As Coal Industry Fades, Some Lawsuits Aimed at Accountability Die, Too

This piece was co-published with The Daily Yonder in collaboration with the Investigative Reporting Lab at Yale.

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It was the early morning of July 28, 2022, on a road near the community of Lost Creek, Kentucky. The sky was pitch-black, but the night was deafeningly loud.

Rain was hammering down, at times at a rate of four inches per hour. From his family home near Caney Creek, a tributary of the North Fork of the Kentucky River, Gregory Chase Hays heard flash floods sweep away mobile homes and pickup trucks.

“The sounds of stuff breaking as it was carried down the creek was like watching a war movie,” Hays said.

Realizing he needed to get his family to higher ground, he grabbed an axe and waded with them through chest-deep water to the edge of his property. He hacked down the fence and helped his pregnant then-girlfriend (now fiancée), their three children, and his girlfriend’s mom through. The family scrambled up the hill to a neighbor’s house, where they waited for the deluge to end.

From July 25 to July 30, 2022, rainstorms ravaged eastern Kentucky in what became one of the deadliest natural disasters in state history. The federal government declared 13 counties, all in Kentucky’s Appalachian region, disaster areas. The floods triggered over 1,000 landslides, destroyed over 100 bridges, and damaged over 9,000 homes. Forty-five people died, ranging in age from two to 97.

Breathitt County—home to Lost Creek—was hit particularly hard, losing 11 residents. Vanessa Baker, a Lost Creek local, was the only victim whose body was never found. Recovery, still ongoing in 2026, could cost nearly $1 billion.

Hays said he believes a nearby coal mine was partially to blame for the extent of the damage.

His house sits downhill from dozens of silt ponds attached to a mine operated by Pine Branch Mining, a Kentucky-based company owned by the Czech conglomerate Blackhawk Mining. The ponds are meant to collect excess water produced during mining, so that toxic runoff and debris from the mine don’t disturb the surrounding environment. If not prepared and maintained properly, however, they can rupture.

On the morning of July 28, 2022, the National Guard arrived by helicopter to rescue Hays’s family. Hays said that as he and his family fled, one of the guardsmen told him that, from his bird’s-eye vantage, it appeared that two of the silt ponds near Hays’s home had burst.

Days later, inspecting the floodwater pooling in the crawl space underneath his family’s mobile home, Hays made an unusual discovery: a two-foot-long, bright-orange grass carp.

“The only fish that can survive in the itty-bitty creek where I live is minnows,” claimed Hays, who grew up in Breathitt County. He said he believes the one that wound up in his backyard came from the silt ponds.

Within weeks of the flood, Hays had joined a lawsuit against Blackhawk and Pine Branch, helmed by Ned Pillersdorf, an attorney whose house in nearby Floyd County also flooded in the storms.

“These are my neighbors,” Pillersdorf said in an interview. “And they asked me to help them.”

Hays was one of 59 Breathitt County residents to join the lawsuit. It alleged that Blackhawk and Pine Branch were legally liable for extensive property and emotional damages because the company had failed to adequately manage their silt ponds, contributing additional water to the devastating floods. Pillersdorf also alleged in later filings that Pine Branch had contributed to two Breathitt County deaths: Baker, whose body was never found, and Amy LaDawn Henson, 40, who plaintiffs claimed “was swept away by the raging flood waters caused by the Defendant.” (Blackhawk was later removed as a defendant in the case because Pine Branch is its subsidiary company. Blackhawk declined to comment for this article.)

Pillersdorf has made a career out of taking coal companies to task for alleged negligence. Across five previous cases, he’s represented over 400 people whose properties were flooded. Each of those cases involved the breach of silt ponds that were attached to active or abandoned mines but were inadequately maintained.

In May 2024, a federal judge threw out the Lost Creek lawsuit Hays had joined. Pillersdorf appealed, but in June 2025 a federal appeals panel dismissed the lawsuit again.

Pillersdorf says it was the worst outcome of his career. Some critics say he was to blame.

But Pillersdorf wasn’t alone in his loss: In the past decade, lawsuits alleging environmental mismanagement by coal companies have become less common and less successful. A second lawyer brought a similar lawsuit against Blackhawk in 2023, alleging that mining activities triggered property damage in the floods, but with a different group of residents of Breathitt County serving as plaintiffs. That lawsuit was moved to the county’s circuit court—unlike Pillersdorf’s case, which was heard in federal court—where its outcome remains unclear.

