By Liam Niemeyer

Kentucky Lantern

Over a week in July 2022, more than a foot of rainfall came down on Eastern Kentucky bringing a deluge of flood waters that displaced thousands of people and killed more than 40. A recent study published by Kentucky’s former top geologist suggests environmental damage from surface coal mining worsened the deadly disaster, perhaps significantly.

Bill Haneberg, the author of the study, led the Kentucky Geological Survey as state geologist until 2023 and fielded questions after the catastrophic floods about the role coal mining played in the flooding. That spurred him to try and find an answer, analyzing federal rainfall data from July 2022 and other datasets involving topography and where mountaintop removal sites were located in the region.

Surface coal mining, which includes mountaintop removal mining, has had sprawling impacts on the landscape in Eastern Kentucky and Appalachia. With surface coal mining, trees and soil are removed, and rock on the side and top of a mountain is blown off with explosives to reach a coal seam underneath. What remains, environmental and mine safety advocates say, is a mined surface with little vegetation and little to no water retention.

Haneberg said the July 2022 floods were a 1,000-year rainfall event and would have been a “bad flood” regardless of surface mining’s impacts. But he believes his study shows surface coal mining made the floods “significantly worse.”

His study found that the maximum additional water that could have been contributed by surface coal mining, compared to unmined areas, were:

• 28% more along the North Fork Kentucky River near Jackson, the Breathitt County seat. That’s equivalent to approximately 17 billion gallons more water added.
• 41% more at the confluence of Troublesome Creek and the Nork Fork Kentucky River. That’s equivalent to 6.1 billion gallons more water added.
• 21% more along the North Fork Kentucky River near Hazard, the Perry County seat. That’s equivalent to approximately 4.1 billion gallons of water.
• 22% more along the North Fork Kentucky River near Whitesburg, the Letcher County seat. That’s equivalent to approximately 0.3 billion gallons more water added.
• Over 50% more in areas adjacent to mined land, and between 50% to 150% more  — essentially doubling the amount of water — in small tributaries originating from mined land.

The calculations are for the maximum potential of surface mining’s contribution, which assumes that the mined lands in the areas studied had zero ability to absorb water. The actual amount of water contributed, Haneberg said, is likely less than the maximum. But he said the point of the study was to show the potential contributions surface mining had in the disaster, an important context to have moving forward.

“Coal mining has been declining in Eastern Kentucky, but those mine lands are going to be with us for a long, long time,” Haneberg told the Lantern. “If you don’t understand that context for the events you’re trying to mitigate or the problems you’re trying to solve, there’s a good chance you may be wrong, and when you’re dealing with hazards like this, that could be very deadly and expensive.”

He said that context is especially important given that climate change is increasing the risk of catastrophic flooding events in Appalachia.

“You can’t fix a problem you can’t define, and one of the worst things to do is deny that there’s any problem at all,” Haneberg said.

Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, a progressive grassroots advocacy group, alongside former federal and state coal mine inspectors, last year called on the federal Office of Surface Mining Regulation and Enforcement to launch an investigation into how surface mining affected the July 2022 floods.

Davie Randsell, a former supervisor for the Kentucky Division of Mining Permits who was part of that call to action, said the potential impacts of surface mining on Eastern Kentucky flooding goes beyond active mines to include the reduced ability of reclaimed mine lands to absorb and hold back water, too.

“It doesn’t replicate what was there before,” Randsell said of reclamation and the “eons” required to create new sedimentary rock that was destroyed. “It’s still going to be much more highly permeable, and it’s going to discharge more water.”

She said the new study was a “hallmark statement” of what federal officials need to investigate. Emails sent to an inbox for media inquiries to the federal office asking whether the office was considering an investigation were not returned.

Beverly May, a retired epidemiologist with the University of Kentucky and a member of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, said the study was “completely consistent” with what she saw in the days after the flood and her own documentation.

May was one of the authors of a separate study from University of Kentucky researchers last year that analyzed the locations of people killed in the July 2022 floods and found a number of fatality locations were adjacent, or downstream from, mountaintop removal mine sites. The study also found more than 40% of analyzed fatalities from the July 2022 floods happened within a half-mile of Troublesome Creek, a tributary that flows into the North Fork Kentucky River.

May said she remembered driving a woman from one of the federal relief camps to visit the woman’s father down the hill. The woman, May said, told her during the drive she was a cousin to four children who drowned in Knott County.

May said when she turned up the road along where Montgomery Creek flows into Troublesome Creek in Knott County she saw that the force of the flood waters had washed away much of the dirt supporting the road along the creek, and the road itself was broken off along the edges.

“I get almost to her dad’s house, look in front of me, and there is a flat horizon of a huge mountaintop removal job…it just fills up the horizon,” May recalled. “I stopped whatever the conversation I was having and took a breath. And I said, ‘Do you think that mine has something to do with the flood?’ And she looked at it and paused a minute, and she said, ‘I don’t know. I’ve never thought about that.’”