Speaker 1: Southern West Virginia. Like this area that these woods where
Speaker 1: we're standing at right now is one of the most
Speaker 1: biologically diverse places on the entire planet. And you look
Speaker 1: out at a mind site like that and you see
Speaker 1: how bare that is, Like that's never ever gonna support
Speaker 1: the top of ecosystems that the types of wildlife, the
Speaker 1: types of plants, everything else that a healthy Appalachian forest
Speaker 1: ecosystem should be able to support. It's the big take
Speaker 1: from Bloomberg News and iHeart Radio. I'm West Gasova today.
Speaker 1: What happens when big coal decides stop, pack up and
Speaker 1: leave town. As America's long dependence on coal winds down,
Speaker 1: some companies that made fortunes in that industry are looking
Speaker 1: to move on, and they're leaving behind a big, filthy
Speaker 1: mass all across cold country, ruined land and poison water
Speaker 1: that someone's got to pay to clean up. And that's
Speaker 1: when the game of past the buck begins. So who
Speaker 1: does wind up footing the bill? Bloomberg reporters Zachary Mider
Speaker 1: and Josh Saul went to find out. They joined me
Speaker 1: now from New York. Josh Saul, Zach Mider, thanks so
Speaker 1: much for being here. Thanks for having us west. You
Speaker 1: tell your story in part through the eyes of retired miner.
Speaker 1: His name is Miles Hatfield, and he lives in eastern Kentucky.
Speaker 1: Can you tell us about him? Sure? I first found
Speaker 1: Miles after a lawyer I was talking to suggested I
Speaker 1: look at complaints that were made um around some of
Speaker 1: the specific minds that we were looking at. He describes
Speaker 1: a really sad story. He lived in the house where
Speaker 1: he raised his kids. They lived there for decades, and
Speaker 1: then the runoff from the Love Branch mine started affecting
Speaker 1: his home. The moment that really almost made me gasp
Speaker 1: is when he described a few years ago walking through
Speaker 1: his house and the water had weakened his floor in
Speaker 1: the structure under his house, and he was walking into
Speaker 1: his dining room and he fell through the floor. He
Speaker 1: fell through and got sort of pinned up to his hips.
Speaker 1: I didn't know what was under the house until it
Speaker 1: fell in, and then there wasn't no doubt about it.
Speaker 1: Then the Love Branch mine was a coal mine, and
Speaker 1: underground coal mine, so you can imagine just a deep
Speaker 1: shaft going into the ground. What happens with these kind
Speaker 1: of minds is they can change the hydrologic balance, or
Speaker 1: change the way that the water flows underground, so above
Speaker 1: Miles house. Instead of the water flowing the way it
Speaker 1: had for decades, where it flowed, you know, to the
Speaker 1: sides of his house and down through natural natural creeks
Speaker 1: and under underground caverns, it started flowing, you know, right
Speaker 1: through his right through his yard and eventually under his house.
Speaker 1: Miles Hatfield described what happened to him. There wasn't no
Speaker 1: warning when it fell, but it went wall to wall
Speaker 1: kitchen cabinets. For the lower kitchen cabinets, they're suspended in
Speaker 1: the air. The floor fell out from underneath those. Uh,
Speaker 1: this is in a bad of an eye. I was
Speaker 1: in four foot of water, which I didn't know was
Speaker 1: there until I went in. I had a cell phone
Speaker 1: with me, no signal. It took me about twenty minutes
Speaker 1: to get out of the hole that I was in.
Speaker 1: The stuff and it fell in, was floating in the water,
Speaker 1: and I kept stepping on things to try to push
Speaker 1: myself up, and it took me about, i'd say twenty
Speaker 1: minutes just to get up out of the kitchen. And
Speaker 1: I went upstairs and told my wife. She couldn't believe it.
Speaker 1: She come down and where we did have a kitchen
Speaker 1: and dining room didn't have it anymore. Now you've got
Speaker 1: to use your machine. Nice on the wrist of it.
