What Is Mountaintop Removal and How Is it Regulated?
The US Environmental Protection Agency defines mountaintop removal as the following: Mountaintop removal/valley fill is a mining practice where the tops of mountains are removed, exposing the seams of coal. Mountaintop removal can involve removing 500 feet or more of the summit to get at buried seams of coal. The earth from the mountaintop is then dumped in the neighboring valleys. One mountaintop removal mine can strip up to 10 square miles and dump hundreds of millions of pounds of waste into as many as 12 valley fills that can be 1,000 feet wide and 1 mile long. Regulators in four Appalachian states (West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee) have approved nearly 6,000 valley fills that will bury 75,000 acres of streams. Click here if you’d like to take a virtual tour of a West Virginia mining site. Recently, coal companies have devised methods to conduct much smaller mountaintop removal operations that do not require filling valleys with waste. Frequently termed “cross-ridge”
