James Bruggers writes:

Along the winding, two lane road that leads to Tracy Neece’s mountain in Floyd County, Kentucky, there’s no hint of the huge scars in the hills beyond the oaks and the pines.

Green forests cover steep slopes on each side of the road, which turns from blacktop to dusty gravel. Modest homes are nestled into the bottomlands along a creek with gardens that grow corn and zucchini under a hot summer sun.

The first sign of the devastation above is a glimpse of a treeless mesa, a landform more appropriate in the West.

As Neece navigates his Ford F-150 pickup truck past an abandoned security booth, he drives into a barren expanse. The forest is gone, replaced by grasses. The tops and sides of entire mountains have been blasted away by dynamite.

Neece stops at about 1,000 feet above the hollow to look at what is left of his mountain, where a coal mining company walked away and left sheer cliffs, exposed and dangerous, after miners gouged the black bituminous coal out of the mountainside with huge earth moving machines.

Neece bought the mountain in 2012 as an investment in coal, just before the bottom fell out of the Eastern Kentucky coal industry in 2015. His tenant left behind nearly two miles of unstable rock-faced cliffs that Neece estimates are as high as 250 feet tall.

By law, mining companies are supposed to ameliorate the damage they cause, a process known as contemporaneous reclamation. Slopes are supposed to be stabilized and returned to their approximate original contour; rainfall needs to be managed; grasses or trees must be planted.

None of that happened. [Continue reading…]