I am  Beverly May.  I was raised and still live on Wilson Creek in Floyd County.  Wilson Creek has seen more than its share of mining.  There were numerous small deep mines in the 40's and 50's, in the early 60's the entire holler was auger mined. From the late 80's through the 90's there was a huge strip mine which destroyed the left side of the watershed.  When the coal was gone, the coal company filed bankruptcy, forfeited their bond and left the state to do the little reclamation work that was completed. Right now there is a coal company trying to gain leases for what I can think of only as the final assault on the place my family has called home for 5 generations.

It shouldn't surprise you that Wilson Creek floods once or twice a year. This past spring, the flooding meant only cleaning tree limbs and trash out of the yard. But a mile downstream in Maytown they weren't so lucky, the flood water got into most of the homes. The next town downstream is Martin which is currently being relocated by the Army Corp of Engineers because of persistent flooding. It would be more accurate to say the town is being dispersed rather than relocated since businesses and families are moving elsewhere but the effort has cost taxpayers about $9 million so far.

You need only multiply the story of Wilson Creek a few hundred times to get a picture of the effect of poor OSM enforcement of the existing stream buffer zone rule has had on eastern Kentucky. As of 2005, 421 miles of Kentucky's blue line streams have been buried under mine waste. Streams with valley fills at what once were their headwaters have higher base flows and are flood prone. In West Virginia this has resulted in not just loss of homes and property but loss of life due to flash flooding. If the proposed changes to the stream buffer zone rule are adopted, it seems inevitable that we will see similar tragedies in east Kentucky.

Congress created the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act in order to protect people and the land and water they depend on from the worst abuses of strip mining. Congress created OSM to enforce the law and yet it is acting as a partner of the coal industry rather that its watchdog. With this proposed rule change OSM is stepping even farther away from the intention of congress. That the stream buffer rule is not being enforced is the worst possible excuse for further weakening the law. An analogy might be helpful here. What if the Dept of Justice decided that its efforts to control narcotics was just too cumbersome and ineffective, and cut into the profits of the drug traffickers. So they decide to change the rules, which after all aren't being enforced anyway, and suddenly crack cocaine, heroin and methanphetamines are legal. I'm sure you can imagine the devastation this would bring to communities across the country. And I'm sure you think this would be an absurd response to a large and difficult problem. For those of us living in the coal fields, the abandoning of reasonable protections for waterways in the face of increasingly large and destructive surface mining practices is equally absurd.

In the language of mine operators, everything that lies above the coal is overburden, waste to be blown out of the way and dumped into the nearest valley, as quickly and cheaply as possible to get at what really matters, which is the coal and the money it represents. That means I am overburden, and my neighbors are overburden and all the people of Appalachia. To a coal operator we are simply in the way, so the quality of our water, the safety of our homes, the peace of our communities doesn't matter.

But we are not overburden, we are citizens in a democracy. We work, pay our taxes, and when called upon send our children to war. We expect to receive the blessings and shoulder the responsibilities of all other citizens of this country. We are no less worthy of protection by the agencies charged with that responsibility than any other citizens. I call upon the Office of Surface Mining to withdraw the proposed changes to the stream buffer rule, enforce the law as it now exists and protect our streams as Congress and the American people charged you to do.