Environmental Impact
The company practices mountaintop removal mining, which is controversial because it reduces the height of mountaintops (sometimes as much as by 600 to 800 feet (240 m)), removes all vegetation and places mining waste or overburden into mountain streams, causing flooding, erosion and water contamination. Arch Coal's West Virginia mining operations in the Appalachian Mountains were the subject of a critical documentary in 2002 on Now with Bill Moyers on PBS.
Arch's Dal-Tex mining operations above the town of Blair, West Virginia were the subject of a 1998 U.S. News & World Report story "Shear Madness" by Penny Loeb. The story documented the impacts of mountaintop removal on communities close to the mines and their subsequent depopulation. A landmark 1999 lawsuit brought by the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, Bragg v. Robertson was the first successful citizen lawsuit to stop Arch's proposed mountaintop removal valley fill. The fill would have buried several miles of stream at Pigeon Roost Hollow near Blair, West Virginia.
In his ruling for the plaintiffs, Judge Charles H. Haden stated that "If there is any life form that cannot acclimate to life deep in a rubble pile, it is eliminated. No effect on related environmental values is more adverse than obliteration...Under a valley fill the water quality of the stream becomes zero. Because there is no stream, there is no water quality."
Read more about this topic: Arch Coal
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