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In the bad old days of mining, before the U.S. Congress enacted the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977, anything went. Coal miners ripped open the mountains of Tennessee with impunity — peeling mountainsides away, leaving unhealed fractures of rock and blighted soil, open sores that are still bleeding acid decades later.

But, standing alongside a road halfway up Buffalo Mountain in Anderson County, Chuck Laine says those days aren’t coming back and that the coal industry should be allowed to continue surface mining in the mountains, which is currently the subject of legislative debate.

“Until 1977, miners had a deservedly bad reputation,” Laine said. “... If you surface mine now, you have to go back and restore the mountain to its original contours so in 20 years (it is) back to normal. My grandkids can see the mountains like my grandparents did. The same people who destroyed it are going to put it back together.”

Laine is a lobbyist representing the Tennessee Land and Mineral Resources Association — an industry group promoting coal mining in Tennessee. On this particular day, he’s escorting members of the media onto the mountains near Oliver Springs to showcase modern mining and reclamation techniques.

Coal interests are particularly anxious for the public to know about the good works of the modern mining industry as state legislators debate whether to ban the disturbance, by surface mining, of mountain ridges above 2,000 feet.

It is a move some in the industry claim would make it impossible to economically mine coal.

“There is a lot of coal above 2,000 feet,” Laine said. “The majority of National Coal’s (the largest mine operator in Tennessee) current permits are above 2,000 feet, and it would drastically affect their operations. The industry definitely opposes the bill.”
State Sen. Raymond Finney, R-Maryville, is pushing the legislation. For him, it is about preserving views of the mountains for future generations.

“It saddens me when great expanses of land are disturbed like this,” he said. “It affects me because this is the heritage we have. This is the heritage I want to leave my children and grandchildren.

“People understand what’s at stake. We don’t have much beautiful land left that is undisturbed. Let’s save some of what we have, so we won’t have to have a museum some day to show people what a tree is like.”

Finney sponsored the bill after being contacted by Dawn Coppock, legislative director of the Lindquist Environmental Appalachian Fellowship, a Christian group established by members of the Church of the Savior, United Church of Christ, in Knoxville.

“It’s a pretty simple bill,” Coppock said. “The primary part says that if a ridgeline is over 2,000 feet, it can’t be altered or disturbed by surface coal mining. You can’t affect the ridgeline itself. Mining is allowed over 2,000 feet, but the ridgeline has to remain intact.”

Bill opposition

The bill is not unopposed. The House version of the bill failed in subcommittee. It’s an issue that touches the fault lines that run throughout the culture of Appalachia — the intersection of environmental responsibility and the economics of private industry, individual property rights and religious obligations.

State Rep. Joe McCord, R-Maryville, voted against the bill.

“There are several industries that people don’t like to see, but they are a necessity,” he said. “Most people don’t like to see logging, but our job as elected officials is not simply to do what is a popular concept. We have to consider the facts and the ramifications. Our job is to do what is constitutionally sound, not what is popular.
“Nobody wants to see mountaintop removal, but it’s a much more complicated issue than just saying, ‘I don’t want to see it.’ One of the greatest reasons I was uncomfortable with this is the effects on private property rights. The mineral rights or the outright ownership of the property belongs to the people who purchased it and paid for it and paid property tax on it.”

Technically, mountaintop removal is no longer practiced in Tennessee, according to Douglas Siddell, technical group supervisor with the Office of Surface Mining in Knoxville. Mountaintop removal is defined by federal law, he said.

“You take off the top of the mountain, remove the coal, and you leave the top of the mountain as a rolling plateau,” Sidell said. “It was somewhere in the late 1980s when we last permitted a mountaintop removal operation as defined by federal law.”

What many environmentalists refer to as “mountaintop removal” being performed in Tennessee, is what Mark Mills, assistant general manager for National Coal, refers to as cross-ridge mining. If the top of the mountain is removed, the mining company is required by the federal government to use the leftover soil and rock to return it to the approximate original contours.

“You still get pretty close to the original contours,” Mills said.

Chris Irwin of United Mountain Defense, an anti-surface mining group, said coal company claims of being more environmentally friendly are bogus.

