W.Va. groups see disease threat from surface coal mines

LOGAN, W.Va. – West Virginia environmentalists Tuesday urged a national committee examining the health risks from surface mining to look at rates of cancer, asthma and birth defects among people living near large-scale coal mines.
Representatives of Coal River Mountain Watch, West Virginia Highlands Conservancy and Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition told the committee of the National Academies of Sciences that scientists should pay close attention to the silica and fine particulates produced by blasting and digging, as well as water pollution.
Vernon Haltom said one study showed higher lung cancer and asthma rates among people living near surface mines and the dust they produce, acknowledging a correlation doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the cause. “But when you have something like silica, which is a known health problem, and people are breathing it … it’s been known for decades.”
The task of the National Academies of Sciences committee is to identify the geological and geochemical characteristics of mining operations, the regulatory framework, relevant scientific literature and its sufficiency, and potential short- and long-term human health effects.
Committee Chairman Paul Locke, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, said the study should take about 18 months. It will require a consensus draft report among the members, several of them professors with expertise including mineral engineering, biosystems, epidemiology, geology and environmental medicine.
They first heard Tuesday from state mining regulators from West Virginia and Virginia, questioning what data they collect and have available, and from a coal industry representative.
Jason Bostic, vice president of the West Virginia Coal Association, said the state’s surface mine production, based mainly in the southern region of the state, has dropped from about 44 million tons of coal in 2012 to about 14 million tons last year, the market for its thermal coal affected by federal regulation.
“To the extent that surface mining continues in southern West Virginia, the extent of those mines is going to be much smaller,” Bostic said. Large-scale mountaintop mining is mostly a thing of the past in the state, he said.
Joey O’Quinn, reclamation program manager for Virginia’s Division of Mined Land Reclamation, said the division’s data show improvement in stream quality below surface mines in the past 20 years, though he couldn’t say how much of that is attributable to less mining and how much to better mining practices. The most common complaint his agency used to receive was harm to water wells. That has dropped because about 90 percent of the people in those areas are now connected to public water systems, he said.