LoveMountains

Continued: Frying Pan into The Fire

The DEIS for the Mingo Logan, Spruce No. 1 Mine 404 draft permit

authorizes the permanent discharge of fill material into approximately 31,678

linear feet or nearly 6 miles of jurisdictional streams and .12 acres of wetlands.

The project will also have terrestrial impacts of 2,278 acres or 3.55

square miles. The proposed project is located in the Spruce Fork watershed

of the Little Coal River in Logan County, West Virginia.

The comments quite aptly restate what we have come to know about

the extensive impact of mountaintop removal mining and valley fills. “The

Corps is currently overseeing the thoughtless and unlawful destruction of

much of the oldest mountain chain in the world with little understanding of

what it is doing or of the future implications of its actions. The central Appalachian

forests are the most productive and diverse temperate hardwood

forests in the world and are criss-crossed with irreplaceable mountain streams.

The Corps, by casually permitting a dizzying number of strip mines in this

region, has authorized, in just a few years, the destruction of mountains,

forests and streams that Nature took millions of years to create. The scale

of destruction is unprecedented in this country.”

The comments continue. “In preparing the DEIS the Army Corps of

Engineers has failed to consider cumulative impacts from large scale strip

mining across central Appalachia or to use sound science in evaluating more

local impacts. It has also ignored the conclusions and studies contained in

the mountaintop removal programmatic environmental impact statement

(MTRPEIS).”

“The DEIS’ limitation of the analysis to the Spruce Fork watershed is

arbitrary, lacks scientific basis, and ignores the unavoidable fact that the

effects of the Spruce No. 1 project contribute to the cumulative effects of

surface mining throughout the central Appalachian region.” Moreover, “ the

DEIS fails to even quantify the extent of cumulative impacts to waters of the

U.S. within the Spruce Fork watershed activities.”

Mitigation

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• #1 Comment from davidbbbsmith 
  5/8/07 1:09 AM | Permalink

  This certainly makes a good point. I'd like to see the response of others on this topic. Makes interesting reading.
  http://www.fatherdave.org/friends