Bush Administration Redefines Mining Waste as Fill Material to Enable Mountaintop Removal

The Bush administration’s Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers jointly revise Clean Water Act regulations to classify mining debris and waste rock as “fill material” that can legally be dumped into streams and valleys. The rule change enables the coal industry’s mountaintop removal mining technique to accelerate dramatically by providing regulatory cover for burying headwater streams under millions of tons of mining spoil—a practice environmental groups argue constitutes flagrant Clean Water Act violations.

The regulatory revision responds to judicial rulings that had questioned whether mining waste qualified as fill material under existing Clean Water Act definitions. Rather than enforce the law’s protective intent, the Bush administration rewrites the rule to accommodate the coal industry’s most destructive extraction method. The change allows companies to blast off 800 to 1,000 feet from mountaintops to reach coal seams, then dump the waste rock and debris into adjacent valleys, creating “valley fills” that bury streams. According to the EPA, this practice has already buried over 2,500 miles of streams—longer than the Mississippi River—and contaminated hundreds of additional miles with toxic runoff.

Mountaintop removal mining has flattened an area the size of Delaware and decimated over 500 mountaintops across West Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee. The extensive tracts of deciduous forests destroyed support endangered species and some of the highest biodiversity in North America. A January 2010 peer-reviewed study in the journal Science concludes that mountaintop mining causes permanent loss of headwater stream ecosystems that mitigation practices cannot address. Research by Indiana University professor Michael Hendryx documents significantly elevated rates of heart, lung, and kidney disease plus certain cancers among populations living near mountaintop removal sites, with residents experiencing 18 additional unhealthy days per year compared to people in non-mining areas—adding up to nearly four years of impaired health over a typical lifespan.

The regulatory change exemplifies how industry capture of federal agencies produces administrative decisions that override legislative intent. Environmental advocates, including the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy’s Cindy Rank, place blame squarely on “the Corps of Engineers for its failure to follow the law” and for “dodging its responsibility to scrutinize these permits that blatantly violate the Clean Water Act.” The reclassification allows coal companies to continue operations that destroy mountains, bury streams, contaminate drinking water, and harm public health—all activities that would otherwise violate federal environmental law. The Obama administration later attempts to restore stricter oversight, but the Trump administration reverses those efforts in 2017, canceling a federal study on mountaintop removal’s health effects and rolling back protective regulations, demonstrating how regulatory capture persists across administrations when industries maintain sufficient political influence.