The Land and People of Kentucky Deserve the Best Protection

The Issue

Regional offices of the Army Corps of Engineers are allowed to give special consideration to regions or states.

“Division engineers are authorized to add regional conditions specific to the needs and/or requirements of a particular region or state. Regional conditions are important mechanisms to ensure that impacts to the aquatic environment authorized by the NWPs are minimal, both individually and cumulatively. Division engineers may also suspend or revoke specific NWPs in certain geographic areas (e.g., states or watersheds) or high-value aquatic systems where impacts authorized by those NWPs may be more than minimal.”

What we need people to do

We need people to write to the Louisville Army Corps of Engineers and tell them we know that coal mining is causing significant environmental impacts and want them to stop issuing general or nation wide permits for sections 21, E and F in Kentucky

Talking Points

The Louisville District Office should stop allowing the use of general or nation wide permits sections 21, E and F in the Central Appalachian region for the following reasons:

• The Corps has ignored the many scientific studies contained in the Mountaintop Removal Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) that concluded environmental damage from mining is of “great concern” and “extreme ecological significance.”  These impacts include increased severity of flooding and loss of species in our streams and forests. The geographic focus of the study was WV, KY, VA and TN.
• In Kentucky, the Army Corps of Engineers has already allowed more than 420 miles of blue-line streams to be buried by coal mining valley fills. This destruction is continuing at an alarming pace and allowing mining companies to continue to use NWPs would impact hundreds of additional miles of headwater streams.
• The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has stated, “no other NWP category produces impacts greater than NWP 21” and that coal mining and valley fill operations in Appalachia cause “significant ecological damage to the headwater stream systems.”
• The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says environmental impact of coal mines in Appalachia on aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems as “unmitigatable” and “unprecedented.”
• The amount of earth moved by mining activities is sufficient by itself to demonstrate that the environmental impacts of mining are significant.  A recent study singles out mountaintop removal mining and valley fills in Kentucky and adjacent states as the greatest contributor to earth moving activity in the United States.
• While the Corps asserts that NWPs will not cause flooding, the U.S. Geological Survey says, “that large-scale surface mining is especially likely to increase the severity of flooding” during certain types of storms.
• The Army Corps of Engineers fails to take into consideration the cumulative impacts of multiple mining operations and associated valley fills on a given watershed.

Also, please make the point that coal slurry impoundments should not be allowed under NWPs.  Section 404 of the Clean Water Act provides that an NWP can only be issued for activities that are “similar in nature.” Coal slurry impoundments, however, are very different from valley fills and other types of stream impacts at mines.  The Corps has failed to analyze these differences, and has illegally lumped them together.

• Valley fills contain only solid materials–dirt and rock.  Surface impoundments contain liquid materials like coal slurry. A surface impoundment, unlike a valley fill, can fail and release millions of gallons of liquid mining wastes into downstream watersheds or seep into ground water. 
• In 2000, an impoundment failure in Martin County Kentucky spilled 306 million gallons of water and coal slurry (more than 27 times the size of the Exxon Valdez oil spill) and damaged 75 miles of streams in Kentucky and West Virginia.  This was the second major breakthrough at this site, with an earlier one occurring in 1994.
• The Corps does not even recognize that impoundments can cause massive spills or contaminate well water.

Finally we would like both the District Commander and the Deputy Commander/Deputy District Engineer to join KFTC members to view firsthand the direct and cumulative impacts of coal mining valley fills constructed under sections 21, E and F of the nationwide permit.

Please send comments by November 27 to

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Louisville District
ATTN: Ms. Amy S. Babey, CELRL-OP-FN
P.O. Box 59
Louisville, Kentucky 40201-0059
Fax: 502-315-6677