Streams of Mercy

As southeastern Kentuckians continue to search for missing loved ones, muck out their homes and prepare for even more rain, they are beginning to ask whether the recent deadly flooding was a natural disaster or one caused by the coal mines that have drastically reshaped and scarred the landscape.

Compacted dirt, destroyed mountaintops and deforestation in eastern Kentucky have often been left ignored by the coal companies that mined there, despite legal requirements that they attempt to return the land to its natural state when mining concludes. Kentucky, particularly the eastern mountains, are littered with abandoned coal mines. Many are a result of strip mining or mountaintop removal mining, the latter a method in which mining companies use explosives to blast off a mountain’s summit to get to the coal inside. The loss of the natural ridge lines, vegetation and trees, and the cracks in the mountains that are largely owned by companies often funnels rainwater into the thin valleys, or low-lying hollows, where most eastern Kentuckians make their homes. Without these natural protections, regional flooding has grown as climate change brings new levels of precipitation up from the Gulf Coast to Appalachia. While many say this is a natural disaster, the truth is, it’s a disaster that was made by a whole bunch of mining that’s been going on for the past 40 years.

The Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of l977 was a federal regulation that was supposed to prevent coal companies from leaving abandoned mines behind. Th law required mine owners to reclaim the land and return it to its natural form as much as possible. In the ensuing 45 years, many companies have avoided that work and many states in the region, like Kentucky, turned a blind eye to it. The hillsides are scarred, they’re not reclaimed and you get a rain event like week before last, and you have terrible flooding, and it was totally exacerbated by the lack of proper regulation.

Reading this information in the Lexington Herald has helped me to see things more clearly. My prayer is that states will take steps to hold companies accountable for failing to reclaim the land, and will do what needs to be done to set things right.

Elizabeth