This story originally Appeared on grist and is part of the Climate counter collaboration.
Appalachians like Kentucky have a long, turbulent history of removing coal and mountaintops—an extractive mining process that uses explosives to cut down forests and scrape soil to access underlying coal seams. For years, researchers have warned that land deformed by the removal of mountaintops is more prone to flooding, due to the resulting lack of vegetation to prevent runoff. With no trees to collect the rain and soil to soak it up, the water collects and heads for the least resistant path – downhill.
In 2019, a couple of Duke University scientists conducted a analysis of flood-prone communities in the region for Inside Climate News, identifying the most “mining-damaged areas.” These include many of the same communities in Eastern Kentucky that saw river level rises 25 feet in just 24 hours this past week.
“The findings suggest that long after coal mining stops, the legacy … could continue to exact a price on residents living downstream of the hundreds of mountains that have been leveled in Appalachia to produce electricity,” Inside Climate News wrote. James Bruggers at the time.
Now, in 2022, those findings feel tragically prescient. From July 25 to 30, eastern Kentucky saw a mixture of flash floods and thunderstorms that brought more than 10 inches of rain per hour, swelling local rivers to historic heights. To date, the flood has claimed at least 37 lives.
Nicolas Zégre, Director of West Virginia University Berg Hydrological Laboratory, studies the hydrological effects of mountaintop removal and how water moves through the environment. While it’s too early to know how much the area’s mining history contributed to this year’s floods, he said he views Appalachia as “climate zero,” a region built on the coal industry, which contributed to rising global temperatures and increased carbon in the atmosphere.
“Whether it’s the 2016 flood in West Virginia or the recent floods in Kentucky, there’s more intense rainfall due to warmer temperatures,” Zégre said, “and then that rain fell on landscapes that had the forests removed.”
For some regional scientists, strip mining is not the only factor behind the increased flooding. A 2017 environmental science and technology study looked at how mining in the removal of mountaintops could actually help store precipitation. When a mountaintop is rocked by explosions, leftover material is packed into areas known as valley fills. According to the authors, “mined river basins with valley fills appear to store precipitation for significant periods of time.”
The study noted that the material in valley fills often contains toxic chemicals and heavy metals that result from the mining process. These compounds are then washed into streams during heavy rain, a process known as alkaline mine runoff. According to a 2012 study, also from Environmental Science and Technology, alkaline mine runoff has polluted a whopping 22 percent of all streams in central Appalachia.