the mining bureau working on behalf of the mines rather than the public. Why else would regulators allow companies to take headwater springs in exchange for nominal compensation? Or destroy perennial streams and patch them up with artificial materials?

“It’s just stupid,” grouses Bill Lindley, the president of Ten Mile Protection Network, a grass-roots group named after a local watershed. He’s referring to DEP sanctioning questionable stream mitigation rather than prohibiting any destruction — an approach that can lead to illogical positions. For example, DEP requires companies to pump water into depleted streams — within 24 hours in some cases. But it lets them use city water, replete with chlorine and other chemicals that can kill that life. And officials have hailed high-profile grouted streams as “fixed and running,” even though the beds amount to tiled troughs conveying rainfall.

Activists relay anecdote after anecdote about fruitless efforts to stop the degradation. They’ve sent e-mails and written letters decrying the “irreversible” stream damage. They’ve shown up at hearings loaded down with pictures of streams before remediation and afterward. They’ve given tours of the water waste to students, reporters, and anyone else who’ll listen. In October 2007, Attilia Shumaker, of Wheeling Creek Conservancy, convinced the manager of DEP’s mining bureau to walk tributaries around Ryerson Station. The official could showcase mitigation successes; she’d do failures. She says the pair wound up selecting the same.

“He didn’t show me one stream that had come back” without artificial materials, Shumaker says. She figures officials know as much as coal representatives do that damaged streams cannot be restored to pre-mining states. “It appalls me that the state allows this,” she adds, “when they know the mining will destroy streams.”

William Plassio, the manager of DEP’s district mining office, declined repeated requests to be interviewed, and the agency did not respond to requests to interview his superiors. In answer to written questions, DEP’s press office provided a seven-page statement outlining provisions of Act 54 and other environmental rules governing the agency’s oversight of longwall mining. The statement notes that, “The actions of the DEP are based on law and regulation” — law that permits “short-term impacts” and “use of mitigation” in streams and water sources. It goes on to insist that the agency is living up to its mission. “The department fully and forcefully requires compliance with Pennsylvania’s strict environmental rules and regulations,” the press office writes. “DEP has successfully and faithfully protected Pennsylvania’s natural resources.”

If activists are wary of such assurances, they have good reason. In July 2000, Stephen Kunz, an ecologist in Media, Pennsylvania, issued a scathing report on the mining bureau’s failure to implement regulations in permitting the mines. Kunz had examined the effects of longwall mining on wetlands in Greene and Washington counties, where the diverse habitat makes up less than one percent of the terrain. His report suggests the steel shearer had dried up some wetlands, turned other wetlands into ponds, and drained their feeder springs. But what it exposed was the way coal companies had ignored many environmental requirements while the DEP rubberstamped their activities.

To remedy the failures, the agency’s since tightened its requirements for identifying wetlands above longwall mines. But Kunz doubts much has changed. “The state isn’t putting its foot down saying, ‘You have to give us this inventory or we’re not giving you apermit,’” he says.

His observation is born out elsewhere. Under Act 54, the DEP must evaluate the longwall method’s harm to citizens and the environment every five years. So far, it’s done two reports, both widely criticized as lacking. The latest, dated February 2005, was farmed out to a local university whose authors devoted an entire chapter of their assessment to “limitations” — i.e., incomplete data in DEP permit files.

...

In southwestern Pennsylvania, the typical landowner I interviewed doesn’t own the mineral rights below his or her property; the coal industry does. Act 54 lets companies extract the coal they own from beneath houses in exchange for damage payments (thus treating people’s homes as though they’re replaceable), and environmental lawyers argue that the law treats aquifers the same. Though Act 54 prohibits “material damage” to streams, it only covers those streams serving public water supplies or feeding certain dams — in effect, a tiny number of tributaries overlying longwall mines. The real regulatory shield is the state’s Clean Streams Law, whose provisions require DEP to deny a permit to any mining method that can harm — or, as the act states, “pollute” — streams and water sources. Many environmental lawyers interpret the term “pollution” to mean drained or diminished flow, although DEP defines it this way: “flow sufficient in quantity to maintain existing and foreseeable uses.” Either way, the law has heft — in theory.

It’s hard to calculate the cumulative draining of aquifers in southwestern Pennsylvania because DEP does not archive water waste in a systematic way. The agency does report the number of landowners who’ve filed water-loss complaints against the mines (287 as of September 2008), as well as its responses (“replacement plan under review,” for example). But it doesn’t track whether a lost spring has re-emerged yards away, or whether a lost well is among a cluster. With streams, the agency is gathering data to judge the state-approved remediation work, not necessarily to document the mile upon mile of ruin.

