92,231 acres are dry strip mine, 6,710 acres are strip mine filled with water. 86,317 acres are coal mining refuse, 722 acres of it is currently burning. Underground coal fires burn on an additional 2,609 acres.
Data Source: Abandoned Mine Land Inventory Polygons, 2019 – Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. http://www.pasda.psu.edu/uci/DataSummary.aspx?dataset=459
Miles Hatfield was walking into his dining room when he felt the wooden floor give way. His legs dropped hip-deep into water that had pooled under the brick house in the green hills of eastern Kentucky where he had lived for the past 40 years, trapping him in his own floor.
Hatfield, a retired coal miner, raised two boys in the house a few miles from the West Virginia border and added on five rooms as his family grew. But the red water running off from the nearby Love Branch coal mine had turned his backyard into a marsh, ruined his septic system, and finally sucked him through his floor three years ago.
Love Branch used to be owned by one of the biggest coal companies in the U.S. Federal law requires companies to clean up the land when they finish mining — and Love Branch hasn't produced any coal in more than a decade. But the former owner, now named Alpha Metallurgical Resources Inc., transferred the mine and its cleanup obligations to a smaller company in 2018, the year before Hatfield fell through his floor.
Driving through the Wyoming sagebrush west of Cheyenne, the clouds of dust rising from the road give way to giant plumes of steam shooting into the warming sky.
This is the Jim Bridger power plant, one of the largest coal-fired power sources in the nation and an enormous emitter of carbon dioxide pollution. At the plant's edge there's a reservoir, lined with rocks and clumps of drying grass. The plant sucks up about 16 million barrels of water each day, using it to power more than million homes across six western states, all the way to Oregon.
But there's a problem that looms for the coal plant operator and the customers that rely on it for electricity. This water is piped here from the Green River, a tributary of the rapidly shrinking Colorado River. Now, amidst a decades-long drought and a shortage of water downstream across the Southwest, future conservation in the basin could mean industrial users like Jim Bridger see their water shut off, says Wyoming State Engineer Brandon Gebhart.
Until the early 1800s, Americans burned very little coal. The country was thickly forested, and wood was cheap. Most houses had one or more wood fireplaces. The country didn’t have many factories that required serious energy, and coal was a niche fuel used, for example, by blacksmiths who needed high heat for their work. Report an ad
But as cities grew rapidly and demanded ever more fuel, choppers quickly deforested surrounding areas. Firewood became scarce and expensive. By 1744, Benjamin Franklin was bemoaning the plight of his fellow Philadelphians: “Wood, our common Fewel, which within these 100 Years might be had at every Man’s Door, must now be fetch’d near 100 Miles to some towns, and makes a very considerable Article in the Expence of Families,” he wrote. Johann David Schoepf, a German physician and botanist who traveled through America during and after the Revolutionary War, fretted that all this wood-burning would not “leave for [American] grandchildren a bit of wood over which to hang the tea-kettle.
I've always been interested in coal stoves. Coal heating is the most inexpensive heating fuel out there, especially in rural areas. They are very common in the Finger Lakes and Pennsylvania. The great thing is they are like wood stoves but don't constantly have to be perked up and be fed more wood like wood stoves. Anthracite is largely mined around Scranton, which is in part and explanation of the popularity of these stoves.