Speaker 1: And so I went down. They got electric stove. He
Speaker 1: had hit me in the back of the head. So
Speaker 1: I was thinking, what would been imbursing too if it
Speaker 1: was in the paper man drowns and kitchen, which I
Speaker 1: wouldn't know about it. It's not exactly the way I
Speaker 1: don't want to go. He said. It felt like, you know,
Speaker 1: in an old, an old cowboy movie when they when
Speaker 1: they hang a guy and he falls to the platform
Speaker 1: of the floor, you know. He said, it felt like
Speaker 1: falling into a swimming pool. And uh it basically it
Speaker 1: basically ruined his house. He had to move. He now
Speaker 1: lives a few miles away in a rental, which really
Speaker 1: burns him. He's very unhappy that. You know, he spent
Speaker 1: all so much of his life. He actually worked as
Speaker 1: a coal miner before he retired, and spent a lot
Speaker 1: of his life making money to pay off the mortgage
Speaker 1: on his house, and then now he's paying rent, you know,
Speaker 1: for a different house. Um, it's pretty unhappy about that.
Speaker 1: It costs a hundred sixty dollars a month to run
Speaker 1: upon to pump this water down, and uh, I hope
Speaker 1: to make it back. I hope the house can be fixed,
Speaker 1: but we won't know until we're empty it to see
Speaker 1: what we have inside. And what happened to him is
Speaker 1: really what your story is all about. That this mine
Speaker 1: no longer in use, is sitting there and it's causing
Speaker 1: all kinds of trouble and it's supposed to get fixed.
Speaker 1: So just what happens when mine closes down? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: So you might think like, okay, they they're done with
Speaker 1: the coal, like whatever. They just kind of close up
Speaker 1: the entrance and and that's it and everything's fine. But
Speaker 1: in reality, an old coal mine leaves a huge mess.
Speaker 1: And so one thing that very frequently happens is that
Speaker 1: because of that activity of pulling all the coal out,
Speaker 1: you you sort of unearth all these noxious chemicals that
Speaker 1: are naturally occurring but that would never cause a problem
Speaker 1: unless something like mining happened to sort of cause them
Speaker 1: to come out all at once. It's super common for
Speaker 1: the area around the coal to have like material that
Speaker 1: when water flows in their water and air that that
Speaker 1: were never there before. They essentially become highly acidic, and
Speaker 1: then the the acid water picks up things like metals
Speaker 1: like iron and aluminum, which is why the water that
Speaker 1: flows out of old mines is typically bright orange or
Speaker 1: very often bright orange, because it's it's so laden with iron,
Speaker 1: and that's just kind of a signal that something's wrong.
Speaker 1: But it's the acidity that typically will kill any aquatic
Speaker 1: life or something that would want to live in it.
Speaker 1: So in Appalachia there's thousands of miles of creeks and
Speaker 1: streams that are affected by what they call acid mind drainage.
Speaker 1: In addition to that, you have selenium, which is a
Speaker 1: necessary nutrient, but in high enough quantities it could become
Speaker 1: toxic to birds and insects, and so in some parts
Speaker 1: of West Virginia Kentucky you have creeks that are also
Speaker 1: poisoned with that, and it's extremely difficult to get rid of.
Speaker 1: So just from the activity of digging things up, you
Speaker 1: have all these really profound problems. And then, of course,
Speaker 1: in addition, you have what Josh was talking about was
Speaker 1: just the drainage of actually affecting people who live nearby,
Speaker 1: and you also have in in mountaintop removal mining, you
Speaker 1: have just these giant piles of rock that are basically
Speaker 1: what's left of the mountain when it's been kind of
Speaker 1: blown up. You're actually just kind of blowing the top
Speaker 1: off a mountain and then kind of dumping it into
Speaker 1: the nearest valley. And so what you're left with is this.
