Appalachia has a long history of being a "third world inside the US," its generally poor and rural population being treated much like a colonised people by mineral extraction companies driven by Northern and urban finance capital.

MTR is highly "efficient" in capitalist terms -- a skeleton crew of a dozen or fewer men can place the explosives and operate the gargantuan (fossil fuel guzzling) equipment.  Labour costs are minimised and that's the name of the game.  The slag piles are simply bulldozed off the site into the valleys, where they clog and poison streams and rivers, destroying many hundreds of thousands of sq mi of watershed.  IIRC some shenanigans have been underway to redefine these slag heaps as "nontoxic landfill debris" or some such in order to weasel around the clean water act.

This is a classic example of the extractive industries' defining an area as a "sacrifice zone," as in "you and your home get to be sacrificed so that other people hundreds or thousands of miles away can (a) wallow in cheap energy and (b) make a killing investing in all the spinoff industries associated with the destruction."

As Wendell Berry said, when you look at the practises of the extractive industrial model -- be it farming, forestry, fishing or the archetypical mining -- how can you distinguish it from warfare?  The devastation, the overkill technomethods, the delusions of godlike power, the utter contempt for life and posterity, are identical.  Industrial capitalism has never been at peace, it has been a constant state of warfare whether overt (geopolitical) or simply quotidian (operational).

Here is one local's blog on the topic.

Refs here to the excellent 2005 Harpers Mag article by Erik Reece which was turned into a full length book Death of a Mountain.

I call attention to the mining company's term for the soil and rock of the mountain -- "overburden."  Compare to "bycatch" and "collateral damage."  All neutral, euphemistic, chilly terms for "whatever does not make us money and therefore must be destroyed to get at the Good Stuff."

In mountaintop removal (MTR) coal mining, the targeted land is clear-cut of all trees, which are usually sold to timber companies. Miners then use explosives to blast away the land (aka "overburden," the rock and subsoil that lies above a coal seam), exposing the coal. The overburden is pushed into a nearby valley or hollow, creating a pile below called valley fill. The coal is removed and transported to a processing plant and washed. Millions of gallons of waste from coal processing, called sludge or slurry, are often stored nearby in open pools held back by earthen dams.

These sludge ponds...

As of 2000, there were more than 600 sludge impoundments across the Appalachian coalfields. Chemical analyses of this sludge indicate it contains large amounts of arsenic, mercury, lead, copper, and chromium, among other toxins, which eventually seep into the drinking water supply of nearby communities. Even worse than this seepage, however, is the threat of a dam break. Several dam breaches have occurred, one at Buffalo Creek in West Virginia, which took the lives of 125 people, many of whom were children.

The most recent sludge dam breach was in Martin County, Kentucky, in 2000, which the EPA called the worst environmental disaster in the history of the Southeast. When the sludge dam breached, more than 300 million gallons of toxic sludge (about 30 times the amount of oil released in the Exxon Valdez oil spill) poured into tributaries of the Big Sandy River, killing virtually all aquatic life for 70 miles downstream of the spill.

Should also perhaps note that the Tar Sands project in Alberta Canada is not dissimilar:  as in any open pit mining, MTR or flatland, all life is exterminated on the surface and then the topsoil and rock or scree are scraped away over an enormous area to get at the low-grade tar sands beneath -- like flensing a captured whale.  The devastation thus produced -- instant desertification -- spreads like a cancer as the "exploration" and "development" proceed.

If you can view .wmv here is a sat-based tour of the tar sands which raises the very interesting potential of Google Earth to provide citizen oversight into the massive abuse of these "invisible" places.  Of course, this presupposes the honesty of Google Earth imagery, i.e. Google's ability to remain uncorrupted by the black-hole-like density and gravitational/magnetic field of the inconceivable mass of money at the heart of the energy/finance nexus.


The difference between theory and practise in practise ...