Corps meetings on mountaintop-removal mining bring out coal supporters who shout down foes

The Army Corps of Engineers held the first three of its six planned public hearings on Nationwide Permit 21 for surface coal mines Tuesday, and pro-coal supporters were able to drown out most anti-mining sentiment at two of the meetings. The Corps has proposed discontinuing the use of NWP 21 to streamline processing of Clean Water Act permits for mountaintop-removal coal mining, a move that coal supporters lashed out against. The meetings in Pikeville, Ky., and Charleston, W.Va., were marked by heavy pro-coal audiences that booed and jeered anti-mining advocates, while the Knoxville, Tenn., meeting was about evenly split between pro- and anti-coal.

"Coal Keeps the Lights On" and "Friends of Coal" banners were draped across City Park in Pikeville, just outside the convention center where the meeting took place, Dori Hjalmarson of the Lexington Herald-Leader reports. (Herald-Leader photo) Some miners in attendance said their companies paid for buses to bring them to Pikeville, and the green shirts of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, an anti-mountaintop removal group, only "dotted the crowd" of coal advocates. The industry group FACES of Coal had run television commercials urging coalfield residents to "take a stand for your future." (Read more)

In Charleston, most of the overflow crowd in the 740-seat auditorium loudly opposed the plan throughout the meeting and silenced anti-mining speakers with boos and jeers, and Col. Robert Peterson, the Corps district engineer, refused several requests from mining opponents to have security remove coal advocates who refused to let them speak. Daniel Chiotos, an activist with the West Virginia Environmental Council, told Ken Ward Jr. of The Charleston Gazette: "Those cheers are the cheers of a mob, and a mob is not the way democracy works." (Read more)

UPDATE 10/15: The Corps says the Charleston hearing was handled in an orderly fashion, despite Ry Rivard's report in the Charleston Daily Mail of some environmentalists being threatened and excluded from the proceedings. "My belief is that we were able to maintain order and receive comments from all of the speakers," Meg Gaffney-Smith, chief of the Corps' permitting program told Ward. "I don't believe anyone was intimidated from speaking." Gaffney-Smith did admit that some participants probably could have "been more respectful." (Read more)

A crowd of more than 450 seemed to be more evenly split among both groups in Knoxville, J. J. Stambaugh of the Knoxville News-Sentinel reports. The more orderly crowd voiced concerns that ending NWP 21 would signal the first step in an all-out war against coal, resulting in the mass loss of jobs in the region, while others said air quality issues were plaguing the residents of East Tennessee due to coal mining. (Read more) (News-Sentinel photo by Amy Smotherman Burgess)