"They're right underneath us."
"It's like nothing I've ever seen."
"So all that overburden that you see over top of that seam of coal down there is going
to be shoved over the hillside, down into the headwater streams.
And y'all are laying in your fine homes and turning your air conditioning on, you never
give it a second thought where your electricity's coming from.
And somebody's paying the price for it.
There's a cost for everything.
It's the people that live in these communities that's paying the cost."
Coal, and the workers who mined it, helped build this country.
They made steel for our towers and powered our wars.
"King Coal is our primary source of heat and energy."
For more than a century, coal has dominated West Virginia.
Today, its governor is a billionaire coal baron.
But technology has reshaped the energy industry — and changed the way coal is mined.
Coal companies buy up whole mountains, find a thin seam of coal and blast away until they
expose it for mining.
This is mountaintop removal.
And researchers say it has staggering health effects for people who live near active sites.
But to see one of these sites with your own eyes, you have to get a little creative.
Although only about 1 percent of U.S. coal comes from mountaintop removal, these sites
take up 10 percent of the land in central Appalachia.
Despite that, neither the state nor federal government has paid much attention to mountaintop
removal mining.
Instead, the role of watchdog has fallen to academic researchers.
Two dozen peer-reviewed studies have found that this kind of coal mining has a health
impact for people living nearby.
In an area with mountaintop removal, one study showed odds of reporting cancer were twice
as high compared to a non-mining area in West Virginia.
Another study showed newborns were especially at risk.
Rates of heart defects in newborns were 181% higher in areas with mountaintop removal.
Smoking, occupation, and family history were all controlled for.
Altogether, researchers estimate 1,460 excess deaths in mountaintop removal areas every
year.
Although the major coal companies operating mountaintop removal sites wouldn't talk to
us on the record, the industry has aggressively countered these health claims through its
own channels, even funding a research center at Virginia Tech university.
And while the debate has gone on, researchers say the worst impacts are hitting remote small
towns tucked into the hollers of Appalachia.
"This is my water stock.
I use water out of a bottle.
The water out of my faucet is not healthy water.
I know that it has selenium in it."
"So this is the water right here?
This is stock."
"Yeah, that's what I use for water.
Yeah.
Most of the people in this area get their water for cooking, drinking, coffee, anything
like that comes out of plastic bottles.
Over the years, living here, 3,500 feet from a mountaintop removal operation, myself and
my children have had terrible problems with our sinuses, a lot of bronchitis, a lot of
breathing issues.
Cancer is extremely common here.
My daughter's lost four friends to cancer and she's only 22.
When you live here, that's just part of it.
You almost know what your death diagnosis is going to be just because you live here."
"Somebody watching this might say, 'Well why wouldn't they move?'
Explain to them, why wouldn't you?"
"I'm not willing to give up everything that makes up my identity, and the identity of
future generations, our family's future generations, I'm not willing to give that up for a black rock.
I'm just not willing to give it up."
"We're walking into a public hearing.
This is a chance for people to come here and give their input to a study that the National
Academies are doing on the link between mountaintop removal coal mining and human health."
"I'd like to first thank everyone for being here.
We appreciate your courage in making this effort to help us with our study."
"These people love being coal miners in this state.
I hear kids throughout the country getting cancer at three years old.
Never been around a coal mines.
Are you looking at that?"
"These strip mines, these coal mines, that dust and that coal slurry makes people sick.
And that's the bottom line.
Period on the end of that sentence."
This new study, begun in 2016, is funded by the federal government and staffed by a panel
of experts.
To people who say mountaintop removal is making them sick, it's their best hope for action
on the issue.
But it's also a threat to an industry that a lot of people here have built their life around.
"My name is Dennis Atkins.
I am a 31-year veteran of the coal industry.
Retired in 2010.
We call it mountaintop development, because there is no developable land unless you take
the mountains off.
God give us coal.
God give us coal to use.
And we know, as mountaintop developers, we understand that we have to do it in a responsible way."
Although the major coal companies had turned us down for an interview, at this hearing
we were able to talk to the vice president of the West Virginia Coal Association for
the industry's perspective.
"At West Virginia University, there was a study in 2012 that showed cancer rates twice
as high for neighboring regions around surface mine sites.
What is your response to these studies?"
"Correlation does not equal causation.
Health has been poor in Appalachia for a long time, certainly before the dawn of large-scale
surface mining.
And just because we operate adjacent to populations that are already impaired does not mean we're
the cause of that.
I mean, we have thousands of men and women every day that show up and operate equipment
on these surface mines, and there has been no increase as far as we can tell in respiratory
or other ailments or maladies in our workforce."
"Are you hopeful about the current administration and its views on the coal industry."
"Yes.
Very optimistic, very optimistic.
We think that President Trump finally recognizes the hard work that's done in West Virginia
and that's been done in West Virginia for decades to make this country a better place."
"We've ended the war on beautiful, clean coal.
We've stopped the EPA intrusion."
There is no doubt President Donald Trump is a strong ally of the coal industry.
But there's uncertainty around whether his policies benefit workers or just pad the corporate
profits of coal executives, like those who have donated heavily to his party and his campaigns.
For decades, the amount of coal produced in the U.S. has remained relatively stable, but
coal companies employ less than half the workers they did in 1980.
That's largely because of automation and heavy machinery replacing the need for workers.
Mountaintop removal sites are a prime example of this.
The growth of other energy industries in Appalachia, like solar, has been almost completely ignored
by political leaders.
But in West Virginia and in Washington, the coal industry has been politically protected.
"The White House is shutting down a study examining the health effects of mountaintop
removal coal mining.
The waste from the process is then dumped into the streams and valleys below nearby."
"So we were just at their hearing a few weeks ago, and now the National Academies study
into mountaintop removal has been halted by the Trump administration.
The Department of the Interior is telling us that they're halting and reviewing all
of their studies that cost more than $100,000, but the Charleston Gazette-Mail just had this
report that shows actually the National Academies study is being singled out.
The Department of the Interior won't tell us why.
We filed a ton of requests through the Freedom of Information Act, and we got all this in return.
For a reporter, this is like Christmas morning.
Most of this is communication within the Department of the Interior.
You can see the researchers trying and failing to convince their supervisors that more research
is badly needed into the human health impact of mountaintop removal.
This is the second government study in three years to get shut down.
And the people that we talked to in West Virginia had really pinned their hopes to that National
Academies study."
"This is my home.
You know, I grew up hunting over there where that equipment is right now.
You know, I spent time with my pawpaw out there on that mine site.
You know this isn't our capitalist system gone horribly horribly wrong.
This is our capitalist system gone horribly horribly right and according to plan.
That's what this is."
"It's not as expensive to mine the coal this way for them.
For them.
But it's pretty expensive when you start adding in all the external factors like the health
problems it throws onto communities.
We're the ones that created this mess, and we're passing it on to our kids.
And they're going to look at us one day and say, 'What the hell were you thinking about?
You know, what was you thinking about?'"