Speaker 1: You know, where you before you had a forest that
Speaker 1: had things growing on it. Now you've just kind of
Speaker 1: like the surface of the moon or something. So we
Speaker 1: all know that mining, and you do a great job
Speaker 1: of describing, and it is dirty business. Um. And so
Speaker 1: when mines are done, the mining companies are supposed to
Speaker 1: make it right. What are they supposed to do? There's
Speaker 1: a federal law that mining companies have to when they're
Speaker 1: done mining, when they're done taking coal out of the ground,
Speaker 1: they have to restore the land to it's roughly to
Speaker 1: its original contours, you know, so it has a similar,
Speaker 1: similar or the same shape in terms of there was
Speaker 1: a mountain here in a valley here. They have to
Speaker 1: plant vegetation so that there are something growing there, and
Speaker 1: they have to make sure that there's not water runoff
Speaker 1: that is bad for people or animals or plants or
Speaker 1: wildlife that live nearby or downstream. So that's both making
Speaker 1: sure that the water is not running in some totally
Speaker 1: different way like with flooding, and also that it's not
Speaker 1: poisoned or laden with chemicals. You spoke to an advigate
Speaker 1: called Aaron Savage with a group called Apple lachin voices,
Speaker 1: right right, right, Yeah, here's what she had to say
Speaker 1: about the process of reclamation. After nineteen seventy seven, coal
Speaker 1: companies became legally required to reclaim the minds that they
Speaker 1: had started. The law past regulate coal mining is called
Speaker 1: the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act. We commonly refer
Speaker 1: to it as smackra. Some of it's simpler in terms
Speaker 1: of moving dirt around. That's at least like pretty easily understandable,
Speaker 1: and you can see when you're done that, Okay, that's
Speaker 1: maybe not as pretty as it was before. But the
Speaker 1: water treatment which wrote about is really a long term
Speaker 1: and really a difficult thing. When when I was in
Speaker 1: West Virginia, I went out with some guys who try
Speaker 1: to keep track of the clean up of these acid
Speaker 1: mind drainage streams and to give you a sense of
Speaker 1: the kind of long term environmental consequences here. One of
Speaker 1: the places we went to there was a stream that
Speaker 1: had been poison since the eight nineties and it was
Speaker 1: still acidic until just a couple of years ago when
Speaker 1: the state finally got around to cleaning it up. And
Speaker 1: what they're doing it turns out to be very expensive
Speaker 1: and long term expensive because if you think of it,
Speaker 1: it's it's basically it's acid, just like household vinegar. If
Speaker 1: you want to clean it up, you essentially just have
Speaker 1: to apply a base to neutralize it. And so what
Speaker 1: they do is they typically install these like giant silos
Speaker 1: along the stream with a machine that's kind of constantly
Speaker 1: dumping this limestone powder into the creek. And so that's expensive.
Speaker 1: It's like electricity and material that could easily be needed
Speaker 1: for another hundred years. And I went out with these
Speaker 1: guys to test some samples of water and see how
Speaker 1: things were going. And one of them said, you know,
Speaker 1: if this machine were to break down for twenty four hours,
Speaker 1: this whole stream is back to square one everything and
Speaker 1: it dies and we'll have to start over. It's almost
Speaker 1: like the stream is on life support. Yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's depending on the machine. But they have signs out
Speaker 1: with the roads saying it is poison they've told the
Speaker 1: people in the hollow, don't let your kids play in it,
Speaker 1: and don't let your animals drink from it. But this
Speaker 1: water goes to the river, they treat it down there,
Speaker 1: and they send it back to us as drinking water.
Speaker 1: I still don't know who posted a sign out there
Speaker 1: tell them about the water. But if I put polluted
Speaker 1: water in the creek, I'm sure somebody'd be after me.
Speaker 1: Cold companies can they're a little bit lax the hold
Speaker 1: of them, you know, accountable. And there are so many streams,
Speaker 1: you know, not just rivers, but streams that are anywhere
Speaker 1: from a flow to a trickle that you can't put
Speaker 1: machinery on all of them. Some of these decisions are
Speaker 1: kind of up to regulators point of view, regulator's decision.
Speaker 1: One long time regulator I talked to, he actually ended
Speaker 1: up being Obama's head of mind reclamation. He said that
Speaker 1: when he was when he was coming up, when he
Speaker 1: was a young regulator in Pennsylvania, one a guy he
Speaker 1: worked with had a had a unique method for deciding
Speaker 1: whether or not a stream was big enough or important
Speaker 1: enough to be protected. And he said, if you could
Speaker 1: piss across it, that it wasn't big enough to warrant protection.
Speaker 1: My conversation with Zachary Miter and Josh Saul continues, after
Speaker 1: the break, that's got to be pretty expensive work to
Speaker 1: restore what has been upturned by mining for you know, decades.
