Supporting Transparent Regulatory and Environmental Actions in Mining Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. BEYER. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the STREAM Act. We should not willfully delay the stream protection rule. I have seen firsthand the impacts of coal mining, both positive and negative. I spent 9 years visiting the coal counties in Virginia: Buchanan, Dickenson, Lee, Wise, Russell, and others.

When times are good, there are good incomes and nice cars. When times are hard, times like today, when we are not mining much coal mostly because of the abundance of natural gas, then things are pretty sad.

When I was Lieutenant Governor of Virginia during the 1990s, mountaintop removal became the most prevalent coal mining technique in central Appalachia. Surely, coal can have a positive impact on local economies. But we also have to look at the impact it has on the environment and the health of these same communities.

My good friend, Mr. Johnson of Ohio, has said that these are about the lives of people. Absolutely right. And we have shown callous disregard for the health of the people who live in these communities.

The citizens of these same Virginia coal counties have by far the worst health outcomes of anybody in the Commonwealth of Virginia. The cost-benefit analysis, yes, but we are not doing anything to stop coal companies from mining coal or even mountaintop removal. We are just demanding that it be done responsibly.

It takes tons of rocks and soil to expose underlying coal seams, but these are placed in valleys, headwater streams filled with all this displaced material. This can have significant impacts on water quality.

West Virginia University--not one of those liberal universities in New England--a West Virginia study in 2012 found that mountaintop coal mining has adverse impacts on surface and groundwater quality. The Congressional Research Service, nonpartisan, said, since 1992, almost 1,200 miles of streams were buried by surface coal mining practices.

The cumulative effects of such surface coal mining operations include, number one, deforestation, which has been linked to harming the aquatic community; two, accelerated sediment and nutrient transport; and, three, increased algae production.

Surface mining has also been responsible for most of the huge flooding in central Appalachia because, when you disturb natural streambeds, cover them with mine spoils, destroy the vegetation, all the topography is different.

Virginia Tech has been working with the coal industry for over 30 years to mitigate these effects, to reclaim the streams and lands that have been disturbed, and a lot of progress has been made. But we can and should do all that we can to protect our critical headwater and small streams before the impacts occur.

Water monitoring found that Kelly Branch Mine in Wise County, Virginia, dumped toxic pollutant selenium into streams at levels far above the State water quality standards and without a permit to allow such pollution.

As a result of a citizen suit, Southern Coal Corp. has since agreed to do the environmental cleanup, but we shouldn't need the lawsuits which too often lead to the bankruptcies of the coal companies.

Lawsuits like this make it unsurprising that a group of researchers from West Virginia University--again--and Washington State University published a study in 2011 on the association between exposure to mountaintop removal mining and the increased rate of birth defects in central Appalachia.

This again gets back to callous disregard for the people who live in central Appalachia. These people have been paying for the externalized costs of mountaintop removal for far too long, and local communities have been suffering life-threatening health problems and a damaged ecosystem.

This is why, with Congressman Lowenthal and Congresswoman Esty, we offered an amendment to ensure that this bill paid attention to the negative health impacts. Unfortunately, the amendment was not made in order. But we can't continue to ignore this.

Adjusted for every other factor, overwhelming scientific evidence links the practice of surface coal mining with elevated rates of serious health problems, including cancer, cardiovascular disease, and pulmonary disease, and overall mortality rates are about 20 percent higher in the coalfields than the national average.

The ecological integrity of the streams is an indicator of the human cancer mortality rates. So the folks that live near these streams are much more likely to die and die young.

This bill destroys the proposed protection for the people who live in southwest Virginia and coalfields across the country.

Mr. Chairman, I urge my colleagues to vote against the STREAM Act. The people of Appalachia deserve better.

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