EPA boss says strip mines damage water quality, pledges help for small, rural water systems

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson told a Senate subcommittee Thursday that strip mining affects water quality, Environment & Energy News (subscription only) reports. "As we learn more and more from outside scientists and inside scientists, we know that there are clear water quality impacts that come from filling in streams -- pretty intuitive -- and from the valley fills that result when you have to take this tremendous amount of overburden," the term for material above coal seams, Jackson told the Senate Interior Appropriations Subcommittee.

Jackson spoke at a hearing on a bill introduced by Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Ben Cardin (D-Md.) that would sharply curtail mountaintop-removal mining in Central Appalachia. She was asked about other topics, and Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), "who said tougher clean-water standards are pinching rural communities in his state," Ledyard King reports for the Billings Gazette. "The cost of meeting higher standards was the top concern raised at a Montana Rural Water Systems conference that Tester addressed last month, according to the senator's office."

Jackson said EPA will "renew its efforts" to help rural communities afford water-system improvements, King reports. The administrator "said she understands the financial hardships small water systems face. She mentioned that the agency has some flexibility, for example, to make loans to eligible communities and then forgive them so they don't have to repay anything." (Read more)