Agency inspectors cannot be all places at all times, so they’ve had to rely on the coal industry for information. On occasion, data has fallen through the cracks. Although companies must report to DEP water losses on property they own, they don’t always do so. And if they do comply with the regulations, their reports — unlike those of citizen landowners — are not made public. As a result, countless water sources on hundreds of parcels are unaccounted — indeed, Consol owns almost 500 plots in Washington County alone. Consider, too, that companies don’t always report stream losses. A case in point: Jim and Linda Winegar’s 60 acres in Graysville overlie two longwall panels and a conventional corridor for Bailey Mine. The longwall machine gobbled the coal under their property in 2003 and 2004 and took two water sources. When their spring went dry, Consol re-established it. Not so their stream.

Kent Run meandered through the Winegars’ acreage in all four seasons — until the mining would bust its bedrock. When the flow lessened, Consol merely monitored it. It’s now vanished for a half mile. In response to Jim’s complaints, the company said it’s not responsible because the couple hadn’t developed the stream for “use.” Never mind that they considered Kent Run, in Linda’s words, “just a beautiful feature of our property,” or that it’s among the five runs funneling into Ryerson Station. Because of Consol’s position, DEP had no record of the de-watering for four years. That changed last fall when the Winegars bumped into Attilia Shumaker, who’d escort DEP’s William Plassio to the stream. Within weeks, an agency inspector assessed the spoilage, yet advised the Winegars that the division would do nothing without a formal claim.

Interestingly, Kent Run is classified as “perennial,” the only category DEP protected until October 2005. Before then, the agency wrote off tributaries defined as “intermittent,” which fade in dry seasons, so that coal companies could mine with near impunity. Its guidelines for issuing permits beneath such surface waters as streams, long viewed as a blank check for the industry, were revised in the face of mounting pressure. Under new rules, companies must predict potential pollution to all stream types; regulators allow longwall mining so long as there’s no evidence of permanent harm. Companies have up to three years to return degraded streams to “normal” flows, based on pre-mining data. If not, DEP can ask that they “compensate” by enhancing another stream.

Coal representatives find the new guidelines tough, in part because companies now have to provide specific hydrologic and biological data to DEP to secure a longwall permit. Because they must collect a couple of years’ worth of baseline information for every stream, Consol employs a dozen consultants who measure daily flow characteristics, gather samples to determine water quantity and quality, and track aquatic species. Firms must also submit remediation plans for the streams expected to pool up or lose flow, on which DEP reviewers must sign off.

It’s an obvious improvement, environmental advocates say, save for a glaring loophole: By allowing for some ruin to surface waters, DEP has done an end-run around the legal standard of “pollution.” Its guidelines distinguish between “temporary” and “permanent” harm, but, says Heather Sage, of the Harrisburg-based environmental group Citizens for Pennsylvania’s Future, “the language is so arbitrary as to be suspect.” How can officials say that a drained flow lasting 180 days is better than, say, 365 days? Or that a stream dewatered in the fall versus the spring has limited injury? “You’re really messing with things scientists cannot fully predict at that point,” she explains.

In its seven-page reply to questions, DEP maintains that it only approves longwall mining when there’s “no presumptive evidence of potential pollution of streams.” While the agency admits “a permanent loss of flow in a stream is categorized as pollution,” it suggests that not all de-watering fits the bill. “Effects of limited duration include flow losses that are expected to dissipate within one or two years or can be restored by the company within that time.” Asked how anyone can predict whether such ruin will last a month or a year or 10 years, it’s replied: “Stream response to mining is a function of specific technical factors, which may include mining method, mining extent, topography, depth to coal, ground water levels, watershed size, [and] stream mitigation techniques.”

But even Consol scientists admit it’s difficult to predict harm, temporary or otherwise. Coal companies try to forecast adverse effects by determining how much fracturing of bedrock will take place. Historically, scientists have seen more fissures in stream beds lying in shallow overburden and consisting of brittle rock, such as sandstone. Still, Silvis, the Consol hydrogeologist, acknowledges, “You don’t really know what is going to happen until you mine.”

DEP’s detractors can’t help but see the new rules as a lot of smoke and mirrors. Lindley, of Ten Mile Network, remembers when his organization argued as much at an informal permit hearing for Mine 84 in 2004, around the time the agency was drafting its guidelines. Members arranged to set up a microphone and registered concerns over water woes, prompting DEP officials to promise that streams and springs would not disappear. Post-longwall, officials discovered a local tributary named Brush Run dry for about 1,000 feet, with 25 or so dead fish. In December 2007, they handed down a compliance order to Consol for causing Brush Run, as it states, “to go dry unexpectedly over the 7-B panel and for causing a fish kill.” “You’d think DEP officials would wake up by now,” Lindley says, “but they won’t.”

Michael Nixon, an environmental lawyer who heads the mining committee for the Pennsylvania chapter of the Sierra Club, puts it more diplomatically: “No one imagined the systematic de-watering of aquifers would be allowed, much less accepted by DEP.”

