Hundreds of West Virginians from both sides of the debate gathered in Washington, D.C., June 25 for a Senate subcommittee hearing about the environmental impacts of mountaintop mining.

Five people were asked to testify in front of the Senate Environment and Public Works Subcommittee on Water and Wildlife, including Boone County native Maria Gunnoe and West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Randy Huffman.

During testimony, Gunnoe told subcommittee chairman Sen. Benjamin Cardin, D-Md., how mountaintop mining has devastated her family’s longtime home in Bob White, caused massive flooding and impacted the health of her and her children.

“This is not a debate about jobs. Mountaintop removal mining is a human rights issue,” Gunnoe, an organizer with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, told Cardin and fellow senators, Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla. “My children have the right to clean water, and that is being taken away.”

Others who testified during the hearing included Margaret Palmer, laboratory director of the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory at the University of Maryland; Paul Sloan, deputy commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation; and John “Randy” Pomponio, director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental assessment and innovation division.

During testimony, Palmer said stream quality tests conducted on waterways downstream from mountaintop mining sites show signs of contamination.

“Headwater streams are exponentially more important than their size suggests,” she said, liking them to the smallest bronchioles that are integral to a lung working properly. “Larger streams below (headwaters impacted by mountaintop removal mining sites) are unable to survive.”

She told senators that the contamination has caused microscopic organisms in the headwaters to die off and fish downstream to show defects like curved spines and both eyes on one side.

“Is it about bugs versus people? Absolutely not. Their loss tells us something is wrong with the streams below valley fills.”

Valley fills are created in mountaintop mining and other surface mining operations when rock and rubble left over from blasting the mountain is deposited in nearby valleys. Environmental groups say the practice chokes out local headwaters and streams that run part of the year. Coal companies and advocates say the practice abides by regulations set forth in the federal Clean Water Act.

The focus of the hour-and-a-half long hearing was to look at the impact of mountaintop mining on water quality in Appalachia, and in particular whether the act of blasting mountains and creating valley fills violates the Clean Water Act.

At the start of the hearing, both Alexander and Cardin told the standing-room-only crowd that they supported coal, but did not support mountaintop mining.

“Coal is an essential part of our energy future, but it is not necessary to destroy our mountain tops and streams in order to have enough coal,” said Alexander.

Earlier this year, Alexander and Cardin co-sponsored a bill that would make valley fills at mountaintop mining sites a violation of the Clean Water Act. The bill currently is in committee.

During testimony, Huffman said the passage of that legislation would be detrimental to West Virginia and coal production. He said 40 percent of the state’s coal comes from mountaintop mining and other forms of surface mining. More than 90 percent of those mines have at least one valley fill.

“40 percent of coal mining could disappear,” he said, adding he wasn’t testifying in favor or in opposition to mountaintop mining.

The hearing left some who participated pleased that federal lawmakers were turning their attention to a problem they’d been trying to fight for years. Others left frustrated.

“This was a glorified press conference today that we’ve witnessed,” said Chris Hamilton of the West Virginia Coal Association, following the hearing.

He said of the five people invited to testify, four were distinctly against mountaintop mining. The other, Huffman, heads up a regulatory agency.

“We (people representing the industry) weren’t invited to participate,” he said, adding that when they asked to be a part of the panels testifying they were denied.”

Hundreds of people, including three busloads of West Virginia coal miners and their families, traveled to Washington to participate in the hearing. However, only about 80 of those were able to actually sit in the hearing room. The rest had to sit in anterooms and watch the proceedings on TV.

Senators peppered Huffman with questions about the state’s permitting of mountaintop mining and whether the practice truly creates jobs. He said his agency is concerned about water quality and that it has been following the EPA’s recommendations. The problem is, he said, the EPA keeps changing its expectations, rules and standards.

“As the state’s regulatory agency, the (West Virginia) DEP needs constituency and clarity from the EPA, and right now we aren’t getting it,” he said.

Gunnoe said rather than focus on those jobs, she said lawmakers and others should focus on the people that live near the sites.

“It doesn’t just have to do with the mayflies and bugs. It has to do with the culture of people in the mountains,” she said, adding, "We are mountain people, and without mountains, we are gone too."

The June 25 hearing on Capitol Hill will not be the last. During the hearing, Alexander said several more hearings on the subject would be scheduled.