Speaker 1: Often the problem with Smacker at this point is that
Speaker 1: the work fuirements for reclamation are unclear, and there isn't
Speaker 1: enough money available to do the reclamation. Aaron Savage has
Speaker 1: done some work to try to figure out how big
Speaker 1: this whole problem is of cleaning up Appalachian coal country,
Speaker 1: and she estimates that it's going to cost something like
Speaker 1: eight or ten billion dollars to clean up all the
Speaker 1: minds that still have to be reclaimed. And then she
Speaker 1: went in and tried to figure out how much money
Speaker 1: is available to do that, and it doesn't look good
Speaker 1: because there's some bond money set aside that these companies
Speaker 1: have to post, but it's not nearly as much as
Speaker 1: their obligations. And so if these companies fail, as a
Speaker 1: lot of them do, that difference is going to have
Speaker 1: to be borne by somebody else, and so it will
Speaker 1: either be that the work doesn't get done and it's
Speaker 1: sort of borne by the environment, or it has to
Speaker 1: be paid for by you know, state reclamation funds, which
Speaker 1: are sometimes funded by taxes on coal, so it's kind
Speaker 1: of funded by the industry. But if those run out,
Speaker 1: then ultimately it would be the taxpayers that would have
Speaker 1: to come up with a difference. All our companies willing
Speaker 1: to at least try. Companies often don't want to do
Speaker 1: the cleanup. It's hard, it's expensive, it takes a long time,
Speaker 1: it takes equipment away from the profitable activity of actually
Speaker 1: mining coal. Uh So, something that they prefer to do
Speaker 1: and are reporting found often have been doing, is instead
Speaker 1: of cleaning up that land, they instead offload or transfer
Speaker 1: or sell those mining permits to another company, often to
Speaker 1: a smaller company that's willing to take on those clean
Speaker 1: up obligations. They can do that by selling the mining permits,
Speaker 1: or they can also do that by basically giving the
Speaker 1: mining permits, and sometimes they do give along a substantial
Speaker 1: chunk of money so that the smaller company has some
Speaker 1: kind of resources to do the cleanup. But you have
Speaker 1: a situation where you have smaller companies with a lot
Speaker 1: fewer people, with less expertise, and they then suddenly have
Speaker 1: sometimes hundreds of mining permits that they're responsible for cleaning up,
Speaker 1: and we found that those companies have been, for the
Speaker 1: most part, at least in the main case that we
Speaker 1: looked at, not cleaning up many of the minds and
Speaker 1: also racking up huge numbers of environmental violations. You read
Speaker 1: about one company in particular and how they did exactly
Speaker 1: what you're describing, Zac. Can you tell about how that happened.
Speaker 1: Alpha was one of the biggest coal companies in the country.
Speaker 1: Basically the whole industry sort of went broke in the
Speaker 1: mid two thousands because of the collapsing demand for coal
Speaker 1: because of cheaper competition from natural gas, and so in
Speaker 1: the course of sort of working its way out of
Speaker 1: bankruptcy and just afterwards, Alpha undertook this transaction where they said, well,
Speaker 1: we have all these old coal mines in in Appalachia
Speaker 1: that basically I don't have any coal that's worth mining anymore,
Speaker 1: and so we're going to shift them to this small
Speaker 1: company that actually didn't have a lot going on at
Speaker 1: all until Alpha transferred all these mines to it, so
Speaker 1: hundreds of mining permits and um they handed over some
Speaker 1: some money as well, and the plan was, you know
Speaker 1: this this company Lexington. What es such a just be
Speaker 1: in the business of of cleaning up all these old mines.
Speaker 1: That's that's what I was gonna do. This was the
Speaker 1: smaller company that took on all these permits, That's right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: And that that ended up being a great deal for
Speaker 1: Alpha because you know, is now publicly traded company again
Speaker 1: and they can tell their investors, look, we don't have
Speaker 1: this legacy obligation of uncertain costs that will be burdened with,
Speaker 1: you know, for a long time while while all this
Speaker 1: cleanup happens. Instead, we can just focus on the future,
Speaker 1: focus on the minds we have now they're still operating
Speaker 1: with with coal in them, and you don't have to
Speaker 1: worry about any of those old clean up jobs. These
Speaker 1: asset transfers and this this strategy, this playbook has been
Speaker 1: tremendously profitable for a lot of these companies. A number
Speaker 1: of these big coal companies have had record profits. Alpha specifically,
Speaker 1: it's executives have earned tens of millions of dollars over
Speaker 1: say the past decade or so, and the company's stock
Speaker 1: is up something like seven So Alpha is just one
Speaker 1: of several companies um involved in minds that need to
Speaker 1: be cleaned up. The example you use with Alpha is
Speaker 1: just one example. Absolutely yeah, and Alpha is just one
Speaker 1: of many coal companies that use the same playbook and
Speaker 1: effectively offloaded or passed off it's clean up obligations, which
Speaker 1: is all entirely legal because it's approved by state regulators.
