If West Virginia’s mountains kept their heads, would its valleys flood so badly?

As the National Guard arrives in West Virginia’s coalfield towns to help residents dig out from weekend flooding and mudslides, people who don’t like to see mountains beheaded are pointing upstream.
“At the very least, surface/mountaintop coal extraction will be the equivalent of constructing a no-sewer parking lot of the same size. If you let the Corps of Engineers do the drainage, you’ll get a zillion small-scale New Orleans, which is the current situation,” Mark Dorlester, a former environmental consultant to the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Energy, and the Carter White House, said by email this morning.
“Of course, as the public learned in Tennessee a few weeks ago, then there’s the post-burn slag to deal with, which itself presents huge chemical and hydrologic problems. When enough people have died from floods and toxic water, we’ll get serious about stopping coal use. Just like PCBs and Love Canal.”
According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, more than 470 mountain summits in the region have been destroyed to extract the coal they contained.
Dave Cooper is a former mechanical engineer who now travels the country, speaking on the hazards of mountaintop removal mining in what he calls the Mountain Top Removal Road Show. He hasn’t studied the current flood, he said, but he has been trapped before by flood waters in that heavily-mined region of Southern West Virginia.
“What I can say is that according to the US Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, in a healthy mature forest trees absorb 75 percent of the rainfall.”
Ken Ward Jr. has been to the mountaintop. He covers coal mining for the Charleston Gazette, and has written on the EPA’s studies of the connection between flooding and mountaintop mining. He says via his blog, Coal Tattoo, that, “It’s difficult without a lot more site-specific information to say that a particular flood was made worse by mountaintop removal. But in general, there’s little question that such large-scale land disturbance makes flooding more likely and makes floods that do occur worse.”
For it’s part, the EPA notes that mountaintop mining not only increases stream flows, which contribute to flooding, it also increases levels of zinc, sodium, selenium, and sulfate in streams, which hurts fish and other macroinvertebrates. Whole streams are sometimes buried by mountaintop mining’s inevitable counterpart, valley fill. Forests are fragmented and may recover more slowly because mining equipment compresses the soil. And while grassland birds and snakes seem to thrive on recovered mining lands, amphibians, such as salamanders, get scarce. And amphibians are tell-tale animals, like canaries in a coal mine.