Monitoring coal mining

Herald-Leader, Lexington, Ky.: General environmental permits are for small, routine disturbances or discharges that pose little risk to the public and that require the same basic precautions: controlling runoff from excavating a small site, for example, or disposing of dry- cleaning chemicals.

Kentucky is seeking to renew its general permit for the coal industry — including mountaintop surface mines that disturb hundreds of acres, pollute streams already impaired by earlier mining and threaten aquatic life and human health.

The state is proposing to tighten some permitting rules to protect water and hoping to appease the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, while loosening other rules.

What happens on the front end of the permitting process is all-important in Kentucky because the state cannot be counted on to enforce permit conditions against the coal industry.

And the EPA has a duty to protect water and the future, even if it means vetoing coal’s general permit in Kentucky.