Nixon sees parallels between the loophole in the surface-water guidelines and other regulatory twists. Take the raft of safeguards for historic properties. State regulations feature a clause governing these properties that specifies a mining method “will not adversely affect” them. But DEP has interpreted this to mean the method won’t cause “irreparable damage,” allowing coal companies to mine beneath historic houses so long as the wreckage is fixed. That’s how the agency enabled Consol to undermine a 1939 Spanish revival mansion in Spraggs, which wound up in such disrepair it had to be gutted. To Nixon, it seems DEP is doing the same with streams.

“It’s like telling coal companies, ‘If you can fix it, okay,’” he says. “DEP is supposed to protect the environment, but that’s like an escape clause.”

...

Kim Jones and her daughter, Kaitlyn, stand near the picnic pavilion at Ryerson Station, marveling at the ripple and flow of Panther Lick Hollow as it trickles into the depleted Duke Lake, some 400 feet away. When Jones was a girl, her miner father would pack the family into the car on August days just like this and head to the state park. She remembers frolicking in not only the lake, but also the five runs. Now, save for a burlap-like fabric on its banks — a telltale sign of remediation — Panther Lick looks almost as lovely as her memories.

The pair soon follows its trail. In November 2006, Jones, the treasurer of Wheeling Creek Conservancy, heard that Panther Lick was not what it seemed: a fellow activist discovered that it springs from a pipe. She’d driven here with Kaitlyn and her 6-year-old son, D.J., then just four years old, and trekked along the tributary for almost a mile until reaching the park border. Remediation was underway, but nothing unusual.

This day, it takes Jones and Kaitlyn 40 minutes to follow the run, trekking up a wooded hill to the apex. Sunlight shines through hardwood trees, as headwaters narrow to a sliver. They reach a barbedwire fence delineating private property. Beyond “No Trespassing” signs, they spot a two-inch pipe spewing water. The activist who’d made this trip trailed the pipeline, too, and discovered it connected to two tanks. But the Joneses take a seat and listen as the water hisses through a spigot. I ask about the apparent illusion.

“Truthfully,” Kim says, resting against a rock, “it’s hard for me to comprehend.” She doesn’t get how the industry can turn a profit given all this remediation. “I know there’s money to mine coal,” she explains, “but is there really money in it when forking out millions to fix streams?”

Residents aren’t the only ones pondering these questions. Every year, the industry extracts more coal from the bowels of southwestern Pennsylvania and, every year, citizens face more water woes on the surface. “The problem is nobody knows how to mine this coal yet protect the water,” says Richard Ehmann, a retired state-environmental court judge and an attorney who’s handled longwall-damage complaints. “This is a problem on a huge scale.” Bailey Mine, for instance, has already ripped out coal — and interrupted aquifers — across 64,000 acres, and a Consol representative estimates that it and Enlow Fork still have a combined reserve of 700 million tons, which will take another half-century to extract. That doesn’t include Consol’s two other longwall mines. On its website, meanwhile, Foundation (which declined to comment for this article) reports that its affiliates “control a reserve base of nearly 750 million tons in this region — enough coal to last more than 50 years.”

“Are acres of lost streams and aquifers worth all this longwall mining,” Ehmann poses, or “are we going to look back and say, ‘What a disastrous bargain that was?’”

It’s actually possible to mine this coal yet protect the water — if different methods are employed. Of course, state lawmakers would have to amend Act 54 to require companies to leave pillars to support surface waters. They could also mandate that operators fill in the panels, or “backstow,” as the longwall machine advances, so the groundcover doesn’t cave into the void. Such practices — required in some European countries — don’t take nearly as many water sources.

Yet legislative reform seems unlikely. Senator Stout, for one, says room-and-pillar mining forces companies to lose 50 percent of their coal — half their investment. “I don’t think it’s realistic to say, ‘You can’t use the latest technology to extract coal,’” he adds.

Miners contend that it’s safer to cut a panel from the coal bed without interruption; undertaking a “move-around,” they say — disassembling the longwall machine so as to avoid a stream or source above — poses greater risk of rock collapsing on them. Bailey’s longwallers have done this maneuver to protect some water bodies, but because of the potential hazards, company officials want to limit its use. There are also the economics. Consol has spent “millions” on stream restoration so far — Pachter deferred on a figure. Yet mining the old-fashioned way, he admits, “is much more expensive, and companies like us aren’t going to do anything without making a profit.”

Consol spokesman Joseph Cerenzia takes the claim further. “It may sound noble, but if the state enacted a law like that, it’d put thousands of folks out of work,” he argues, since labor and production costs would rise. “It gets my dander up just to hear some things these folks say.”

