Isn’t it awesome that the Army Corps of Engineers reissued a controversial mining permit to ICG for its Thunder Ridge mine in Leslie County just hours after the Environmental Protection Agency decided to reevaluate mountaintop removal sites in eastern Kentucky and West Virginia?

The permit in question was halted late last year after the Kentucky Water Ways Alliance (and the Sierra Club) sued the Corps over its decision to issue the permit based on its belief that they had not sufficiently considered cumulative water quality impacts of the planned mining. After ICG agreed to reduce the number of valley fills from five to four, the permit was reinstated. The new permit increases the operation by 22%, from 5.5 square miles to 6.9 square miles.

That’s right– we said water quality impacts. All this went down just hours before a major mine blowout in Leslie County, which we told you about earlier.

“The Thunder Ridge mine site is exactly the type of mining operation the EPA signaled they were concerned about this week. It’s inexcusable for the Louisville Corp office to reissue this permit after EPA’s recent action,” said Judith Peteresen, executive director of Kentucky Waterways Alliance. She’s right. The Corps has been challenged over and over through the years for failing to thoroughly evaluate the environmental impact of mountaintop removal. And while ICG reduced its footprint for new valley fills, there’s no evidence that the Corps evaluated the water quality impacts of expanding the Thunder Ridge mine– a mine that was already unusually large.

According to a press release from Kentucky Waterways Alliance, the Army Corps of Engineers admitted that it had no recent dialogue with the EPA over water quality issues with the reinstated ICG permit and that the EPA had raised no concerns in December 2007 when the original permit was issued. But EPA officials were in Louisville last week to discuss concerns regarding mining permits and were caught off-guard by the ICG permit issuance.

KWA’s press release said the organization has contacted the Obama administration and EPA administrator Lisa Jackson to request an examination of the process used by the Army Corps in evaluating water quality impacts of the ICG permit. “I hope President Obama follows through with his promise to find better ways of mining coal than by blowing the tops of our nation’s mountains, destroying streams and polluting our waterways in the process,” said Peterson. “We owe it to our children and future generations to find better, more sustainable ways to meet our nation’s energy needs.”