“It’s all based in lies and misinformation,” he said, comparing the effects of surface mining to the landscape being “carpet-bombed.”

Benefits outweighed

Coppock said the effects of both mountaintop removal and cross-ridge mining far outweigh the benefits.

“It’s cheaper to blow all the surface away, and sometimes hundreds and thousands of feet of a mountain, in order to get to the seams of the coal that lay within the mountain like icing inside of a cake,” Coppock said. “It is the most destructive way to get coal out of the mountain. It is not the only way ... it is just the cheapest way.

“Limiting the blasting off the top of mountains would affect less than 0.1 percent of the nation’s coal supply. We’re going to have surface mining in Tennessee. We’re not against that. What we’re saying is let’s maintain the ridgelines so that we’re not blasting away entire mountains. Take the coal in ways that might be a little more expensive but preserve something that is much more valuable, our Appalachian Mountains.”

Coal mining in Tennessee already takes place on fairly slim margins, Mills said. It cost his company about $50 per ton to mine coal while contracts can pay about $65 per ton. In contrast, coal costs about $8 per ton to mine in Wyoming.

“Mining coal in Tennessee is hard to do,” he said.

Still, coal mining in Tennessee has some advantages.

“It makes a lot of sense on the transportation side,” Mills said. “We are about as far south as you can go and still find coal. It’s more expensive, but you can save a little on shipping.”

Mining in Tennessee also means reduced labor costs because there is less competition for skilled miners from competing companies, he said.

Reclaiming the mountains

Laine emphasizes the reclamation work being done by mining companies in the state. He claims most of the surface mining now being done in Tennessee is taking place in mines that had been abandoned, allowing companies to restore the sites to something approaching their original condition. New mining technology allows the companies to pull more coal from the sites than had previously been accessible.
In Anderson County alone, the mountains near Oliver Springs and Rosedale are littered with scar tissue from old mines, scabbed-over wounds from the reckless days before federal regulation.

“There is no question that industry got away with some horribly bad practices back in the 1940s, ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, but many things have changed,” McCord said. “The business has changed ... in a sense, they are doing an environmental service to these old sites by coming in and re-mining and doing reclamation.”

On Patterson Mountain, Laine stopped his SUV to point out the difference between an abandoned mine and one that had been reclaimed. At an abandoned site, a naked wall of rock rears about 80 feet above a vast marshy area, full of discolored water. It looks diseased.

“It’s an open sore on the mountain,” Laine said. “It will be that way forever if we don’t come back in and re-mine it. It’s going to be like that forever if coal mining stops in Tennessee.”

Abutting the nastiness is a reclaimed area. The difference is obvious and striking. In the place of exposed rock and muck water is a gently rolling strip of land that looks more like a median on an interstate than a mountainside.

Coal companies use the leftover rock and dirt from the mining process to fill the excavated voids, then plant trees and seed the newly formed hillsides with grass.
It has been a learning process. Coal companies doing restoration work in the early days created strips that looked more like fairways than mountainsides, Laine said.
“They made them look like golf courses,” he said.

There are still difficulties. Coal companies have not been particularly successful at getting trees to grow on the reclaimed areas. In fact, the Knoxville Field Office of the Office of Surface Mining put new rules in place in 2007 designed to help foster better reforestation.

Irwin, however, isn’t impressed with the technique.

“It’s like lipstick on a corpse,” he said.

Coppock said reclaimed mountainside cannot function like natural mountainside.
“Reclamation is a wonderful thing to do with a bad situation, but when you destroy a mountain, you don’t refurbish or replenish the aquifers in the same way, so you start having wells that go dry,” she said. “You don’t have the flooding protection because you don’t have the topsoil and dense trees that soak up rainwater and keep flooding from happening.”

Irwin’s group spends a great deal of time in the field, documenting the environmental effects of surface mining.

“I would rather do anything in the world than go see blown-up watersheds,” he said. “It sickens me inside.”

National Coal Company has mines in Scott, Campbell, and Anderson counties. The majority are surface mines, but the company does run one deep mine.
Much coal in Tennessee is high-sulfur coal, which has fallen out of favor because of air pollution issues. New scrubber technology at TVA steam plants, however, will allow the agency to purchase and use the coal again, Mills said.