Losing a mountain, and possibly our souls

“He who hears the rippling of rivers in these degenerate days will not utterly despair.”
— Henry David Thoreau

“The sludge moved with the speed and the consistency of volcanic lava, choking everything in its path.”

That’s how journalist Erik Reece describes the nation’s worst environmental disaster east of the Mississippi in “Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness: Radical Strip Mining and the Devastation of Appalachia,” his 2006 masterpiece of investigative reporting that won the John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Reece is describing the Inez, Ky., mine disaster of 2000, which sent 300 million gallons of highly toxic, black coal slurry spilling into the surrounding landscape, burying trees, animals, birds, insects and fish along the way. Coldwater Creek and Wolf Creek were covered over in the spill. Nearby homeowners reported seven feet of sludge on their front lawns.

According to the Associated Press, cleanup of the spill –– still incomplete –– cost $46 million and was paid for by the mine’s owner, Martin County Coal, a subsidiary of Massey Energy of Richmond, Va. In addition, the company paid $3.25 million in penalties to the state of Kentucky and $225,000 to Kentucky’s Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources. The federal government fined the company a whopping $5,600.

An overburdened slurry pond had collapsed into a mine shaft, sending acrylamiac, a chemical used to clean coal of dirt and dust, into the environment, destroying everything in its path. Acrylamiac, by the way, is known to cause cancer.

I put “Lost Mountain” on my summer reading list in large part because I wanted to know more about the coal industry, about its inner workings and about how we, as a nation, could wean ourselves off the dirtiest of fossil fuels. No easy task, considering that 50 percent of our electricity is produced at coal-fired power plants, many of them built before the Clean Air Act of 1970, meaning that they do not have to meet its provisions.