CHARLESTON — West Virginia’s environmental troubleshooter says the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency is using the Clean Water Act to go after coal
production and other industrial works.
Environmental Protection Secretary
Randy Huffman complained Wednesday that the EPA has moved the debate from
mountaintop removal to clean water, a tactic that could affect all resource
industries.
“This debate is not any longer about mountaintop mining,” he
told the Senate Energy, Industry and Mining Committee.
“It’s about water
quality. It does relate to surface mining, but it relates to underground mining,
other types of mining and other types of industrial activity. The driver is
water quality and it affects everything we do.”
Huffman pointed out the EPA’s letter
opposing the Buffalo Mining plan — one that affects the King Coal Highway — was
sent on President Obama’s inauguration day of Jan. 20 of last
year.
Huffman said
an EPA leader “told me with a straight face the timing was purely
coincidental.”
“I did not believe him,” he said,
emphasizing the key role the mining permit plays as a connector between King
Coal and Corridor G.
“Losing that piece would be a
significant loss to the state,” Huffman said.
The letter detailed issues
that had never been raised to the DEP, the secretary said.
“But all of a
sudden, it became a crisis as of Jan. 20, 2009,” he said.
A year ago,
mountaintop mining was the target, but that debate has since disappeared, he
said.
Rather, the focus is now on clean water, and in all the discussions
that ensued, Huffman said, the DEP has been left out of the loop.
“When
they talked to us, they still have not asked for our opinion on how this water
quality definition is to be formulated,” he said.
“That’s troubling, but
not surprising.”
Consequently, he said, the “sudden change of direction”
at the federal level has stalled a number of mining applications.
While
the state is being ignored in the process, Huffman said, legislators and others
need to keep in mind that 80 percent of the permitting for every lump of coal is
performed at the state level.
What’s more, he said, even the U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers is being omitted from the process.
Huffman pointed to
the Spruce Knob permit approved in January 2007 as “the most scrutinized surface
mining permit in Appalachian history.”
Two years after the permit was
approved, the EPA raised objections and has intentions of quashing it, he
said.
“In the 40-year history of the Clean Water Act, the EPA has only
vetoed a dozen 404 (valley fill) permits nationwide,” Huffman said.
“We
have dozens of permits that are hanging under the threat of veto right now if
significant changes are not made by the companies.”
In four to six weeks,
Huffman said he hopes the DEP can produce a narrative standard to comply with
the federal law.
“Our biggest mistake we have made and it’s the hook EPA
has in our back as a state is we do not have a protocol for enforcing the
narrative water quality standard,” he said.
“We’re going to do that. I
know enough about what the problem is, what the real impacts are.”— E-mail: mannix@register-herald.com