Mountaintop Removal: Stripping Kentucky's Beauty

What regulation. Mountain top removal (MTR) is a type of strip mining, exploding explosives from the summit to reach the lower coal seams. This is a faster and easier mining process, reducing manpower and time. This process of using explosives seems to be a better choice, but byproducts of explosives are negligibly harmful. It is considered to be the "most merciless" way to quickly mining coal as quickly as possible.

Mountain Removal Mine (MTR) is a strip mining that extracts mountain peaks or mountain peaks. It began in the 1970's, especially in the Appalachia of West Virginia and Kentucky. This method is the most efficient type of strip mining and is increasingly used as it recovers more coal beds with fewer people. The US Environmental Protection Agency (US Environmental Protection Agency) stated that "mountain removal / valley filling is a mining that exposes charcoal seams with the top of the mountain removed, and the land at the top of the mountain is adjacent It is thrown into the valley.

Strip mining and summit elimination are common ways to extract coal, as it can produce more coal and reduce labor. Scrape off the ground or remove sandblasting covers (extra soil) to expose the coal stripes. You can reach the coal by removing the entire summit. This destroys the ecosystem by removing plants, trees and topsoil. It also causes soil erosion and destroys thousands of miles of agricultural land. Mining in the area severely pollutes the groundwater by destroying toxic heavy metals dissolved in the waterway. That's horrible! Although maintenance agencies need reprocessing and regeneration, plants rarely survive in new harmful soils and the land does not return to its original state. In addition, bankrupted mines are exempted from this rehabilitation project.

Since the emergence of open pit mining (open pit mining and clearing of mountains) depends on heavier machinery than human resources, employment in mining has been greatly reduced. The focus of strip mining and summit dismantling is to remove everything on the coal bed, not to drill into the mountains. As a result, these practices have produced more "digging waste" (ie explosive stones than coal) than conventional mining. In 2002, the company went around to make these non-traditional mining activities more profitable. The Bush administration revised the definition of "packing" in the Clean Water Act to enable this "mineral cover" to fill valleys and rivers. In other words, instead of paying rocks to the appropriate disposal facility, the coal company can obtain permission to throw millions of tons of rock into nearby valleys and waterways.