Speaker 1: That's right. Now. Why would Lexington, a smaller company, not
Speaker 1: a lot of assets, take over essentially spent minds and
Speaker 1: tons and tons of obligations. What is the incentive for them?
Speaker 1: I think there's there's two. There's two incentives for Lexington
Speaker 1: in a situation like that. The first is that some
Speaker 1: of the minds do have coal left in them, and
Speaker 1: coal can be mined profitably, especially when coal prices are
Speaker 1: high like they are right now. To to abstract away
Speaker 1: from Lexington to kind of all of these companies in
Speaker 1: general that are taking on these obligations, they don't necessarily
Speaker 1: have that much money in the game. In other words,
Speaker 1: they're taking on a huge amount of obligation, but if
Speaker 1: things go south then they fail, they haven't actually that
Speaker 1: much on that outcome. Whereas if it turns out to
Speaker 1: be less expensive, or if coal prices recover dramatically, some
Speaker 1: of those defunct minds become useful again. They kind of
Speaker 1: get all that upside. Well, one thing that you describe
Speaker 1: in the story is that in some cases, these smaller
Speaker 1: companies don't have enough money, and then taxpayers wind up
Speaker 1: holding the bag. Right. That's the thing is that by
Speaker 1: by transferring minds from a kind of big company with
Speaker 1: a lot of coal, like Alpha, to a smaller company
Speaker 1: that doesn't really have anything else going on, what you're
Speaker 1: doing is essentially guaranteeing that whoever is going to have
Speaker 1: to pay for that long term, it won't be Alpha. Josh,
Speaker 1: what did Alpha and Lexington say when you ask them
Speaker 1: about this? Alpha said that, you know, first of all,
Speaker 1: we're a very environmentally conscious company, and where they say
Speaker 1: that they're proud of their standards. More specifically, they say
Speaker 1: that they often pass along substantial payments to the companies
Speaker 1: that take on their clean up obligations, and they also
Speaker 1: say that all of these transfers are approved by state
Speaker 1: by state regulators. Lexington told me that they would comment,
Speaker 1: but never actually sent along any answers to any questions. Josh,
Speaker 1: you mentioned the state regulators having to approve these deals,
Speaker 1: and that's exactly what happened. In this case right where
Speaker 1: they they spelled out this plan and the state regulators
Speaker 1: looked at it and they did approve it. And what
Speaker 1: was in the plan plan was that Lexington would take
Speaker 1: on all the obligations. Lexington would do all the clean
Speaker 1: up that Alpha had promised to do, even set aside
Speaker 1: money to do it. But it basically passed along money
Speaker 1: to Lexington, and Lexington at that point had all the
Speaker 1: obligations and Alpha went on its way. We haven't had
Speaker 1: a final accounting yet of how much money has actually
Speaker 1: left UM to clean this stuff up, but there's a
Speaker 1: lot of signs that it doesn't look great because these minds,
Speaker 1: rather than being owned by these coal companies that are
Speaker 1: super profitable this year, are instead owned by these like
Speaker 1: little companies we can't even really tell if they're in
Speaker 1: business or in some cases they've already gone bankrupt or
Speaker 1: or or put in receivership already, so they they're sort
Speaker 1: of unable to benefit from the revival in the coal
Speaker 1: industry that we're seeing. So to take the kind of
Speaker 1: big picture perspective, you know, for for a hundred years
Speaker 1: in the coal industry, there were no rules about this.
Speaker 1: You could just dig in mine and then kind of
Speaker 1: walk away, and so um the federal government to this
Speaker 1: day is I mean, they just approved a big spending
Speaker 1: bill that would spend billions of dollars cleaning up those
Speaker 1: old messes from back before there were rules. We're still
Speaker 1: cleaning that up. Since nine there's been this federal law
Speaker 1: that says the coal companies have to clean it up,
Speaker 1: and there's all these kind of checks and balances to
Speaker 1: make sure they really do. And that's what we're talking
Speaker 1: about here. There's there's so many different ways that that
Speaker 1: system can fail, and ultimately, if if it does, we
Speaker 1: could be back in a situation where the federal government
Speaker 1: has to come in and and pay for these cleanups
Speaker 1: that we're supposed to be the private industry's responsibility. Why
Speaker 1: aren't the state boards that oversee this taking a harder line, Well,
Speaker 1: they're the state regulators are in a tough position because
Speaker 1: you know, states like Kentucky and West Virginia they want
Speaker 1: their old minds to be cleaned up, but they also
Speaker 1: want coal jobs and they want their coal companies to
Speaker 1: be healthy and profitable, and so oftentimes in the short
Speaker 1: term there's really a trade off there. If a coal
Speaker 1: company says, hey, listen, we we need a little more
Speaker 1: time on this, or why don't you prove this deal
Speaker 1: so we can like keep all our guys at work.
