(lively banjo music)
- I think coal companies do owe it
to the communities to restore the land
as best as possibly can be done.
(contemplative music)
- What we don't know is what the companies
are actually doing at this moment.
Almost impossible to legally see from the ground,
so if we can see it from satellite images,
we can get some idea of
what's actually happening on the ground.
(contemplative music)
We've been mining coal in this region
for well over a hundred years.
So it's not just the coal mining that's problematic.
It is the method and the impacts that method has.
Mountain top removal coal mining is used
pretty much exclusively in Central Appalachia.
The process involves using explosives
and machinery to remove the tops of mountains
to expose the coal seams below.
(dynamite explodes)
Mountain top removal tends
to create a lot of waste material.
There's a lot of excess rock, excess dirt,
and then the company needs to do something
with that material.
So a lot of the time that material is used
to regrade and reclaim the mine, but there's usually excess.
So a lot of the times it's pushed over
into the valley below and buries a lot
of headwater streams and damages downstream water quality.
So basically we come out here and try to get as close
to their monitoring sites as we legally can.
And then we duplicate the tests to see
if their results are accurate,
to see if we find other problems,
for things that they may not be required to monitor for.
There's a lot of emerging science about the damage
that that may cause to humans.
It can be expensive for coal companies
to fix those problems.
And if they can hide the fact that they're avoiding
some of those requirements, then they don't get caught.
Appalachian Voices works with community members
to find those additional problems that may be missed
or may be covered up by the company.
In the early days of Appalachian Voices,
one of the things we helped bring
to the toolbox was doing flyovers.
So literally getting in small airplanes
and taking cameras and taking photos and video
of the mines as we flew over them.
But they're hard to do, they're expensive,
and they're time consuming.
So the next thing we did was figure out how
to start looking at the mines using satellite images
from Google Earth.
- SkyTruth is an environmental non-profit
and we focus on using satellite imagery
and digital technology to raise awareness
about the impact that human activity has on the environment.
And so we're looking at how each color represents
a different year of active mining.
So then we transitioned across the landscape.
SkyTruth's first forays into mapping surface mining
in Appalachia date back to 2009
when we were approached by Appalachian Voices.
We worked with them to put together the first map of
where these mines were located.
Our original work was limited by the fact that we had
to sift through imagery and find suitable scenes.
And what we ended up doing was selecting one usable scene
for each year that we were trying to classify mining.
Earth Engine and satellite imagery is
really allowing researchers to conduct studies
that were previously impossible.
Now, once we know where mining activity is taking place,
we can use that information to track that site through time.
- Using Google Earth, we came up with a figure of
about 500 mountains being destroyed
by mountain top removal mining, and at the same time found
that 1.5 million acres have been surface mined
in Central Appalachia since the '70s.
Another thing we were able to show is that
over 2,000 miles of streams have been buried
through surface mining in Central Appalachia.
We do a lot of water testing because that water,
it has to leave the mine eventually.
Water flows downhill.
So figuring out where those paths would be
and where they would intersect, like a public road
or a public waterway, Google Earth is really helpful
for us in doing that.
We have caught companies in the past
that fabricate their data.
In 2010, Appalachian Voices discovered
that several large mountain top removal companies
in Kentucky were falsifying their compliance records
for the Clean Water Act.
Basically, they were fabricating the data
for their wastewater.
We were able to file several lawsuits
that basically forced those companies to clean up their act.
We helped to create additional tools to better safeguard
against falsification of water monitoring data.
- Mining continues, but our historic work has illustrated
that good access to data can help make
environmental policy changes
which may limit the extent of mining.
So we're using this data to track the progress
of reclamation in formerly-mined sites.
Reclamation can take a variety of forms,
but essentially what a lot of it is
is removing of haul roads, regrading landscapes,
and then re-vegetating the landscape.
- A lot of cases it's returned to forest
or grazing land for cattle.
And it can go all the way up to shopping centers
or schools and hospitals or kind of industrial use.
- Mine reclamation for a surface mine in this area
usually consists of basically trying
to put the mountain back.
Replanting trees and making sure
that water leaving the mine is clean
and safe to enter into streams below.
