Most people in North Carolina have heard of the issues with coal ash ponds. The story of how the coal is shipped to the state is also full of broken lives. North Carolina has no coal of its own and is forced to import the black mineral from West Virginia. Up to half of all of North Carolina’s coal comes from a controversial mining process known as mountaintop removal (Sturgis, 2014).
Mountaintop removal involves destroying all the vegetation from a mountaintop and blasting away the rock to access coal seams inside the mountain. In 2002, at the request of the Bush administration, Congress changed the Clean Water Act to allow the dumping of mountain top debris into rivers at the bottoms of valleys. The change in the law led to a rapid increase in mountaintop removal. A staggering 1.4 million acres of forests have been lost since 2002. The forest loss led to a decease in native species including endangered ones. The headwaters of streams in West Virginia have been so polluted by acid mine drainage that two thirds of fish in those streams are now gone (Ecological, n.d.).
The health impacts to humans from mountaintop removal can be severe. Communities that live near mines see an increase in lung cancer and low birth weights. There have also been increases in diseases such as COPD and high blood pressure. Chemicals used in mine blasting have gotten into the water system and poisoned residents with heavy metals. Explosions from blasting have caused flying debris that have destroyed homes and even killed people (Health, n.d.).
West Virginia exports up to a 100 million tons of coal every year. Each train coal car caries up to 120 tons of coal and can lose up to a ton of that coal per trip. Soil samples taken from neighborhoods near the coal lines have found arsenic levels five times normal levels. Coal from the trains coats nearby buildings with black stains. Most of the people forced to live near the coal lines are poor and lack political power. Living in close proximity to coal trains has negative health impacts and can reduce life expectancy by ten years. Norfolk Southern, which runs the trains, gives large campaign donations to local politicians who help insulate them from the health issues their trains create (Geiling, 2018).
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