The extraction of coal from the earth and its refinement into a marketable product historically have formed an environmentally destructive process. Despite a host of laws and regulations written to protect environmental resources from the adverse effects associated with new mines, significant impacts continue to occur. Laws, regulations, and especially enforcement have been slow in keeping up with new technologies, such as high-extraction longwall methods, and the environmental impacts they entail.

Evidence of environmental destruction from coal mining is not hard to find. After years of public outcries, the United States Congress in 1977 acknowledged:

[M]ining operations result in disturbances of surface areas that burden and adversely affect commerce and the public welfare by destroying or diminishing the utility of land for commercial, industrial, residential, recreational, agricultural, and forestry purposes, by causing erosion and landslides, by contributing to floods, by polluting the water, by destroying fish and wildlife habitats, by impairing natural beauty, by damaging the property of citizens, by creating hazards dangerous to life and property by degrading the quality of life in local communities, and by counteracting governmental programs and efforts to conserve soil, water, and other natural resources. [SMCRA §101(c), 30 U.S.C. §1201(c)]

          Present mine subsidence legislation and coal mining laws have failed to protect the public interest 
          in Pennsylvania in preserving our land. Damage from mine subsidence has seriously impeded 
          land development of the Commonwealth. Damage from mine subsidence has caused a very clear 
          and present danger to the health, safety and welfare of the people of Pennsylvania. Damage 
          by subsidence erodes the tax base of the affected municipalities. [Bituminous Mine Subsidence
          and Land Conservation Act, 52 P.S. 1406.3]

Unfortunately, these findings are equally pertinent some thirty years later.

The severe environmental destruction so long characteristic of coal mines is neither necessary nor acceptable to the public. Mining and environmental protection do not have to be mutually exclusive. Federal and state laws and regulations have been established, ostensibly to enable mining activities to occur without sacrificing the environment. Yet impacts continue to occur, and the public remains unaware of current circumstances in the coalfields.
 

The landmark Federal mining law, the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA), was enacted in 1977. It established certain minimum standards for environmental protection and was intended to be implemented by the States, which could elect to be more (but no less) stringent when protecting public resources. The enactment of environmental laws was only the first step; implementation by regulators and compliance with those laws by mine operators are other crucial steps if the anticipated environmental protection is ever to be achieved.

The public remains unaware of the ongoing environmental damage occurring in the coalfields.

Today, more than 25 years after the enactment of SMCRA and complementary Pennsylvania legislation, many adverse environmental effects are still being caused by new mines. Some of the old problems have been addressed, but they have not been eliminated. At the same time, developments in the technology for extracting coal, such as longwall mining methods, have created new problems and raised new issues which are not adequately addressed by the pre-longwall laws and regulations. The environmental consequences resulting from the new high- extraction technology have not yet been fully appreciated by legislators or regulators.

The adverse impacts of mining activities today are supposed to be addressed at various steps in a mine-planning process that starts long before a permit to mine is ever issued. Applicants are supposed to demonstrate that they have studied the resources of their mine site and planned their operations so that environmental impacts are minimized. Adverse impacts that cannot be avoided are supposed to be offset in some appropriate manner through remedies of various kinds, including wetland replacement.

For example, to prevent acid mine drainage, wastewater is to be handled so as to minimize its potential to form acid. Treatment facilities are to be utilized to cleanse mine wastewater before it is discharged to a stream, and the discharge itself is to be monitored to detect any unexpected pollution. Additionally, bonds must be posted to address potential future problems in the event the mine operator goes bankrupt or the treatment facilities prove to be inadequate before the post mining site has been fully restored to a stable condition.

Two of the most notorious impacts historically associated with underground coal mining are stream pollution resulting from acid mine drainage and damage to buildings and water supplies as a result of subsidence. The potential for these impacts currently receives some attention during the regulatory review process. In contrast, the potential and actual loss of wetlands as a result of longwall mining is virtually unrecognized despite State and Federal regulatory restrictions designed to protect what are now viewed as scarce and valuable natural resources. Wetlands fail to receive so much as a mention in the recent, controversial report by PADEP (1999b) on the effects of subsidence resulting from underground bituminous coal mining. This attests to the State's inability to identify environmental damages, not a surprising finding, given the scant inventory data it collects on resources at risk.

Wetland impacts are but one facet of the environmental damage from longwall coal mining in southwestern Pennsylvania. The people, through their elected representatives, have indicated that the natural resources of the Commonwealth must be protected. Laws and regulations protective of wetlands have been put on the books in Pennsylvania. The fundamental problem is that the permit review process is seriously flawed. At present it allows unnecessary environmental destruction by underground coal mining to an extent far beyond that allowed to other industries, to highways, or to commercial or residential development in the Commonwealth.
 

The lax treatment afforded to wetlands is not an anomaly, unfortunately, but merely the tip of an iceberg of inadequate and unlawful implementation of the regulatory process for permitting new longwall mines in Pennsylvania. Streams are dried up or altered to the extent that fish and invertebrate populations are devastated. Entire aquatic ecosystems are permanently changed. Surface owners' homes are damaged, their mental and physical health jeopardized, their water supplies depleted or contaminated with methane and radon gases, and their daily lives disrupted, sometimes for years after the actual mining passes beneath them. Historic and archaeological resources are sacrificed. The quality of life in local communities is degraded. The productivity of waterways and of the land surface is severely impaired.

The permit review process for underground coal mines is seriously flawed, unnecessarily allowing environmental destruction far beyond that allowed for other types of construction or development.

All those impacts deserve thorough attention beyond the scope of this report. Here, the focus is on wetlands and secondarily on aquatic resources; each of the many other classes of environmental impact from longwall mining deserves similar analysis.

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