Chase Hays knew it was time to evacuate when he saw his neighbor’s home float through his front yard. It was just after midnight on 28 July 2022, and Lost Creek, Kentucky, was experiencing a catastrophic rainstorm.
As Hays would later learn, the rains caused a silt retention pond to burst at a nearby mine, sending a torrent of rainwater and sediment down the mountain.
Hays, 35, led his fiancee and three children out of their home and into the rising water, breaking through a neighbor’s fence to get to higher ground. His terrified seven-year-old daughter prayed aloud for their safety. “I heard her say: ‘God, if you need to take me to save the rest of my family, I’m OK with that,’” Hays said.
By morning, at least two of Hays’ neighbors had died and dozens of people had lost their homes.
Now, Hays and more than 50 of his neighbors are suing Blackhawk Mining, and a subsidiary, Pine Branch Mining, alleging that the companies contaminated local drinking water and failed to perform necessary reclamation work on the coal mine that sits on a mountain uphill from their town. If they had properly re-vegetated the area and maintained the ponds, the suit claims, the community might have been spared.
“I was one of the really lucky ones,” said Hays, whose double-wide mobile home was left standing. “A lot of people lost everything they had.”
In a court filing, attorneys for Blackhawk Mining and Pine Branch denied they were responsible for damages “in connection with the unforeseeable and historic rainfall event”. Blackhawk did not respond to requests for comment.
Lost Creek is only the latest Appalachian community to sue mining companies for failing to carry out the process of replanting and restoring the strip-mined landscapes they leave behind. Flood damages have been worsened, the plaintiffs say, as lax regulation of the mines collides with increasingly heavy rains.
“The facts are the same in all these cases,” said Ned Pillersdorf, the attorney representing the Lost Creek residents. “Basically, you have a mining operation that has reclamation issues, and then you get a 45-minute tidal wave that does damage.”
Pillersdorf has filed more than half a dozen cases against mining companies on behalf of Kentuckians over the last 15 years. The suits have all settled or been resolved out of court. But the Lost Creek case, he said, could become the first to go before a jury as soon as July.
“I file these cases for two reasons,” Pillersdorf said. “One is to help the people in front of me. The other is just to let people know how dangerous it is to live below an un-reclaimed strip mine. It’s a public safety issue.”
For Hays, the decision to sue was fraught. Like many of his neighbors in Breathitt county, which has a poverty rate more than twice the national average, he feels deeply connected to coal: his grandfather and stepfather were miners, and he worked on a coal truck as a young man. “I’m not the anti-coal guy a lot of people are trying to label me,” he said. “Mining made the food that fed me my entire life. I just think there’s a certain amount of responsibility that needs to be taken.”
In recent years, Appalachia has experienced additional extreme weather and climate-related floods: heavy rainfall prompted a state of emergency in Kentucky in 2020 and the activation of West Virginia’s national guard last August.
The communities most affected are often those downstream from mountaintop mining operations, where the land has been stripped of water-absorbing trees, vegetation and even topsoil. What’s typically left behind is compacted ground that does a poor job of managing run-off and sparsely maintained mitigation measures, like the pond that failed in Lost Creek.
Almost all of the 43 people who died throughout the region in the 2022 flood lived downstream from a mine, according to a University of Kentucky report. “It invites one to draw that straight line that were it not for the strip mining, maybe these deaths wouldn’t have occurred,” said W Jay Christian, an associate professor at the University of Kentucky and the report’s lead author.
Unlike underground mining, which accesses coal through a network of tunnels, surface mining involves digging out or blasting away the soil and rock above a coal deposit. According to the advocacy group Appalachian Voices, more than a million acres of land - nearly the area of the state of Delaware - have been denuded by the practice.
Even as overall coal production and use in the United States has waned, strip mining’s footprint has grown relatively steadily since the 1980s. That’s due in part to the introduction of massive earth-moving machines beginning in the mid-20th century that make it easier to expose even a narrow coal seam that once wouldn’t have been worthwhile for a mining company.
“Technology used to limit [mining’s] scale,” said D Scott Simonton, a professor at Marshall University in West Virginia. Now, larger equipment means companies can move many tons of mountain and still profit. Companies are required to perform reclamation once they have finished mining, but enforcement is often lacking, Simonton said.
In relatively undisturbed Appalachian forests, the tree canopy, understory plants and soil absorb at least half of falling precipitation, according to Chris Barton, a professor at the University of Kentucky and head of a non-profit that repairs poorly reclaimed or abandoned mine sites. The rest eventually makes its way into creeks, streams and rivers. It’s a complex natural water management system that’s erased by mining.
“The combination of the trees not being there to do what they do and over-compacted soils where infiltration rates are really slow will lead to run-off,” Barton said.
To contain that run-off, mines like the one above Lost Creek build retention ponds, which are meant to prevent flooding by releasing rainwater a little at a time. But over time, those basins can fill with sediment, and when a huge storm hits, the structures can collapse, sending the contents rushing downhill all at once.
The July 2022 storm has been called a “1-in-1,000-year” event. But as the climate crisis makes extreme weather more commonplace, towns below surface-mining sites - which make up at least 7% of the land area of central Appalachia - face risks similar to those in Lost Creek.
In short, Christian said: “I would not want to be along a creek near a highly mined mountain. I would avoid living there. But a lot of these folks can’t: the real estate market in this area isn’t exactly hot.”
The county has a median home value of $58,800, about three-quarters less than that of the US as a whole. A Fema report from just before the disaster found that just more than 1% of homeowners in Kentucky carried flood insurance, and in Lost Creek, says Pillersdorf, few could afford it.
Now, at least without restitution from the mining company, few can afford to rebuild.