Some environmental advocates say it’s because attention on mining has dwindled with the coal industry’s downturn, outcompeted by natural gas and now renewables—which has delayed efforts to enforce mining regulations that were already weaker than many advocates would prefer. As the industry has died a lingering death, its capacity to pay out settlements has declined.

But it may also be that the intensification of natural disasters linked to climate change has made it more difficult for lawyers and scientists to link flood damage to mining specifically, as opposed to other factors, such as extreme and unpredictable weather.

Coal is the dirtiest and most widely used fossil fuel, responsible for roughly 40 percent of all historic carbon dioxide emissions. The industry’s own collateral damage—climate change—is now becoming something of a legal shield. Even as the risk of severe flooding has grown for communities near Appalachia’s mining sites, the number of lawsuits attempting to tie mining companies to these natural disasters has dwindled. Elsewhere around the world, climate-focused lawsuits are becoming increasingly popular, but in eastern Kentucky, lawsuits like Pillersdorf’s are sputtering.

FOR MUCH OF THE 20TH CENTURY, coal mining sustained Kentucky. The industry supported at least 20,000 jobs statewide every year from 1927, when coal employment data was first collected, through 1995. The state’s coal production peaked in the early 1990s, and with 27,000 jobs in coal in 1991 alone Kentucky was the most coal-reliant state in the nation.

But the adoption of automated mining techniques, the onset of the environmental movement, and the rise of cheap renewable electricity put the coal industry in freefall. By 2023, Kentucky was home to roughly one-eighth of the coal mines and mining jobs it had in 1991.

The coal industry’s rapid collapse left many residents reeling, and likely exacerbated Appalachia’s disproportionately high rates of poverty, mental health struggles, and substance dependence.

Breathitt County, once a mining stronghold, is now one of the poorest counties in the state and the country. Its median household income in 2024 was roughly $35,000, less than half the national median of $82,000. It was one of the hardest-hit counties in the 2022 floods, in part due to its ill-maintained public roads and its population being concentrated in flood-prone valleys, often in mobile homes that are more easily swept away.

The July 2022 floods destroyed 1,400 homes in Breathitt County, with an estimated repair cost between $100 million and $200 million.

Pillersdorf’s lawsuit posited that actions by Blackhawk and its subsidiary, Pine Branch Mining, contributed to these property damages. He argued that the coal company failed to adequately care for the silt ponds near its Lost Creek mine, allowing the ponds’ walls to grow weak and eventually breach when pummeled by rain.

Indeed, maintaining the structural integrity of silt ponds is central to a legally required process for mines called reclamation. The federal government has required coal companies to steward mined lands—and, once mines are closed, restore them to pre-mining conditions—since 1977, when President Jimmy Carter signed the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act. The law recognizes the risks of allowing inactive mines to sit untouched, including water pollution, wildlife endangerment, and floods.

But the law’s enforcement mechanisms are inadequate, according to Mary Cromer, deputy director of the Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center, a think tank and advocacy group. “It’s really just been a joke from the beginning,” said Cromer, referring to the 1977 law. “It was the poorest-designed law, and it was never enforced.”

The law does not define timelines for cleanup, stipulating only that companies reclaim surface mining sites “in an environmentally sound manner and as contemporaneously as practicable.” It also gives individual states the responsibility of drafting their own regulatory programs, a system experts say has exacerbated geographic disparities in enforcement and transparency.

Reclamation is especially important in the context of surface mines, the type of mine that exists near Hays’s house. In the late 1960s, as coal supplies deep underground grew exhausted, companies began “mountaintop removal”—that is, blowing off the tops of mountains with explosives—to expose thin seams of coal lying close to the surface. These deposits of coal can be more cheaply and safely extracted than those deeper in the earth, but the process leaves a much larger environmental footprint than traditional underground mining.

But companies don’t always meet reclamation requirements, sometimes resulting in citations or stop orders from state regulators tasked with overseeing coal companies.

