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People working together for social, economic and environmental justice in Tennessee
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Newsroom Archives
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For release October 4, 2002
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Contacts:
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Landon Medley
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Charles Winfrey
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SOCM Staff
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(931) 946-2951
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(865) 426-2542
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(865) 426-9455
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SOCM wants feds to do job, clean up abandoned coal mines
Thirty years ago a handful of mountain people banded together to convince the Tennessee legislature to pass a severance tax on coal. They wanted to insure that as the "black diamond" being gouged from hillsides left their communities, some money returned.
Since then, that handful of people has grown into a statewide grassroots organization of over 2,000 members. Tennessee coal counties, meanwhile, have collected over $37 million in coal severance tax to help repair roads and support schools.
Now Save Our Cumberland Mountains (SOCM), is pledging to fight to bring additional money into Tennessee's coal counties. SOCM members gathered October 4 at an abandoned Campbell County strip mine to call on Tennessee's congressional delegation for help in cleaning up the hundreds of abandoned coal mines in Tennessee.
"If 30 years ago twenty of us were successful in promoting legislation which has brought $37 million into the coal counties, I know that 2,000 of us can bring in the $37 million in mine reclamation funds that is needed to clean up abandoned mines in the coal counties," stated former SOCM president Steve Schaab of Speedwell.
Four thousand plus acres of abandoned mines scar Tennessee's Cumberland Mountains and Cumberland Plateau. Problems at abandoned mine sites range from hazardous high walls and open air shafts to mines that ooze orange colored toxic drainage.
"In my community there are abandoned strip pits along both sides of the hollow. Some of them are safety hazards - two trucks have gone off the road into an abandoned pit." explained Donnie Partin, a SOCM member from Scott county. "Other sites are not dangerous but they still hurt our quality of life. Water from these old pits drains into my fields making it difficult to grow anything."
In 1977, after years of lobbying by SOCM and other coal field groups from across the country, Congress passed the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act. The legislation also created the Abandoned Mine Land (AML) Program to clean up areas that were impacted by coal mining before 1977. Money is collected from coal operators on each ton of coal and becomes part of a trust fund that now contains $1.4 billion, resting unused in Washington.
"I'd like to see more of the money sitting in that fund released so that the AML sites in communities like ours can be cleaned up," said Partin. "It seems like if they would use this money to clean up these abandoned mines, everyone would benefit. The environment would get cleaned up, it would help our community, and it would create jobs."
Although Partin and other SOCM members see AML clean-up as a win-win situation, they are worried that the AML program may soon disappear. Under current law the program will sunset in 2004. SOCM is calling on Tennessee's congressional delegation to support legislation that would extend the program at least until 2014 and to make changes in the law critical to Tennessee.
"Right now AML funds do not flow to the states where they are most needed. Tennessee, because we don't have our own state regulatory program, gets even less funding than our neighbors," explains Betty Anderson of Knoxville.
SOCM wants states like Tennessee, that lack a coal regulatory program but still have significant abandoned mine problems, to also qualify for minimum program funding. Because many of the states with serious problems currently produce little coal, SOCM also is calling for an increase in the amount of money states receive based on past mining.
SOCM is an organization of nearly 1,800 families from across the state, most living in rural communities and small towns. The group first rose to prominence in the 1970s by fighting for fair taxation and the regulation of strip mining. More recently, SOCM won a major victory in persuading the federal government to permanently declare off-limits to mining the 61,000-acre watershed of Tennessee's largest and most popular state park, Fall Creek Falls.
Recently SOCM has expanded from its Appalachian roots to begin organizing among African-American communities in middle and west Tennessee, where suspected health problems attached to aerial spraying affect African American and white communities alike.
"SOCM is really about people organizing to make democracy work for them. We have learned that we can find our voice through working together and teaching ourselves the skills necessary to have a say in the future of our communities," said SOCM president Barbara Levi, a Hamilton County school teacher.
As part of its 30th anniversary celebration this year, SOCM is launching major campaigns in all three grand divisions of the state for 2003. In addition to the AML campaign in East Tennessee, SOCM next week in Murfreesboro will kick off a renewed effort to gain passage of laws to regulate clear-cutting.
Excessive timber harvesting has become a major problem on the Cumberland Plateau of east Tennessee and the Highland Rim of middle Tennessee.
At a September news conference in West Tennessee, SOCM announced a campaign to address health problems caused by aerial spraying of chemical herbicides and pesticides.
"We are asking that residents be given notice when and where spraying is going to occur and that buffer zones be established to protect hospital patients, school children and other sensitive elements within the population," said Murray Hudson, resident of Lauderdale County and chairman of SOCM's aerial spraying committee.
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