GENERAL SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
Wetlands are important natural resources that are valued in Pennsylvania and in the United States as a whole. State and Federal laws and regulations have been established to protect wetlands. In permit applications for most types of new development in Pennsylvania, other than longwall mining activities, wetland resources are being identified and potential effects are being assessed. Where wetland impacts are demonstrated to be unavoidable, they are being authorized by PADEP, and compensatory mitigation of some sort is being required as a condition of permit approval.
Throughout the Commonwealth, builders and public agencies seeking to construct highways, residential subdivisions, commercial establishments, or factories in or near wetlands must first identify the wetlands on the property and then design their development to avoid them.
When so little as a fraction of an acre of wetlands must be disturbed by a construction project, the applicant will be involved in a Chapter 105 regulatory permit review that can take a year or longer to complete. Unavoidable wetland losses greater than 0.05 acre must be compensated. The DWWEC regulatory system generally is working to protect wetlands throughout the Commonwealth; not so with the procedures of BMR, which has been delegated Chapters 93 and 105 responsibility for coal mines.
Despite the appearance of wetland protection requirements built into the regulatory process for new underground coal mines, wetlands are not being protected at all from wholesale damage in the bituminous coalfields of Pennsylvania. The "protections" found in the Constitution, laws, regulations, and application forms are mere words on paper, with no apparent effect on Bureau of Mining and Reclamation review of proposals for new mines. This report provides some recent examples, but the failure of BMR to protect scarce wetlands and other water resources extends back for decades and presumably reflects deliberate administrative directives. The inescapable conclusion is that BMR considers the scarce wetlands on longwall mine sites not worthy of notice, let alone regulation or replacement.
PADEP's current, overall regulatory philosophy emphasizes "flexibility" in achieving environmental compliance. It seeks to do this in part by establishing partnerships with permit applicants and by minimizing the cost burden it places on the regulated community. Such an approach to environmental protection should never become an end unto itself, which is what appears to have happened in the context of underground mine regulation. The BMR seems to have lost sight of the fact that its primary responsibility is environmental protection. In allowing coal mine operators a virtual exemption from wetland regulation, BMR seems to have responded to coal industry complaints that mining is over- regulated and operates on an unreasonably meager profit margin, rather than laws requiring wetland protection. Unrestricted mining on a vast scale that devastates streams and wetlands is not lawful in Pennsylvania. It should not be allowed by BMR. Compensation for natural resource damages of all types should be sought from coal operators, just as it is sought from other industries that cause environmental harm.
Examination of the BMR files for mine after underground mine leads to the inescapable conclusion that BMR seeks deliberately to ignore the requirements protective of wetlands, the same requirements that PADEP imposes upon other types of industrial and construction activities Statewide, where wetlands are more abundant than in Washington and Greene Counties. Dozens more instances exist in the BMR files for each characteristic example cited in this report.
Proposed alterations of the quantity
and flow of surface water and groundwater for nonmining activities are
subject to PADEP permits statewide. Stream diversions, impoundments, and
water withdrawals all are subject to regulatory review and approval. At
least the same level of regulatory review should be afforded to the enormous
longwall mines that disrupt surface and groundwater patterns in a region
of exceptionally scarce wetlands as in those parts of Pennsylvania where
wetlands are relatively abundant. Instead, the current review by BMR of
impacts on wetlands and other water resources from longwall mining is superficial
to nonexistent. Perhaps longwall mines are just too big for BMR to adequately
comprehend --- after all, a single mine may encompass 35,000 acres -- the
same size as the entire City of Pittsburgh (55 square miles).
| By not applying the laws and regulations protective of wetlands equally to all entities who would destroy them, PADEP is heavily subsidizing coal mine operators at the expense of the environment, surface landowners, and the taxpaying public at large. No comparable subsidy is offered to other classes of developers in the Commonwealth. |
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Coal operators quietly are being allowed to encroach upon wetlands with impunity. When wetlands are destroyed without replacement of their critical functions, the resultant decreases in water quality or quantity and increases in downstream flooding eventually become problems that surface landowners and taxpayers at large have to bear. Longwall mine operators, who have shown the ability to raise massive amounts of capital to increase coal production per man-hour and per acre, are given no incentive to apply innovative technologies to reduce environmental impacts.
The BMR has the authority to regulate
and the responsibility to protect wetlands in the context of its review
of underground mine applications. It chooses not to implement either. This
report demonstrates that:
| As a result, virtually all of the requirements for wetland identification and protection imposedon new construction in Pennsylvania are routinely ignored for longwall mining operations. Adverse impacts on wetlands are routinely approved without being identified, avoided, minimized, or compensated. In most cases, adverse wetland impacts are not even acknowledged because no effort has been made by applicants or demanded by regulators to identify the wetlands at risk. |
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The justification for wholesale suspension of laws intended to protect wetlands when the BMR processes applications for longwall mines has nowhere been publicly acknowledged by the PADEP. Instead, this long-standing administrative practice is concealed from the public by regulations and forms that pretend to offer some measure of protection to wetlands but in practice do not. In this respect wetlands are but one illustrative class of resources routinely destroyed by high-extraction coal mining in Pennsylvania.