According to legal documents from the case, Kentucky mining inspector Daniel Wilson testified in a deposition that Pine Branch had previously fallen short of reclamation requirements for surface mines and that, following the flood, it was cited for improper maintenance. Pillersdorf’s argument also relied on mining inspection reports that concluded that some of Pine Branch’s silt ponds had “remarkable sediment buildup prior to the flood,” although these ponds were attached to separate coal mines operated by Pine Branch, not the one closest to Hays’s house.

Don Gibson, Pine Branch’s director of permitting, also allegedly testified in his deposition that between 2019 and 2023, the mine site near Hays’s home was only “20 to 25 percent reclaimed.”

Wilson’s office sent Pine Branch notices of noncompliance related to these and other missteps, but never issued a final order concluding that the company had violated Kentucky’s reclamation requirements.

Pine Branch denied in legal proceedings that the silt ponds in Breathitt County burst during the floods. But they rested their broader defense on two claims: first, that any property damage was due to unprecedented rainfall, and second, that any silt pond could have broken under such extreme conditions.

The company’s attorneys argued in their reply to Pillersdorf’s lawsuit that the Lost Creek residents’ alleged damages were an “act of God,” not of negligence. “No pond associated with any mining operation … is designed to withstand the July 2022 storm event,” wrote Dr. Michael Ricci, the hydrologic expert Pine Branch hired for the case. Ricci cited storm-gauge data showing that between July 25 and July 30, 2022, Lost Creek received nearly eight times more precipitation than normal.

He also presented models purporting to show that the ponds might have actually reduced the flow of water to the floods.

Other evidence contradicts Ricci’s findings. Dr. William Haneberg, Kentucky’s former state geologist, published a study in 2024 where he found that surface mining could have increased the volume of water moving through eastern Kentucky’s tributaries during the 2022 flood by 21 to 150 percent, depending on the section of the river and the proximity to mines.

But whatever one makes of Ricci’s model, his hard data pointed to a broader pattern in Appalachia: Floods are becoming more common, and more destructive.

The year 2022 marked the third one in a row in which bad floods hit eastern Kentucky, after rainfall in 2020 and 2021 caused damage that commentators described at the time as historic. In February 2025, another 24 Kentuckians died in extreme flash floods.

Climate change adds moisture to the atmosphere, which can make rainfall patterns more intense and less predictable. The rainfall levels in July 2022 were the highest since 1981. In 2026, Appalachia will see roughly two full days more of rain than it did in 1950, according to a November 2025 analysis by The Washington Post.

It’s not that the severe floods hitting Appalachia would never have arrived without climate change, said Haneberg, who authored the 2024 flood study. But “maybe what used to be a 100-year flood now may be a 50-year flood or a five-year flood.”

Eric Dixon, a researcher at the Appalachia-focused think tank the Ohio River Valley Institute, said he believes that as climate change makes extreme weather events more likely, it also makes it harder to tie weather damage to specific companies’ actions. He believes it can obscure coal corporations’ legal and ethical responsibilities.

“It’s pretty well established … that mining prevents the absorptive capacity of mountains,” said Dixon. Surface mines dramatically change topography, he said, preventing forests from acting as “sponges … so when it storms, water just rushes off the mountain and can flood areas below.”

“A more difficult question is when a particular storm happens and there’s damage afterwards,” he said. “What degree of that damage was a result of the mining? That’s much more difficult.”

DURING THE 2022 FLOODS, the Kentucky River crested in Breathitt County at 44 feet high, besting a record set in 1939. But a review of public photos and documents shows that that peak came hours after Hays’s family was evacuated and his backyard destroyed.

“A lot of the rain actually fell after that damage was done,” said Pillersdorf. He claims this means it couldn’t have only been the rain that contributed to residents’ property damage. There must have been something else, he argues—such as a one-off, localized water surge, perhaps one coming from a ruptured silt pond.

And while research on the connection between surface mining and the July 2022 flooding is ongoing, much of it suggests there was a link. A 2023 study by professors from the University of Kentucky found that most of the fatalities in the 2022 floods occurred adjacent to or downstream from surface mines. Many of these fatalities occurred near the Troublesome Creek watershed, close to where Hays lives.

Hays is convinced that it was water from the silt ponds that damaged his property in the early morning of July 28, 2022, not the rainfall that caused the river to surge later that day. But even some advocates who agree with him also believe that Pillersdorf failed to wrangle sufficient evidence of Pine Branch’s responsibility for the lawsuit.