Those who live above Bailey Mine are equally riled. Residents are especially angry that Consol plans to mine underneath 14 streams near Ryerson Station. Currently, the company has applied for a permit revision to expand the mine by 3,135 acres. In its application, it reveals that, of the 14, most will endure “temporary” damage, and six sections are predicted to lose flow.

When Kim Jones read the permit revision in the local newspaper, she couldn’t believe its fine print: Consol requested approval to perform “minor forms of stream restoration” on three streams in stretches of up to 11,100 feet — or eight miles in all. The application proposes five remediation locations for one stream alone — Kent Run, which was left dry by the longwaller on the Winegar property.

Under the Bailey expansion, Jones would have to endure more mining beneath her farm. The coalfields activist has waged a fierce fight against Consol and DEP to reclaim what the longwall machine has taken from her family, but the weight of this unyielding battle belies itself when the feisty miner’s daughter confides: “There are days when I have the fight of a lion in me and there are days when I cower in a corner like a mouse because I don’t know what to do.”

Some residents see longwall mining afoot and know exactly what to do: they flee. Farmers, in particular, wonder whether their springs and wells will flow and sustain their cattle and crops. Or will they just fade away? “This land ain’t gonna be worth nothing if coal companies take all the water,” says Bill Whipkey, of Holbrooke, who tends a herd of 100 cows on 95 acres above Cumberland mine. He expects his farm will turn arid once the steel shearer visits in a decade. “I don’t want to see what happens,” Whipkey laments. “I’m telling the company, ‘You give me a check.’ I’m outta here.”

He’s heard the horror stories from fellow farmers like Harold Van Druff, of Kirby, whose thriving dairy business went belly up, post longwall. Van Druff watched his dairy cows get sick from chlorinated city water after losing his pure sources to Blacksville 2 Mine in 1996. His farm’s never returned to its pre-mining prime, despite his attempt to remake it into a cattle ranch. Or Dick Patterson, a cattle farmer in Waynesburg who witnessed seven of the springs he’d developed dry up from Emerald mine in 2002. Foundation has replaced his freshwater with a municipal supply, pumping 16 gallons a day for his 70-strong herd — a rate too costly for him to pay. Or Leigh Shields, the Spraggs herb grower who lost his eight sources and pays for public water. He’d planted such herbs as mint, oregano, and sage in a three-acre field beside his 47-acre farm — until it sunk four feet and became a swamp. Consol packed it with dirt, but he can’t plant crops in bulldozed soil.

“I think Greene County will regret the loss of water and the death of farming,” says Sandra Brown, a farmer in Holbrooke whose 45 acres sit between the Enlow Fork and Emerald mines.

Sitting on the porch of her 1880s farmhouse, surrounded by shovels and buckets, Brown is a former legal secretary whose blue eyes grow wide as she discusses the dwindling agricultural community here. In August 2005, she moved to this hollow from Pittsburgh to live off what she calls “income-producing land,” researching organic foods, studying trends. She’s sunk $373,000 into the farm and has managed to sustain herself — “The experiment is working,” is how she puts it. Today, she has 19 Scottish Highland cows, 125 French hens, 16 egg-laying hens, and a rooster. But long-term success hinges upon the looming longwall mines, which will close in on her property within 12 years.

In the past two years, coal companies have purchased nearly every surrounding farm. One farmer colleague is giving his herd to his son. Another has bought a smaller plot and is unloading equipment. Still another is staying for a final season and then selling to King Coal. Two adjacent farms are set to become a mine portal. For Brown, a rookie who likes to talk shop with veterans, the desertions have meant less supplies and support. “The whole system you have when you have an agricultural community is affected,” she says, standing before seven cows munching on grass near a shimmering pond. Hens and the rooster waddle in its edge as heron fly overhead. A constant ring of crickets fills the air. She finds the scene too “exquisitely beautiful” to give up. But who knows what she’ll think, post-longwall?

“It seems to me the state is condemning the land to live off rainwater,” she observes. “Loss of water tables is permanent and it’ll have a real impact on farmers, so the state is going to have to decide if that’s a priority or not.”

...

If the Pennsylvania DEP isn’t quite living up to its environmental mandate, the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources seems willing to step into the void. At least, that’s what this state agency has done in the most dramatic instance of water loss: Ronald J. Duke Lake. Created by Ryerson Dam, which plugs the North Fork of Dunkard Fork as it meanders through Ryerson Station, the artificial lake sits in the heart of the only state park in Greene County. Unlike typical water bodies, its 62 acres weren’t sucked into the substrata after the longwall machine had gnawed away the coal. Rather, DCNR drained the lake because of cracks in the dam, which had materialized once Bailey Mine moved into the territory.

