Housing and Mountaintop Removal

I sure found this story unexpected:

Decades ago, a cheap form of extraction called mountaintop removal coal mining blew up summits and shoved the detritus — sugar maples, salamanders, song birds — down hill. While federal law required these moonscapes to be leveled and replanted, reclaimed strip mines no longer resemble mountains. Instead of lush eastern woodlands, they look more like dry western plains.

But in a region defined by steep slopes, these ecological graveyards also provide a startling solution to a problem plaguing residents in the narrow valleys below: the floods.

In 2022, apocalyptic flooding swept across eastern Kentucky, killing 45 people, destroying 542 homes and damaging thousands more. Now, instead of rebuilding in the floodplain, the state is permanently lifting residents onto safer land. Officials are more than two years into a nearly $800 million plan to reclaim these landscapes again, turning them from deserts into developments.

“Climate change is real,” Andy Beshear, the governor of Kentucky, said in an interview last month. “It’s hard to say which natural disaster would or would not have occurred without climate change, because we’ve had some big ones in the past. But what we know is that we see them more often, and sadly, we see them hit a lot of the same places.”

Seven communities across four counties, with aspirational names like Skyview and Olive Branch, have been designed for 665 brand-new properties, some of which will run on solar. Fourteen houses have been completed and about a dozen people have moved in to two communities called Thompson Branch and Wayland, according to the state.

But….aren’t mountaintop removal sites crazy toxic? The answer is yes:

• West Virginia and Kentucky lead the nation in deaths per capita from cancer.
• Greater exposure to pollution from coal-mining activity increases the risk for cancer and other fatal diseases.
• 60,000 cases of cancer in Appalachia have been directly linked to mountaintop removal.

Uh….this does not seem like a very good idea to me.