Crayfish expert Roger Thoma looks for crayfish in March in Ash Camp Branch, a creek on Donna Branham’s property in Lenore, W.Va. By Juliet Eilperin Juliet Eilperin Reporter covering domestic policy and national affairs Email Bio Follow May 10 at 1:34 PM LENORE, W.Va. — Donna Branham was grilling steaks in her backyard when she felt the tremors. She was two miles away from the coal mine, but she could feel the blasts.
Championed by Landon “Tucker” Davis, an Interior Department official who used to represent the state’s coal industry, a 2017 directive that paved the way for mine permits illustrates how environmental rollbacks enacted at the start of the administration are reshaping the nation’s landscape in ways that could harm threatened species.
Besides helping to clean creeks and rivers, the animals serve as prey for sport fish. And the very activities that threaten their habitat can affect local residents’ water supplies. Now the Center for Biological Diversity and other advocacy groups are preparing to sue the Interior Department for failing to protect the crustaceans from activities such as those at Twin Branch mine. The center’s senior scientist, Tierra Curry, who helped qualify the two species as endangered, laid out her argument as she watched a coal truck make its way recently to a mining operation permitted under Trump policy.
“We were confronted with this listing, and nobody could tell us what to do,” he said, adding that state and industry officials felt like they could make a case to Interior Department officials once President Trump took office. “We felt like we had an audience. It was time to voice our opinion.”A scare crow dressed in the protective clothing worn by coal miners stands in a field near Berwind, W.Va.
But in February 2017, Trump signed legislation nullifying the “stream protection rule,” which had barred mining firms from dumping waste within 100 feet of a stream. Without that protection, Fish and Wildlife officials began to retool the plan to reconcile coal mining with saving the crayfish. As negotiations dragged on, Fish and Wildlife experts fretted about the fate of the Guyandotte River crayfish.
In a June 6 email, a Fish and Wildlife Service official referred to Davis as an Interior “political” and said Davis had complained the agency was holding up permits. A short time later, when Skipwith questioned whether Fish and Wildlife was holding up a permit for the Twin Branch mine, another official reassured her that the operation had been approved under then new policy. “Tucker is satisfied,” the official wrote Skipwith.
In an interview, Bostic said the DeVito guidance was critical for extracting metallurgical coal, a low-sulfur coal that is used in industrial manufacturing instead of electricity generation. Demand for metallurgical coal exports has remained strong even as the market to sell coal to U.S. power plants has contracted.
Coal operators at the Eagle Creek mining area near Beckley, W.Va., attempt to control debris and water movement as mining waste flows down toward the streams. Thoma holds a chunk of coal from among the many coal samples he has found in the Guyandotte River near Madison, W.Va. The Interior Department issued a news release Aug. 1, 2017, hailing the mine’s reopening.
“You know, I have three good wells on my property, plus a lot of springs, and I’ll fight to the end to try to protect it,” said Branham, a 65-year-old with steely blue eyes who boasted that her property’s creek was still clean enough to hunt for crayfish.
West Virginia is the enemy of the American people
😡.