That runoff from a mine, it will eventually reach
some local river that gets used by local people.
So I drive around and I look for public roads
that go below mines and up valleys
that receive the wastewater runoff.
I use the Google Earth app on my phone a lot
when I am trying to ground truth a mine.
Not only can I figure out where I'm going,
but I can do measurements on the fly
so we could get a sense of how big this slurry pond
we were driving past is.
Coal companies are hiding what they're doing.
It was common practice, especially at the height
of surface mining, to leave a strip of trees
between the surface mine and the road
so that people on the public road couldn't see the mine.
(light banjo music)
- This is the title track off of my new album.
This is called "When the Light Shines Again."
♪ It was in '95 when the coal mine shut down ♪
♪ And began the downfall of my little hometown ♪
♪ Well, the miners walked out, busted and broke ♪
♪ A lot of jobs headed west to Colorado ♪
My Papaw was an underground coal miner for over 30 years.
It offered him a way to make a living.
And without that, my family wouldn't be here in this town.
He spoke about the environmental effects,
how even at times when he was unemployed
he never believed in going to work for a strip mining
or a mountaintop removal company
because he didn't believe that the amount of coal
or the amount of money that might be made
was worth the environmental damage
that could come from that type of mining.
♪ Mugs and belt buckles don't mean much these days ♪
My Papaw, unfortunately, like so many coal miners
in the region has suffered some negative health effects
from working in the mining industry,
and today he suffers from black lung disease.
I don't think he begrudges working in the mines, though.
He enjoyed it.
We want the same things as everybody else
in any community wants, we just want a safe,
healthy place to live where people can work
and raise families and and go to school
and live a successful life.
♪ Turn down your lamps, it looks like the end ♪
I really want to put together this album as a way
to kind of cut through all the noise
and sound bites that are being created about the region
and about coal mining to say here is a real explanation
and a real look at what it's like to live
in a coal mining region in Southwest Virginia.
(drone buzzing)
(light folk music)
- We're looking at whether there's tree survival,
whether the trees look healthy.
We're looking at what type of trees there are.
Sometimes you can tell that by drone, like in this case,
but a lot of times we would need to request an inspection
and be able to go on site.
- I think one of the utilities of this tool
and this data set that we're creating is
it will allow researchers to examine
how effective different reclamation efforts are.
And so we can highlight operators
who are doing things the right way
or drawing attention to those areas
where the company's failed its reclamation effort.
It hasn't achieved the benchmark that it should be reaching
or that it says it has reached.
So we're not just using it to ID where mines are.
We're also looking at how forests recover
on these sites, and that's all done via Earth Engine.
- [Erin] Roughly a decade ago, we did use Google Earth
to look at the fate of reclaimed mines.
We called it reclamation fail.
- Reclamation fail is a pithy term we came up for
when the mining company loses incentive
to follow through with its reclamation plan.
It is cheaper for the mining company to pay the fine
than to do the reclamation.
That's kind of the worst example of reclamation fail.
- We are at the top of Black Mountain,
which is right on the Virginia and Kentucky line.
Black Mountain is the highest point in Kentucky.
We are looking at the Looney Ridge surface mine
that's on the Virginia side.
So we're looking at a big mine
that needs a lot of reclamation.
This mine has essentially been idled
for about seven years, maybe a little bit longer even.
So the concern about this particular mine is
that it has been idled so long that
if the company were to go bankrupt,
reclamation becomes less certain.
- It will leave the mine in a state of being unreclaimed
and to really be the kind of the ward of the state
or the federal government to clean it up.
And that's kind of the worst case scenario.
(light piano music)
- These communities are historically underserved.
Operators are legally required to restore the landscape
to some sort of higher use.
And if there's no real way to measure
how effective reclamation efforts are,
we might be continuing to neglect these communities.
- This region absolutely deserves proper reclamation,
because these communities have worked in these mines
for generations and they have produced the coal
that has provided a huge percentage of the energy
that this country has been built upon.
- I, like, many people in our community believe
that coal companies should repair the land,
because we've given them a lot.
And I think the least that any company can do is
help us repair the damage that's been done
so that as we move forward in the region,
whether we continue mining coal or not,
we will have a healthy environment to exist in.