Speaker 1: You know, that's very tempting to state regulator. So sometimes
Speaker 1: the regulators have to weigh on the one hand, like
Speaker 1: they want to support the industry, but that might kind
Speaker 1: of lead them to say, well, we'll think about reclamation,
Speaker 1: you know, as as our second priority, or maybe we'll
Speaker 1: worry about that later. And so over time, that's part
Speaker 1: of the reason that they're kind of willing to approve
Speaker 1: these deals. That separates the kind of profitable part of
Speaker 1: the industry from the clean up obligations. We'll talk about
Speaker 1: where things go from here when we come back. In Appalachia,
Speaker 1: there are any number of people who are taking it
Speaker 1: upon themselves to monitor this clean up uh, to put
Speaker 1: pressure on mining companies to do it and to see
Speaker 1: what's being cleaned up in and what's not. One of
Speaker 1: them you spoke to was a person called Junior Walk.
Speaker 1: Junior grew up kind of in the heart of coal
Speaker 1: country along the Coal River, and there's a number of
Speaker 1: coal companies operating along there. He was affected by coal
Speaker 1: kind of starting out as a kid his his grandfather
Speaker 1: was a miner. He said he saw as a kid
Speaker 1: his grandfather welding little jack rocks, which is what coal
Speaker 1: miners would make, sort of little little caltrops out of
Speaker 1: nails to throw in the way of coal trucks during
Speaker 1: labor disputes. And coal companies also hurt his drinking water
Speaker 1: when he was a kid. So I mean he grew
Speaker 1: up right right in the middle of all this, and
Speaker 1: he now works for an organization called Cold River Mountain Watch,
Speaker 1: and he spends he spends some of his days basically
Speaker 1: keeping an eye on patrol and keeping watch on the
Speaker 1: coal companies that operate around around around his childhood home
Speaker 1: and where he lives now. And one of the most
Speaker 1: effective ways he has for doing that is flying flying
Speaker 1: a drone. So he'll drive up. You know, he's got
Speaker 1: an old Subaru. We we went and road with him, um,
Speaker 1: and he's sort of cowboys, you know, straight up these
Speaker 1: dirt roads up into these mountains and finds a spot
Speaker 1: and him and his organization then report those violations to
Speaker 1: state regulators and you know, try to get inspections or
Speaker 1: trying to make sure that those companies stopped doing that
Speaker 1: or make it right. What does it look like in
Speaker 1: the area surrounding spent mine, Well, it's really a mix.
Speaker 1: I mean you can be driving down a road or
Speaker 1: you know, standing looking out down a ridge and it
Speaker 1: can be really beautiful. Western Virginia is a breathtakingly beautiful place,
Speaker 1: and then there could be right next to it what
Speaker 1: looks like looks like a moonscape, just like scraped not
Speaker 1: just to the ground, but like way way below the ground,
Speaker 1: just gray, gray rock. You know, if you think about
Speaker 1: the mountain like a human body, that's like, that's like
Speaker 1: cutting your arm, right, it will eventually heal back over.
Speaker 1: But if you're talking about a massive mountaintop removal operation,
Speaker 1: then that's like cutting your whole arm off. It's not
Speaker 1: going to grow back. If we were to take a
Speaker 1: place like that that you just described, what would a
Speaker 1: reclamation project look like? How would they bring it back?
Speaker 1: What what steps would be involved in doing that? I
Speaker 1: guess I'd give you an acenario and ab scenario. According
Speaker 1: to some of the advocates we talked to, I mean
Speaker 1: that a scenario of you know, a perfect reclamation, which
Speaker 1: would be extraordinarily expensive, would be you know, restoring the
Speaker 1: original contours of the land, bringing in you know, deep
Speaker 1: top soil and then planting native vegetation that would take
Speaker 1: a long time to grow to the kind of level
Speaker 1: or height that it was before. Um. That's very very
Speaker 1: rarely done except for some sort of um, you know,
Speaker 1: pr projects or show pieces. So a lot of these
Speaker 1: minds can become productive forest again, but it takes effort
Speaker 1: and time and money to do that, and a lot
Speaker 1: of the coal companies want to avoid putting that much
Speaker 1: effort in. It's usually what's done when reclamation is done.