In April 2005, after Bailey’s longwallers cut a panel some 2,000 feet from the dam, state inspectors noticed new seepage on its left side. Over the next four months, according to DCNR’s lawsuit and DEP dam-safety reports, inspectors monitored the dam, measuring cracks, recording leaks. Some crevices had surfaced and been repaired months earlier; others emerged and grew as the steel shearer started on a new panel and inched closer. On July 13, they’d calculated water seeping at levels “significantly higher than previous observations” — 35 gallons per minute. Two weeks later, that figure would rise to 80. By July 28, the shearer was within 1,400 feet of the dam, and DEP’s dam-safety division had ordered DCNR to open floodgates in order to protect houses and a business downstream. It dictated removing a 100-foot section of the 200-foot spillway, and draining 10 feet of the 12-foot lake.

DCNR, which oversees the state parks, began lowering Duke Lake the next day. Within hours, residents descended on the scene in a futile attempt to save fish. One family shot a coarse video of their children stacking flopping bodies of carp, shiners, and bass into picnic coolers. Morris Township Supervisor Scott Finch visited the following day. He’d piled his grandkids into his pick-up truck to go for a swim and instead was greeted by the horrible stench of decaying fish. The job of cleaning up the site had gone to inmates of Waynesburg Prison, who were dumping 5-gallon buckets full of dead carcasses into Dumpsters.

Folks in the coalfields have long suspected longwall mining as the culprit. Many cannot forget the cozy agreement that DCNR entered with Consol in September 2001. Under the pact, the agency would effectively sell its mineral rights underneath Ryerson Station to Consol and, in exchange, Consol would spend $200,000 on a new park visitor’s center. (The company ended up spending $350,000, which it’s touted in press releases and which residents, like Finch, regard as “an upfront inconvenience fee.”) Bailey’s longwallers soon followed, as did the dam cracks. By August, park personnel and residents had noticed foot-high bumps in the road on the right side of the dam, in line with its face, the kind of bumps that tend to emerge above longwall panels.

Over the years, DCNR has said little about what caused the dam to shift. Not long after the draining of Duke Lake, though, officials were speaking privately with a geology firm, which visited the dam four times in August and which identified longwall mining as a possible source of distress. One July 30, 2005, memorandum from the geologists to state officials explained the reasoning:

Despite what was reported to us to be a very considerable distance from the dam to mining operations, a concrete gravity dam such as the Ryerson Station Park Dam is extremely sensitive to even small ground deformations that would not necessarily damage other types of structures. Further, given the long-term satisfactory performance of the dam coupled with the time coincidence of active mining, this possibility must be considered.

In 2006, DCNR hired the firm to further investigate the matter— an investigation that would last a year and reportedly cost $1.2 million. Today, the findings have yet to be made public. Officials have shielded the records from citizens, activists, and reporters, including this one. Even Consol executives maintain that they’ve never seen the results.

Presumably, the findings form the basis of DCNR’s pending lawsuit against Consol. In January 2007, just weeks after receiving the geologic results, the agency filed a summons for the company in state civil court, which led to a quiet negotiation period. One year later, the agency finally made its suit official. In January 2008, DCNR filed a 28-page complaint accusing Consol of negligence, misrepresentation and deceit, and breach of contract. In it, the department claims Bailey Mine’s “unreasonable interference” with public use of Ryerson Station “has and continues to significantly harm the lands, waters, wildlife, habitat, and natural resources of the park.” The complaint estimates costs of rebuilding Ryerson Dam and Duke Lake at $38 million, and asks for another $20 million to repair damages to unspecified “natural resources.”

Ryerson’s destruction, as the suit alleges, “is of a continuing nature, and has produced a permanent and long-lasting effect on the land, water, [and] habitat.” Such damages were never mentioned in Consol’s proposal to undermine Ryerson Station; instead, according to court records, executives “misrepresented facts to and concealed information from the DCNR regarding the known, increased risk of damage to its property . . . in an effort to induce the Commonwealth to not object to its mining at this location.”

Consol declines to discuss the pending suit, except to deny its allegations. In court papers, its attorneys argue DCNR’s case amounts to a longwall-damage complaint under Act 54, which belongs under jurisdiction of DEP — an agency that, conveniently, has insisted the mining occurred too far away to have harmed the dam. On October 2, a judge agreed and stayed all case proceedings until the resolution of such a complaint.; DCNR has since filed that complaint, which DEP is investigating.

