June 2, 2009
By Ken Ward Jr.
"Coal Tattoo" Blog, Charleston Gazette
Last week, West Virginia Environmental Protection Secretary Randy Huffman told a U.S. Senate subcommittee what a great job his agency does making sure that mountaintop removal coal mining doesn’t contribute to flooding. Among a long list of changes Huffman said the state Department of Environmental Protection has made to ease federal regulators’ concerns about mountaintop removal, Huffman cited flood protections:
For the past several years the State has required every permit to include a Surface Water Runoff Analysis which is an engineered formula that assures no flooding potential from proposed mining operations. Additionally, West Virginia modified its valley fill construction rules to further assure no flooding potential in times of short, intense runoff from flash storms and thunderstorms.
Sounds great, right?
The U.S. Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement thinks so … well, kind of. OSMRE officials think the state’s so-called “SWROA” “concept is valid,” a reasonable method to try to limit the potential for large-scale mining to make flooding more likely or more damaging.
But is WVDEP doing a good job implementing this approach? Well, not so much, at least according to a new OSMRE oversight report.
Read more here.
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