What Ever Happened to AOC?

By Ken Ward Jr.
Charleston Gazette Coal Tattoo Blog

I’m starting to wonder if Clem Guttata at West Virginia Blue just wants to make work for me. He keeps asking good questions about coal, climate change and mountaintop removal, and I can’t help but try to answer them.. His latest was this:

Which local, state, or federal regulatory bodies are responsible for defining and enforcing rules about returning Mountaintop Removal sites to Approximate Original Contour (AOC)? What can be done to force those agencies to do their job?
On one level, the answer is simple: The U.S. Office of Surface Mining and the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (at least in West Virginia — in other states, it would be their local regulatory authority). Those are the agencies who write the rules. As for how to get them to do their jobs … that’s beyond the scope of one little blog post.

WVDEP officials tried years ago to more clearly define AOC, something they said was needed if they were ever to enforce the rule. But OSMRE stopped the state from doing so, and has repeatedly delayed any plans for a federal rulemaking that would help clarify the term. West Virginia, though, has adopted its own AOC formula, and most experts think that has resulted in a reduction in the size of valley fills that bury streams.

But, as the rest of the W.Va. Blue post points out, this AOC issue is complicated and is a subject worth more explanation, because it gets to part of the heart of the problem with the way mountaintop removal has been regulated in Appalachia.

Read the entire post here.