At Bailey Mine, just three weeks before DCNR would file its complaint, Consol Vice President Dave Hudson was discussing Duke Lake. “That dam never did break,” says Hudson, a robust man with a matching personality who’s toiled in company mines for 35 years. “They cut the middle out of it,” he tells me, without irony. He recalls all the rumors circulating about water pouring into the mine-”Not true,” he says. Bailey’s superintendent then, Hudson paints the longwall operation as “relatively dry,” pumping an average 700 gallons of water a minute, as compared to 2,000 gallons in wetter mines. DEP inspection reports show that Bailey’s active sections were “damp to wet” during much of 2005; likewise, inspections by the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration reveal repeated pooling problems. State inspectors issued two compliance orders in February 2005 for what’s described as “accumulation of water . . . rib to rib approximately 150 feet in length . . . and 16 inches in depth.” In April, when park personnel spotted the dam cracks, MSHA was issuing a citation for “a large pool of dark, murky water” in the 3-I panel-closest to Ryerson Dam. Federal inspectors designated the condition “significant and substantial,” and noted its “recent origin.” By July, when the dam leaked the most, Bailey was using a pump to keep water levels below 12 inches. But MSHA would hand down at least seven more water-related citations over the remaining months. In September, Bailey requested more time to fix one area partly because of “the amount of water needing to be pumped.”

Hudson claims his employer has behaved as an admirable steward. He helped negotiate that deal with DCNR, he says, and agreed to leave a two-square-mile pillar under Duke Lake. That works out to be five million tons of coal.

“That was a huge sacrifice for us,” he says. Later, he observes, “We’re not out here trying to destroy the environment, but some people have the perception we are. Once they think that, it’s hard to change their minds.“

...

That perception stems from devastating scenes across southwestern Pennsylvania, like the one at Ryerson Station, where Duke Lake remains a baked and brittle bed. Once dubbed the park’s “crown jewel,” it looks like a cattail haven these days. The stream still flows into its bed, but gets lost in the low-lying vegetation without the dam. On one side there’s a sign that reads, ironically, “Ronald J. Duke Lake.” Crickets and dragonflies flitter around, but that’s about the only aquatic life that the Jones family can see as they stand on its mucky banks.

The Joneses still mourn the loss of their favorite recreational haunt. Duke Lake drew them here each summer — Kim would volunteer to park cars for trout-fishing events, she and Kenny would help at community picnics. Both recount the days when paddleboats and canoes peppered the lake, as campsites dotted its beaches. Years ago, when his father worked as a janitor at Ryerson Station, Kenny would sit on the docks, catching carp and catfish all day. Now, the Joneses only come here to see what the coal company has done to the park’s streams.

Earlier, while resting on that rock near Panther Lick Hollow’s artificial headwaters, Kim offered her observations of the park plunder. “It’s the reality of corporate America,” she’s said, her daughter listening. “It has caused a path of destruction here.”

And with the clarity of a child, Kaitlyn interjected: “Water is one of the only resources we have. You can do so much with water — take a bath, grow plants, raise animals. What’s going to happen when it’s all gone?”

Research for this article provided by Sarah Laskow.

The hidden costs of clean coal

Pennsylvania,United States — 2012-05-30T19:22:44-04:00

Down in Washington, Pennsylvania, an hour’s drive southwest from Pittsburgh, one message can be found plastered on billboards, newspapers, even diner placemats. It reads: “Coal, Pennsylvania’s #1 Fuel for Electricity. Now Clean and Green.”

Those last words probably don’t spring to mind for citizens in the coalfields of northern Appalachia, where longwall mining thrives. A highly productive method, longwall mining yielded 176 million tons of coal in 2007—15 percent of total U.S. production. An estimated 10 percent of all U.S. electricity now depends on coal from longwall mines, which have grown in Appalachia and in Illinois, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico.

But longwall mining is the most brutal technology yet employed to extract coal from underground quickly and cheaply. A hulking shearer, the longwall machine chews the coal seam and leaves the ground to cave in what the industry calls “planned subsidence.” Residents living above mines describe the effect differently. Says Rebecca Foley, whose historic house has been shaken apart by the shock waves: “It’s like living through an earthquake that happens in slow motion.”

Northern Appalachia represents that epicenter. In southwestern Pennsylvania, six of the country’s top 25 longwall mines snake below 138,743 acres of rural terrain—15 percent of the area. By contrast, the remaining 19 mines are scattered among West Virginia, Ohio, Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, and western states. Nationwide, no other place has as many operations—or as many citizens living above them—as southwestern Pennsylvania.

This project examines social and environmental impacts of longwall’s full-extraction method. Our first article exposes the David-versus-Goliath battles that define the region, and documents the landowner’s dilemma: He must fight not only the powerful coal industry, but also indifferent state officials. The second article looks at the method’s steep environmental price: Longwall mining has sucked surface and ground water into the earth, and left behind disrupted aquifers. The result? Residents have had to sacrifice their way of life for “clean coal.”

