The US government took the first steps Wednesday to reverse a last-minute rule passed by the Bush administration which allowed coal mine operators to dump excavated material into streams.
The Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSM) announced “an advance notice of rulemaking that would govern the overall operations and conduct of where to place excess oil from mountaintop mining,” Frank Quimby, a spokesman for the Interior Department, which oversees the OSM, told AFP.
The Interior Department will also seek to strengthen its oversight of actions to protect streams from the adverse impacts of coal mining, including while the new rules are being worked out, Quimby said.
The administration of former president George W. Bush in its last weeks revised a rule that had stood for 25 years and had broadly prohibited dumping excess material produced in coal mining operations — called overburden — within 100 feet of streams. Read more in this article.
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