Controlling the Strippers

Strip coal mining has provoked a heap of feudin' and fightin' lately in the poverty-pocked Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky. Behind the legal protection of mineral-rights grants dating from the last century, companies have let mine debris bury trees, pollute streams with fish-killing acids, even damage homes with boulders and shale cascading down mountainsides. One woman watched in horror as a bulldozer uprooted the coffin of her infant son, sent it tumbling down the hill behind her house. Since last summer, sporadic gunfire has erupted between the angry mountaineers and the armed guards of the mine operators.

Last week Kentucky's legislature came to the rescue of the mountaineers. By an overwhelming vote, it adopted a law placing stiff controls on the strip miners. The law becomes effective in June, requires the companies to dump stripped soil in places where it cannot slide down exposed mountainsides. After the coal has been extracted, the companies must refill their gouges in the earth, terrace and replant their access cuts and, under certain conditions, regrade the slope to its original contour. Kentucky thereby became the seventh state to impose similar controls on strip coal mining. The others: West Virginia, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Maryland.

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