Coal revamp seen hurting Trump country

EPA expects mortality to climb in Pa., W.VA.

GRANT TOWN, W.VA. — It’s coal people like miner Steve Knotts, 62, who make West Virginia Trump Country.

So it was no surprise that President Donald Trump picked the state to announce his plan rolling back Obama-era pollution controls on coal-fired power plants.

Trump left one thing out of his remarks, though: northern West Virginia coal country will be ground zero for an increase in deaths and illnesses from the rollback on regulation of harmful emissions from the nation’s coal power plants.

An analysis done by his own Environmental Protection Agency concludes that the plan would lead to a greater number of people here dying prematurely and suffering health problems that they otherwise would not have than elsewhere in the country when compared with health impacts of the Obama plan.

Knotts, a coal miner for 35 years, isn’t fazed when he hears that warning, a couple of days after Trump’s West Virginia rally. He says the last thing people in coal country want is the government slapping down more controls on coal, and the air here in the remote West Virginia mountains seems fine to him.

“People here have had it with other people telling us what we need. We know what we need. We need a job,” Knotts said.

Clean-air controls since the 1980s largely turned off the columns of black soot that used to rise from coal smokestacks. The regulations slashed the national death rates from coal-fired power plants substantially.

These days pollutants rise from smoke stacks as gases, before solidifying into fine particles small enough to pass through lungs and into bloodstreams.

Nationally, the EPA says, 350 to 1,500 more people would die each year under Trump’s plan. But it’s the northern two-thirds of West Virginia and the neighboring part of Pennsylvania that would be hit hardest, by far, according to Trump’s EPA.

Trump’s rollback would kill an extra 1.4 to 2.4 people a year for every 100,000 people in those hardest-hit areas, compared to under the Obama plan, according to the EPA analysis.

Trump’s acting EPA administrator, Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist whose grandfather worked in the coal camps of West Virginia, headed to coal states to promote Trump’s rollback. The federal government’s retreat on regulating pollution from coal power plants is “good news,” Wheeler told crowds there.

John Raby The Associated Press American Electric Power’s John Amos coal-fired plant in Winfield, W.VA., is seen from the town of Poca across the Kanawha River. The northern two-thirds of West Virginia and the neighboring part of Pennsylvania are the areas most affected by a forecast rise in deaths stemming from a rollback of environmental rules on coal.