Consider these findings:

Structures above a longwall mine almost always suffer subsidence, forcing homeowners to contend with such damages as shattered foundations, crooked roofs, and cracked plaster. By last September, 1,819 property owners had reported longwall damages since the state began documenting such complaints.
Longwall mining dams, diminishes, and dries up water sources. Scientists have found the practice is permanently lowering the area’s water table and draining its aquifers; state regulators have reported damages to 23 stretches over 97 miles of mined streams.
The environmental fallout has hit farmers so hard that the agricultural land and farming community are dwindling.
State policymakers have fostered this destruction through the mining law and environmental regulations, leaving citizens virtually powerless to undo harm.

Today, the country is building more power plants that will burn the coal from this area; indeed, northern Appalachia ranks as its third largest coal-producing region. And yet most Americans have never heard of longwall mining. Our project aims to change that, and to expose the havoc wreaked by an industry peddling a “clean coal” campaign. The longwall machine may not look as dramatic as blasted mountaintops, but it is quietly collapsing not just the ground below but the communities above it.

Documents

Pennsylvania,United States — 2012-05-30T19:27:50-04:00

The Center for Public Integrity’s year-long investigation into the social and environmental impacts of longwall mining centered on hundreds of pages of documents obtained from government sources, such as the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; legal agreements between coal companies and property owners; environmental studies; landowner letters; and federal and state records requests. The library features key documents exemplifying key people or issues in each of the project’s magazine articles.

The library for Longwall, Part One, includes the following records:

1. A Notice of Intent to Mine — A typical Notice of Intent to Mine is sent by a coal company to landowners whose properties it will undermine informing them of their legal rights under Act 54. Here, Consol Energy’s subsidiary, Mine 84, sent the notice to John and Cynthia McGinnis, of Washington, Pennsylvania.

2. Official Notes on Stream Damage — These are the notes on record in a district mining office of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) documenting an agency investigation into the de-watering of Tributary #32596, dubbed “Kim Jones Trib.” Kim Jones reported that her stream had disappeared after Consol’s Bailey Mine and its longwall machine went underneath her farm in 2004.

3. State Investigation into Longwall Damages — These DEP documents outline the agency’s investigation into structural and water damages on the John McGinnis property, post-longwall. They include DEP’s order to Consol to pay McGinnis $506,041 for structural damages only, as well as his appeal of DEP’s finding that the mining did not destroy his pond.

4. A Mining Violation — Here’s a typical violation issued by DEP against Consol for failing to abide by state mining regulations; in this case, it’s for not reporting damage complaints made by John McGinnis to the DEP, as required by law.

5. A Pre-Mining Agreement — A typical pre-mining agreement that coal companies often offer to landowners before longwall mining — and its guaranteed subsidence. Here, Mine 84 has entered into the pact with Aimee Erickson, of Washington, Pennsylvania.

6. Typical Legal Tactics — One hardball tactic used by coal companies against landowners seeking recompense for longwall damages is to drag them into court. These records show how one mine sued Ed and Ellen Walker (whose real names and other identifying information are redacted because they spoke to the Center on condition of anonymity) to force them to accept nominal compensation; the records reveal settlement terms the couple would eventually accept, as well as a judicial order dismissing the mine’s claims.

7. A Letter to the Editor — One letter to the editor written by Scott Finch, a supervisor of Morris Township, who has criticized state lawmakers for being in the pockets of the coal industry and for the destruction caused by longwall mining.

8. A Buyout Agreement — A typical buyout agreement wherein coal companies often purchase an undermined plot from a landowner for 15 percent of its appraised value. Here, Consol’s Dilworth Mine bought the historic house of Rebecca Foley for $368,000 in 1999. The pact featured an unusual option enabling Foley to buy back her destroyed home “in an as-is physical condition.”

9. DEP Water Pollution Tests — These documents from DEP to Fred and Becky Ricker of Washington, Pennsylvania, reveal that water supplied by Mine 84 to the couple exceeds safe limits for “dissolved solids, chloride, and total coliform.” The Rickers lost their natural water supply after the arrival of Mine 84’s longwall machine in 2002.

10. DEP Water Loss Compensation — Documents from DEP show the agency-brokered compensation from Bailey Mine to Kim Jones in exchange for taking her natural well and replacing it with a public-water line. Bailey Mine proposed to pay Jones $345.97 a year over 20 years, even though her annual city water bill is $542.

The library for Longwall, Part Two, includes the following records:

1. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Investigations — Here are records from the USFWS showing its field investigations on 131 tributaries overlying eight longwall mines in southwestern Pennsylvania in 2000. This unpublished data lists streams with “subsided reaches” and “impaired flow,” likely caused by the longwalling.

2. DEP Consent Order — A consent order and agreement from DEP to Consol’s Bailey Mine for de-watering a stretch of Tributary #32596, otherwise known as the “Kim Jones Trib.” It requires Consol to perform “stream restoration activities” to return the run to a pre-mining condition.

