RECOMMENDATIONS
To achieve wetland protection from longwall mining in southwestern Pennsylvania several fundamental changes are necessary.
First, the administrative decision must be made to enforce existing laws and regulations pertaining to the underground mining of coal. Every opportunity should be taken by the news media, by environmental groups, by candidates for public office, by residents of the coalfields, and by the taxpayers of Pennsylvania to condemn the environmental lawlessness documented in this report. There appears to be no justification for any significant loss of wetlands to underground mining whatsoever, and none has ever been provided in any permit application file. The technology exists to eliminate wetland loss from longwall mining. BMR refuses to require it.
Second, detailed environmental inventory and assessment of wetlands and water resources must be required in each application for an underground bituminous coal mining activity permit, permit renewal, or increase in permit area, together with post-mining monitoring and reporting to demonstrate that wetland protection is being achieved. PADEP either should require this of BMR and assign appropriate staff, or reassign current BMR responsibilities for wetland protection to other agencies willing, competent, and staffed to discharge them.
Third, underground coal mining application forms must be revised to demand the necessary information regarding wetlands as mandated in 25 Pennsylvania Code Chapter 86, 89, 90, 93, and 105 regulations, thus making possible environmentally protective regulation such as governs other types of industrial development and construction in Pennsylvania. Specific recommendations, module by module, were presented in Section VI of this report. Reviewers independent of BMR should closely critique proposed forms and publicize their findings.
Fourth, the impacts of mining on wetlands and other classes of resources should receive widespread publicity and public discussion in the news media and in the political arena. For much too long, the wholesale, unregulated destruction of wetlands by longwall coal mining has been allowed to proceed hidden from public view.
Fifth, charitable foundations that truly are concerned with environmental quality in southwestern Pennsylvania should fund surveys of resources at risk from underground mining and of the probable impacts of proposed new mining activities by competent experts independent of PADEP and not beholden to the mining industry. These professionals should review each underground mining activity permit application and compare results with the claims of permit applicants and BMR for several years, until such time as PADEP has demonstrated a willingness and an ability to identify and regulate impacts credibly. Systematic field examination of recent longwall impacts should be part of this review, providing comparison of actual field conditions with the representations made in permit applications.
Sixth, environmental organizations and residents of the coalfields should vigorously pursue litigation aimed at compelling compliance with existing environmental laws. The widespread and decades-long flouting of existing law by the coal industry with the ready collaboration of BMR is unlikely to change soon in the absence of court action. Until PADEP demonstrates that it can process permit applications in an environmentally protective manner, the need for litigation should be evaluated for each permit issued by BMR.
Seventh, all of the longwall mining permits approved by PADEP during the past 25 years should be subjected to a formal audit by qualified professionals to ascertain the extent of wetland loss that has occurred in the absence of impact minimization and compensation. For any mining operation that is still active, full restitution for past wetland damage should be required as a precondition for the approval of any permit renewal or additional mining activity. As demonstrated by PennDOT experience, planned wetland creation in southwestern Pennsylvania is costly. At least twice the acreage of wetlands lost must be created in hopes of avoiding net loss of wetland functions. When no mitigation is performed for the wetlands lost to longwall mining, the public suffers, especially the residents of the coalfields.
It is safe to state that there is no surplus of public funds in Pennsylvania just waiting to be applied to the remediation of past and future wetland loss so as to preserve private profits for multinational conglomerates. Ultimately, the vast economic subsidy of longwall mining that results from ignoring wetlands and other adverse environmental impacts leads to severe underpricing of coal in the marketplace, to the economic detriment of less environmentally damaging fuels.
Eighth, surface owners should become familiar with wetlands on their property and should insist that these resources receive full regulatory protection every time that a longwall mining application is processed by BMR. Measures effective in protecting wetlands will at the same time protect structures from damage. Formal notice is provided to each affected surface owner when mine applications are filed. Surface owners as individuals and as organized groups should make sure that every effort to avoid or minimize subsidence damage to wetlands is imposed upon applicants by regulators. Surface owners should insist that their consent be obtained prior to disturbance of any wetlands by mining, just as for wetland disturbance by any other kind of construction activity.
Ninth, Federal oversight agencies should fulfill their responsibilities to insure that wetlands are protected under Federal laws administered by BMR. The Army Corps of Engineers and US Environmental Protection Agency are obligated to protect wetlands by Section 404 of the Clean Water Act. The Office of Surface Mining in the US Department of the Interior has chosen not to concern itself with the impacts of subsidence on wetlands or other resources, but its own regulations purport to require compliance with all other Federal laws when mining permits are issued by State agencies with primacy under the Federal Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act. These agencies have failed to hold PADEP-BMR accountable for its failure to comply with Federal requirements for wetland protection and antidegradation. A detailed review of Federal involvement in wetland protection relating to longwall mines is beyond the scope of this report. But BMR is not alone in its failure to uphold the law, and Federal agencies must shoulder part of the blame.
If the actions recommended above were taken, wetland protection might someday become a reality in southwestern Pennsylvania, and wetland restoration might begin to make amends for the accumulated losses from longwall mining. There is no justification for allowing any significant or uncompensated wetland loss as a result of underground mining. If wetlands were regulated appropriately, there also might be reason to hope for the protection from longwall mining of other aspects of the human environment that are beyond the scope of analysis in this report. The impacts of longwall mining on resources other than wetlands warrant at least as detailed analysis as the review of wetlands provided here.
Longwall mining is a capital-intensive industry. Coal mine operators have shown the ability to raise vast amounts of money to purchase the machinery that extracts an ever-higher proportion of the coal resource from the earth using ever-dwindling amounts of human labor. The widespread exemption of the underground bituminous coal mining industry from environmentally protective laws that apply to other types of development in Pennsylvania continues to impose many costs of longwall mining on wetlands and other environmental resources, on surface owners, and on the taxpayers of the Commonwealth.
This shortsighted result of regulatory failure has had and continues to have significant adverse impacts on the environment and on the daily lives of current and future generations of citizens of Pennsylvania, both coalfield residents and taxpayers at large. Such lawless behavior on the part of State government and the mining industry should not be tolerated any longer in Pennsylvania.