CHARLESTON –When all you ever see in the media is the caricature presented by anti-coalextremists, it is easy to miss the great benefits that West Virginia, Kentuckyand Virginia have derived from mountaintop surface mining. When they actually seelook at the sites they soon begin to realize the great potential these siteshave for helping with economic diversification and development across thecoalfields.
Members of the Southern Legislative Conference Energy andEnvironmental Committee got just such an up-close view of surface coal miningduring a special tour of two area surface mines July 31.
The West Virginia Coal Association hosted thelegislators, who hailed from West Virginia, Oklahoma, Texas, Georgia, Virginia,North Carolina and even Canada, visiting the Pritchard Mining Four-Mile mine aswell as the Tyler-Morgan facility near the Kanawha/Fayette border.
“As you can seearound you, we have a lot of mountains in West Virginia,” Hamilton said to thetour group. “We also don’t have a lot of flat land that can be developed. Sowhen we talk about mountaintop mining, what we’d really like to call it is‘mountaintop development’.”
Pritchard Mining, one of the few private,individually-owned coal mining companies left in West Virginia, offered itsoperations for the tour. Legislators visited Pritchard’s Four-Mile mine to viewactive mining and reclamation practices as well as toured part of “Joint Base WestVirginia," which is located on Pritchard's award winning Tyler-Morgan complex.
Joint Base West Virginia is the outgrowth of apartnership between the mining industry and the National Guard. At Tyler Morganlegislators learned how a former mine site is being used as a national militarytraining facility for soldiers and other emergency services and firstresponders to learn a variety of skills. One of the advantages of using theformer surface mine is that it recreates a setting that more closely resembles thekind of terrain our military faces overseas in areas such as Afghanistan andIraq. The facility is located next door to another part of the Joint Base WestVirginia Complex, the Memorial Tunnel that has been converted into an emergencyresponse training center.
As the lawmakers toured the sites, they saw the entireprocess of mining – from the clearing of land, through active miningoperations, restoration and post-mine land use. One of the legislators said itis clear that West Virginia desperately needs the developable land created bymining and that the media’s representation of the process bears no resemblanceto the reality.
Photos can be viewed here.