3. USFSW Stream Study — An unpublished 2001 study by the USFSW on effects of longwall mining on streams. FWS provided the Center for Public Integrity with a June 2003 draft, but this latest version, dated August 2004, was obtained by the Center for Coalfield Justice.

4. Biologist Ben Stout’s Stream Studies — A 2002 study by Wheeling Jesuit University biologist Ben Stout on effects of longwall mining on “headwater” streams, as well as the results from his 2004 follow up.

5. DEP Letter on Longwall Report — Here’s a letter from former DEP Secretary Kathleen McGinty to the Center for Coalfield Justice explaining why the agency will not complete its five-year report on impacts of longwall mining before the reporting period, ending in 2008, as is required by law.

6. DEP Consent Order — A consent order and agreement from DEP to Consol’s Mine 84 for de-watering 1,000 feet of Brush Run and for “causing a fish kill.” The pact follows Consol’s request for more time to remediate the stream.

7. DEP Correspondence on Duke Lake — Internal communication obtained by the Center through a public-records request between the DEP’s District Mining Office and its Dam Safety Division on the cracks in a dam at Ryerson Station State Park, which led to the draining of Duke Lake. At the time, records show, Bailey Mine’s longwall machine was moving beneath the park.

8. Geological Reports on Ryerson Dam — The initial reports sent by the geological firm Gannett Fleming to DEP’s Dam Safety Division that outline damage to Ryerson dam and possible causes, including longwall mining. Records feature the firm’s plan for investigating the reason for the dam cracks, as well as minutes of the first government briefings on the matter.

9. DEP Mine-Safety Inspection Reports — Inspection reports obtained by the Center through a public-records request from DEP’s Bureau of Deep Mine Safety showing that Bailey Mine’s active sections were “damp to wet” during much of 2005, especially in months leading up to the cracks in Ryerson dam.

10. Federal Mine-Safety Inspection Reports — Inspection reports obtained by the Center from the U.S. Mine Health and Safety Administration (MHSA) showing repeated “pooling” problems in Bailey Mine in April and July 2005, when park personnel spotted cracks in Ryerson dam. Some reports note the “significant and substantial” water problems then.

Resources

Pennsylvania,United States — 2012-05-30T19:30:57-04:00

This list of resources includes the websites of coal companies and citizens groups, as well as studies about and lawsuits over the impacts of longwall mining:

1. National Mining Association is the “voice” of the mining industry in Washington, D.C., and the only national trade organization.

2. Families Organized to Represent the Coal Economy is the “voice” of Pennsylvania’s coal industry, which trumpets “benefits” of mining and related businesses to the state economy.

3. Consol Energy is the largest producer of underground coal in the United States. The company has 17 mines, mostly longwall operations in Appalachia. Four of them are in southwestern Pennsylvania.

4. Foundation Coal Holdings is the fourth-largest coal producer, with 12 collieries in Appalachia and the West. Two longwall mines operate in southwestern Pennsylvania.

5. Behind the Plug is the blog of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, which promotes the industry spin.

6. Center for Coalfield Justice is a grassroots group that organizes and assists Pennsylvania residents in the fight to protect their properties from the longwall machine.

7. Pennsylvania Sierra Club devotes a web page to the trail of longwall destruction, featuring a letter from victim Laurine Williams, of Waynesburg, Pennsylvania. The club’s Allegheny Group has a blog on “clean coal” as well.

8. Citizens for Pennsylvania’s Future is an environmental group working to reform the state law known as Act 54, which paved the way for longwall mining.

9. Citizens Coal Council is a coalition of grassroots groups in the country’s coal states, from Alabama to Wyoming.

10. Country Mile Farm is an 1860s historic house in Smith Township, Ohio, keeping an online diary that documents six years of havoc wreaked by the longwall machine.

11. A 2004 study on the social and environmental impacts of longwall mining in southwestern Pennsylvania, funded by the Raymond Proffitt Foundation.

12. Two studies on the effects of underground mining on structures, streams, and water supplies by Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, which is legally required to produce such studies every five years.

13. The Pennsylvania DEP’s webpage on its surface subsidence agents program helps citizens whose properties are undermined, features maps of the active longwall mines in southwestern Pennsylvania, as well as damage complaints and the language of Act 54.

14. A landmark lawsuit filed by the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources against Consol Energy for allegedly damaging a 62-acre lake after longwall mining beneath a state park in Greene County. (Click on the link and type in GD 07 000190 to see the complaint.)

15. The price of coal has skyrocketed over the year that the Center for Public Integrity has reported on longwall mining in northern Appalachia. The Department of Energy’s energy information website has current and forecasted coal prices, as well as other economic reports on coal.

The hidden costs of clean coal

2012-05-30T19:39:54-04:00

A digital exploration of the environmental and human disaster caused by longwall coal mining.