Pillersdorf’s legal case largely relied on a report by Dr. David Scott Simonton, an engineering professor at Marshall University in West Virginia.

In the report, Simonton described Pine Branch’s reclamation of the Lost Creek mines as “wholly inadequate.” He alleged that along with the ponds’ walls being eroded, one silt pond had not been cleaned out before the floods, adding even more volume to the runoff after the ponds’ walls burst.

But Simonton never submitted a follow-up to his report, which he’d described as “preliminary.” Nor did he conduct hydrologic modeling to estimate how much water the silt ponds added to the flash floods, despite Pillersdorf having hired experts to conduct hydrologic modeling in prior successful lawsuits.

Simonton based his opinion instead on witness statements, aerial photographs taken in the days before and after the floods, and existing hydrologic models that had linked previous floods in eastern Kentucky to surface mining.

The federal judge presiding over the case, Danny Reeves, ruled in February 2024 that Simonton’s testimony was so flimsy that it could not be admitted as evidence. That left the Breathitt County plaintiffs with little on-the-record proof supporting their claims, save for the testimony of Hays and other residents. (Simonton initially agreed to an interview but did not respond to subsequent scheduling requests.)

Jack Spadaro, a mining engineer who oversaw the United States’ mine safety office before he was fired for whistleblowing in 2003, has consulted on dozens of mining accountability lawsuits. Eight of those lawsuits were helmed by Pillersdorf.

Spadaro said hydrologic modeling is a standard element in these sorts of lawsuits, since models can help indicate how much of a flood resulted from mining operations. A more responsible lawyer, Spadaro said, would have hired a more effective engineer to build a model estimating the volume of water that the coal mines contributed to the watershed.

“They lost, and it’s his own goddamn fault,” said Spadaro. “He’s too lazy to do the work … He really has abandoned these people.”

Pillersdorf wrote in a statement that Spadaro’s claims were “demonstrably false” and “defamatory.”

“Any due diligence review of the public court filings would indicate that we filed voluminous pleadings, attended dozens of depositions,” he wrote. Such an examination of the case’s evolution would “defeat any suggestion that we did not do our best to try and undo the terrible injustice that our neighbors experienced.”

Thompson Barney is an environmental litigation firm that won multiple lawsuits in the 2000s and 2010s arguing that coal companies’ inadequate reclamation contributed to flooding and damage of properties. Kevin Thompson, one of the firm’s founders, said winning the cases required a meteorologist’s opinion that the rainfall contributing to each flood was not of “biblical proportions … It’s a 25-year flood, it’s a 50-year flood … That’s how you get beyond the idea that this is an act of God.”

Will Kovalchik, a senior legal assistant at the firm, added that cases of this nature tend to also require hiring a mining engineer and “some sort of hydrogeologist,” both of whom could be trusted to testify “that whatever was in place to control the flooding was inadequate.”

Pillersdorf hired none of these experts.

“Modeling is to predict whether or not there’ll be a flood event,” Pillersdorf said, defending himself. “In this case, it was irrelevant. Because we knew it was a flood event—that had already occurred.”

When pressed on why he had hired mining engineers and conducted modeling in similar previous cases but not this one, he didn’t offer a clear answer. Instead, he blamed the lawsuit’s loss on the challenges of demonstrating to the public and the justice system that flooding in eastern Kentucky is due to mining companies’ negligence.

Appalachia has experienced more floods “probably because of climate change,” Pillersdorf said. “But you don’t need that amount of rain to cause these flood events. The failure to reclaim also exacerbates these events.”

In a later statement, Pillersdorf wrote that Simonton, the expert whose preliminary report was cited in the lawsuit, had “insisted” there were “unusual circumstances in the Breathitt case” that made hydrologic modeling unnecessary and added that his firm had received “excellent results” in other cases without modeling.

Pillersdorf also accused Reeves, the judge presiding over the case, of bias. Appointed to the federal bench by President George W. Bush in 2001, Reeves had previously dismissed a pollution lawsuit against a coal company that an appeals court later reversed. He was a commercial litigator before becoming a judge, and in one of his cases he represented an eastern Kentucky–based oil company in an environment-related lawsuit.

