Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 13, 1990 TAG: 9005090626
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: BUS-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER SOUTHWEST BUREAU
DATELINE: POUND LENGTH: Long
Today, they prefer the term "surface miner," and they're showing a new pride in how they reclaim mine sites after getting the coal.
Pittston Coal even took teachers, civic groups and reporters on tours of its 550-acre Sycamore 4 surface mine on the border between Wise and Dickenson counties during Earth Awareness Week to show off its reclamation work.
It was one of the first surface-mined sites in Southwest Virginia, and had been thoroughly torn up from the 1940s to the 1960s. During that time, it was strip-mined three times, deep-mined three times and auger-mined by boring into its hillsides, all before any requirements to restore the land were enacted.
With no requirements, there was no reclamation and the acreage once looked much like a war zone. Sides of mountains had been stripped away, leaving unstable high walls bare of foliage. Piles of leftover spoil material and stagnant ponds dotted the landscape.
Now the site offers a pastoral view of rolling hillsides green with orchard grass, fescue and redtop clover. The high walls are rounded off, a stream channel is cleaned out and water has been drained from where it lay atop coal seams, which had turned it acidic.
The new conditions are a result of work done after Pittston restarted mining activities at the site in 1983, using newer techniques to get at coal that could not be mined economically during the prior Pittston operations.
This time around, Pittston took 1.5 million tons of coal from the site before mining ceased last year and reclamation began.
"Sycamore 4 is proof that the coal-mining industry, state and federal agencies and the environmental community can operate in harmony to produce a product . . . create jobs and revenues, yet protect and improve our natural habitats," said Mike Odom, president of the Pittston Coal Group.
"It only makes good business sense for companies such as ours to incorporate solid reclamation plans along with our mining plans."
Coal operators did not always feel that way. Convoys of strip-mine operators drove from Southwest Virginia and elsewhere in 1977 to lobby, unsuccessfully, against passage of a federal act that set requirements for land reclamation. States such as Virginia had passed some reclamation legislation, but none strong enough to stop the devastation left by strip mining.
"The law with the teeth was the '77 surface-mine act," said John Bryan, the plain-speaking environmental-affairs director for Pittston and a man who said he once was introduced as "the guy in charge of pollution."
"Before that [act], there just wasn't a whole lot of constraint. It was pretty much shoot and shove, get the coal and get the hell out."
One of the things surface-mine operators objected to in the 1977 federal law was the requirement to put the land back to its approximate original contour. In the Southwest Virginia coalfields, flat land is at such a premium that it would often be preferable to rebuilding mountaintops.
At Sycamore 4, the original contour provision was not a problem.
"This thing's been mined so much, Lord knows what it looked like originally," Bryan said. The reclamation has left about 230 acres of land flat enough for potential industry.
The re-mining of the abandoned site provided about 30 jobs for seven years, generated $2.2 million in taxes - about $900,000 of that in local coal severance taxes - and produced 200,000 tons of coal annually.
It also paid 35 cents per ton into the federal Abandoned Mined Lands Fund, which collects such tonnage fees to raise money to reclaim sites such where the land was mined and abandoned. Since this site was re-mined, however, it will not have to be reclaimed with federal funds. The current reclamation laws require the operator to reclaim it.
Bryan has long argued that operators should not have to pay that 35 cents per ton when re-mining an abandoned site because, he said, it is in the government's interest for private enterprise to do as much reclaiming as possible.
No matter how much AML money is raised, he said, it will not be enough to reclaim all the land that was stripped and abandoned before the federal act.
According to a Virginia Division of Mined Land Reclamation survey, more than 71,000 acres of land in Southwest Virginia's coalfields have been disturbed over the years.
Conrad Spangler, the division's chief engineer, has calculated that based on current tonnage figures, it would take more than half a century to reclaim the 14,400 acres considered an immediate hazard to public health or safety. And since the Abandoned Mined Lands program is scheduled to expire by 1992, it is obvious that it will come nowhere near reclaiming all the lands.
Even with more efficient mining tools, operators are often hesitant to re-mine such acreage because they are required to clean up problems they did not create. Spangler is suggesting a relaxation of standards that would allow operators to stabilize the land without having to go quite as far as the act requires for reclaiming after new mining ventures.
"If you touch it, you buy it," Bryan said. It is possible the Sycamore 4 re-mining project might been more extensive if the law allowed the 35 cents requirement to be waived. "Another 35 cents a ton might have encouraged us to go a little deeper," he said.
Other incentives to encourage re-mining and the subsequent cleanup of old sites might include some reductions in the bonds put on operators for reclamation work, and waiving some of the approximate original-contour requirements, Bryan suggested.
"But we didn't do it just out of the goodness of our heart, because it had to make economic sense. We mined 1 1/2 million tons of coal and we made money on it. We couldn't have done it if we hadn't."
Bryan, who sometimes speaks so bluntly that he wonders aloud why his company did not fire him long ago, is characteristically unflinching in his assessment of strip mining before passage of the federal act. "It was a crime the way things were done. It was a crying shame."
But he and Clay Spradlin, a Pittston surface-mining engineer who was just a child when many of these strip mines were abandoned, are obviously proud of what has been accomplished at Sycamore 4.
"This place looked so bad that anything you did in here would have to be an improvement," Bryan said. "About 1971, the acid drainage out of this area right here would've eaten the soles off your shoes. I mean literally! I wouldn't be afraid to drink out of that creek down there now."
Dickenson County is looking into the possibility of offering part of the reclaimed site for a state prison. Pittston will donate the site to its counties if any kind of development becomes possible.
"It's got a lot of potential, for more than growing grass or grazing cows," Spradlin said. "Somebody'll use it for something."
by CNB