Speaker 1: The there's you kind of a very rough push of
Speaker 1: the landscape back into a topography that won't slide, you know,
Speaker 1: that won't fall apart in a rainstorm and slide down
Speaker 1: on somebody, and some dirt added to the top. And
Speaker 1: then mostly a sort of sort of top soil spray
Speaker 1: and grass seeds spray added to the top, which can
Speaker 1: make pretty quickly some uh sort of chest high grass
Speaker 1: through there. And then um, maybe an addition of some
Speaker 1: some non native species like like a Russian olive, some
Speaker 1: kind of thorny you know, not really that nice plans
Speaker 1: that are very hardy and grow really fast. Um, and
Speaker 1: you know kind of provide the appearance pretty quickly of
Speaker 1: some some vegetation there, But according to the people who
Speaker 1: live around there, don't really make a nice place to
Speaker 1: you know, go for a walk or hunt for deer
Speaker 1: or you know, do the sort of activities that they,
Speaker 1: you know, like to enjoy in the in the actual
Speaker 1: forests around there. So just a bare minimum to keep
Speaker 1: it from becoming a mud slide forever, that's the idea, right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So all the areas over there that look like a
Speaker 1: nice green meadow with no trees, that's all bare rock
Speaker 1: that has had hydro seed sprayed on it. And hydro
Speaker 1: seed is essentially grass seed mixed with fertilizer and like
Speaker 1: chopping up newspaper, and that'll grow on literally anything. It'll
Speaker 1: grow on a bare piece of rock. And that's what
Speaker 1: it's doing over there. What happens from here, How, if
Speaker 1: at all, does this get fixed? Uh? I know, it's
Speaker 1: a big question. We don't really know. For the most part,
Speaker 1: the the minds we're talking about have not been abandoned
Speaker 1: by their owners. Right there are still companies on paper
Speaker 1: that's say they're responsible for these minds. They're just companies
Speaker 1: that are racking up a lot of violations, and it's
Speaker 1: kind of unclear whether they're ever going to have the
Speaker 1: money to do it. So if those companies fail, then
Speaker 1: typically the next step is, well, they have bonds that
Speaker 1: were posted at some point that that money can be
Speaker 1: used to clean them up, but the bonds are often
Speaker 1: not enough and as also as we reported, we're not
Speaker 1: even sure if the insurance companies that back those bonds
Speaker 1: will actually have the money. And then if there's still
Speaker 1: not enough money, then the states have funds that are
Speaker 1: backup funds that are supposed to be able to help out.
Speaker 1: But that whole system kind of wasn't set up envisioning
Speaker 1: a world in which coal was just ending. And in
Speaker 1: the meantime, the people who live near these minds are
Speaker 1: having a rough go of it. We've seen minds in
Speaker 1: our area that have been idled for nearly a decade,
Speaker 1: so they are not getting reclaimed and they're also not
Speaker 1: producing coal, and as they sit, they create more pollution,
Speaker 1: have more erosion issues and other problems because they're not
Speaker 1: being maintained. That's that's them doing everything to the letter
Speaker 1: of the law. I don't think the news companies going
Speaker 1: in burst some enough to that they would do anything.
Speaker 1: They're in the business to make money, not give it out.
Speaker 1: You know, I look out at something like that and
Speaker 1: I think about my family, and I think about how
Speaker 1: certain members of my family have made a living, you know,
Speaker 1: never held down an one to five job in their
Speaker 1: entire lives, but just by going out in the woods
Speaker 1: and digging jin saying, or digging blood root and yellow
Speaker 1: root and things like that. And I think about how
Speaker 1: much of that stuff was lost on a permit like that.
Speaker 1: You could imagine that there just won't be enough money
Speaker 1: in those funds that are funded by coal taxes to
Speaker 1: pay for this kind of growing clean up obligation with
Speaker 1: kind of falling coal revenue. And so then you're gonna
Speaker 1: have to look to, you know, the state taxpayers, of
Speaker 1: the federal taxpayers who all lee. We'll have to decide
Speaker 1: if they want to pitch in. Jess and zach Mider,
Speaker 1: thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me.
Speaker 1: Thanks West, Thank you. You can read Zachary Miter and
Speaker 1: Josh Saul's reporting at Bloomberg dot com. Thanks for listening
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