Will Feds Take Down WVA's Embarrassing DEP?

By Jeff Biggers [exerpted]

This might be a first in the country: The failed West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection is emerging as such an embarrassingly pro-coal anti-mountain public relations nightmare for Gov. Joe Manchin that even retired coal miners have taken to the streets against the state's environmental regulators, calling on the federal EPA and Office of Surface Mining to take over the key duties of the dysfunctional state agency. [...]

On Monday, August 10, in a rare call for federal intervention in this growing national emergency, coalfield citizen groups including Coal River Mountain Watch, Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition and West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, along with the Sierra Club and the Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment, formally petitioned the OSMRE to withdraw approval of the state's surface mining program and substitute federal enforcement. The petition concludes:
"Given West Virginia's refusal to enforce the law in the face of coal industry interests, we believe that the only remedy that will protect the State's essential environmental resources is for OSM to substitute federal enforcement, in whole or in part, of the state's surface mining program." [...]

Testifying last month at the first bipartisan US Senate hearing on mountaintop removal in a generation, DEP Secretary Huffman stunned the crowd by chucking his environmental protection mandate out the window and openly defended the reckless part of West Virginia's Big Coal economy beholden to devastating mountaintop removal operations. Huffman defiantly lectured the US Senators: "West Virginia and the nation need jobs and coal. Nothing in the debate over mountaintop mining debate is going to change that in the short term." [...]

On April 20, Huffman made an extraordinary admission in an interview with the West Virginia Public Radio, declaring that the mountains impeded the state's development, and therefore, needed to be destroyed through mountaintop removal.

"Mainly what we're concerned about as regulators is the ability to develop land after mining," he said. "You need valley fills if you're going to have a viable post mining economy. You need flat land. And in order to have flat land you need to have valley fills, and one of our biggest concerns is that EPA is wanting to reduce the size and number of valley fills in Appalachia." (The radio interview is here.) [...]

"The WVDEP simply fails to adequately regulate the coal industry," said Rock Creek resident Lorelei Scarbro. "When WVDEP Secretary Randy Huffman runs off to lobby the EPA to grant illegal valley fill permits, he's abdicated his responsibility to the people. Corporate coal influence has become so great inside the WVDEP that he has become a public relations spokesperson for the coal industry instead of an enforcer of mining laws and regulations."

"We will not sit idly by today while the WVDEP is granting blasting certifications for coal companies to demolish our mountains and ruin our homes and communities," said Bo Webb of Naoma. "It is time for Huffman to resign or be fired. He's derelict in his duties and grossly incompetent at best. Quite possibly a case for criminal negligence could be made."

Read the entire article here.