Statewide Organizing for Community eMpowerment

For over twenty years, Bledsoe County SOCM members have organized to prevent mining of the Sewanee Coal Seam, by far the most dangerous coal seam in Tennessee and one of the most toxic in the country. 

On March 4, 1987, the Department of the Interior’s Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSM) designated the Rock Creek Gorge, where the Sewanee coal seam is located, “Lands Unsuitable for Mining” (LUMP). For three years Bledsoe Chapter members held meetings and submitted reports and testimony to OSM regarding the coal seam. In March 1986, OSM representatives tested a soil sample from an exposed area of the seam that showed a thick zone of acidic material present in the shale overburden of the Sewanee Coal Seam and a zone of shale below the seam also had high potential for acidity.