By Carl Keith Greene / Staff Writer

A new approach to restoring surface-mined land is being developed in the Appalachian states. It’s a way to not only restore the land, but also the forests that were destroyed in the effort to reach the coal veins near the surface — and it will also bringing thousands of jobs to some of the nation’s poorest counties.

A federal agency called the Appalachian Region Reforestation Initiative (ARRI), created five years ago, has begun to actively promote reclaiming land not by compacting the soil and sowing grass, but by replacing the forests that were cut from the land.

The forests would be replanted much in the way the forests of history developed, said Patrick Angel, one of Kentucky’s U.S. OSM representatives of ARRI, who is posted in London.

“It’s something that people with all kinds of opinions can latch onto. Who would dispute the virtue of replanting of trees, re-establishing the forest?” he asked.

In early strip-mining and surface mining locations, there was little to no work done to return the land to its previous appearance. Abandoned mines began to pepper the landscape, not only in the eastern Kentucky mountains but also the flat lands in western Kentucky. The scars left by non-regulated mines, some dating as far back as 1905 in Lily, still stick out in the landscape.

After complaints from environmentalists, the interior department’s Office of Surface Mining (OSM) was established in 1977 to institute regulations requiring restoration of former mining lands.

At the time, Angel had been working for the state mining office and had seen former surface mines both before and after reclamation regulations were put into effect.

As a state inspector in 1973, he saw overburden from a surface mine come down a hill as a landslide and actually hit the back door of a home as the family was fleeing through the front door.

“I saw landslides all over the place,” he said.

Most post-regulatory reclamation work was done in an effort to simply keep the soil used to fill in the mined land from running down the hills and damaging streams and other lands — thus, it was tightly compacted and only a few grasses grew.

Yet in places where uncontaminated, loose spoil from former mine sites has remained, “we’ve seen forests grow like crazy. Because the spoil is very, very loose,” he said.

The forests grew with “yellow poplar, white oak, black walnut, some of the best growth that can be observed can be found in this spoil material, as long as there are no chemical problems. The physical issues are just perfect. The soil physics are just perfect for growing trees.”

The trees there grew at a faster rate than in naturally-occuring soil conditions, and they gave researchers the idea to change procedures for surface mine reclamation.

In the past, most mined land was reclaimed by filling in the area from which the coal was taken, compacted to nearly rock-hard by continuous packing down with heavy equipment.

Only grasses — and then just a few grass species — can grow easily in the hardened soil, Angel said.

He compared the grasslands created atop the mountains to golf courses, which also are compacted to the point of being quite hard, and supporting only a few grasses.

In Floyd County, a reclaimed mine was indeed converted to a golf course, and Julian Carroll Airport in Breathitt County was built on a reclaimed mine, but most are simply left to grow grass.

In the early days of the grass reclamations, it was thought that perhaps cattle could graze there. But the mechanics of getting the cattle up the hills on few existing roads, providing water, fencing and other necessities for cattle didn’t allow for an easy way to do it, Angel said.

ARRI hopes to not only reclaim existing mines after the coal is taken away, but also reclaim some of those mines that were turned into grasslands.

Plans by ARRI are to develop a program called “Green Forest Works for Appalachia.”

The program, by 2014, is expected to employ some 2,000 people from rural coalfield communities to re-establish more than 175,000 acres of high quality, diverse forests on formerly mined lands.

About 1.2 million acres of Appalachian forest have been affected by surface mining.

The program will also directly address high unemployment rates in the eight main coal states in Appalachia, Angel said. The workers will by 2014 plant more than 125 million trees on land that was topped by loose soil to the depth of at least four feet — optimum planting conditions to help the trees take root.

Grasslands with highly compacted soil can also be re-reclaimed.

“Lightweight equipment with plows set to a depth of four feet can be used to plow four-foot deep furrows in a crisscrossed pattern leaving eight feet between the rows,” Angel said.

Trees can be planted in the places where the furrows cross, allowing the roots to spread in all four directions and keep the trees from blowing over in heavy winds.

Employees of the “Green Forest Works for Appalachia” program will not only plant trees, but will operate nurseries to grow the seedlings and do other jobs in the forests, making the jobs year-around, Angel said.

Benefits from the program include increasing plant diversity, providing habitat for endangered and declining species, enhancing habitat for game species, improving soil and water conservation, and providing future new sites for timber to be used in construction and other projects, Angel said.

For more information about the project, reach Patrick Angel at pangel@osmre.gov.