Sparring with Spoilers

So ruinous to the land is strip min ing for coal, Kentucky's most profit able product, that huge swaths of the Bluegrass State might be mistaken for the moon. Both boon and bane, strip mining gouges out a third of Ken tucky's coal production, which last year reached 93 million tons worth some $500 million. The strip miners use bull dozers to flay great strips off the sur face and get at the veins beneath. This scars Appalachia's hills and flatlands with ugly detritus called overburden or spoil. As the spoil shifts and slides, the hills resound to the awful rumble of landslides shuddering down the slopes.

The U.S. Interior Department reports that Kentucky's overburden has spoiled 119,600 acres of land and polluted 395 miles of streams.

Responding to the complaints, the state in recent years has adopted ever-tougher curbs on the strippers. Most stringent of all was the order signed this month by outgoing Governor Edward T. Breathitt ten hours before turning over his office to incoming Republican Louie B. Nunn. The order forbids strip miners from working slopes steeper than 28DEG. Straight up in the air went the industry, thundering that it would be driven out of business, which was exactly what it said last year when the maximum slope was put at 33DEG. Since then, new operations have doubled to 12,000 acres, the amount of land approved for stripping.

The industry predictably asked Kentucky's courts to erase the new ruling, counted on at least moral support from Louie Nunn, whose gubernatorial campaign they had supported. They were in for a disappointment. Not only did Nunn go along with the order, but he also persuaded Ned Breathitt's director of reclamation, Elmore Grim, who had helped draw up the regulations, to stay on the job. When a restraining order against carrying out the regulations was knocked down in court, Grim pledged strict enforcement.

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