Pillersdorf wrote in a statement that he and other lawyers had opposed Reeves’s nomination to the federal bench years ago “due to his conduct in defending corporate polluting defendants.” He added that “when Reeves was assigned, it was totally predictable that he would dismiss the case,” despite his team’s “excellent efforts.”

Regardless of Pillersdorf’s potential missteps, environmental advocates say his loss is further proof that the deck is stacked against litigators taking on coal companies in environmental cases.

Cromer, of the Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center, did not comment on the specifics of Pillersdorf’s legal strategy but said that in her experience, there’s a tapestry of policies benefiting coal companies, which means “you are always at a disadvantage” in lawsuits against them.

“There are all kinds of tricks … they can say, ‘The state said this was OK,’” said Cromer. “You have this landscape of administrative stuff that companies will use as a defense … It is generally a very uphill battle.”

BETWEEN 2010 AND 2017, there were 22 federal lawsuits filed in Kentucky’s Eastern District court whose “cause of action” was classified in the federal court system as “environmental matters.” Many focused on mining companies’ cleanup failures and were filed by advocacy groups such as the Sierra Club and Appalachian Voices.

But over the following eight years, from 2018 to 2026, the court saw only four such lawsuits. (So far this year, no similar cases have been filed.)

This decline in litigation has occurred as the coal industry has changed. After 15 years of contraction, companies have consolidated—and the ones that remain have even more power to fight litigation. A handful of major conglomerates are still operating and making profits, often benefiting from foreign ownership or from the absorption of smaller coal companies.

“The company has a slew of experts, some of which are on staff,” Cromer said. “So they just have all of this capacity at their fingertips to bring experts into court and say, ‘No, it wasn’t caused by my mining operation.’”

That’s if lawsuits even get filed, which can be difficult if mining regulators never issue final orders for these companies to stop mining.

Each state has an office dedicated to overseeing mining operations and monitoring reclamation. Some climate activists say that Kentucky’s Division of Mine Reclamation and Enforcement—which determines which citations result in stop orders—is sometimes unwilling or too overwhelmed to step in.

In 2022, Inside Climate News reported that private correspondence from Kentucky’s mining office acknowledged that a growing number of violations at surface mines were not being reviewed because the office was so backed up. The story quoted a December 2021 email from Courtney Skaggs, an environmental scientist and the office’s former director, who wrote that the backlog of environmental violations “is completely out of control” and “is going to blow up in someone’s face.”

Pillersdorf pointed to the office’s struggles with enforcement as a source of frustration in his own case. The judge ruled in favor of Blackhawk and Pine Branch in part because Kentucky’s mine regulators had never issued a final ruling against the company. But Pillersdorf said he believed this is a near-impossible standard for lawyers to overcome, given the fact that regulators are often too overburdened to fully enforce penalties or unwilling to issue certain orders against coal companies.

“I don’t know, practically, how you get around that,” said Pillersdorf.

If litigation against coal companies is hard to win, environmental advocates say it’s also difficult to rely on federal or state law as a line of defense against companies’ abuses.

Under the federal mining regulations enacted in 1977, coal companies are supposed to post bonds to fund future cleanup of mines, in case the company goes bankrupt.

Companies are required to take adequate care of their sites while they mine—by limiting tree removal, ensuring toxic runoff doesn’t reach water supplies, minimizing topographical disruption, and more—and complete any remaining reclamation activities after a mine shuts down. If a company fulfills these obligations, their bond is released and returned. But if a company fails to clean up a mine, their bond is forfeited and used to finance reclamation.

The issue, advocates say, is that the bonds have not always served their intended safety-net function. The 1977 law left it up to individual states to set their bond amounts and rules, leading to wide divergence among states’ enforcement. Many states set the amount required for a bond too low, meaning there isn’t enough money to cover the full cost of cleanup once mines shut down. Some states—including Kentucky—allow companies to use “self-bonding,” where they demonstrate financial stability without needing to post any collateral and thus leave mines in disarray when their self-bonded reclamation funds don’t materialize.

“The bonds to reclaim those lands are set at levels way below what the actual reclamation costs are,” said Peter Morgan, an environmental attorney who formerly worked for the Sierra Club. But he said that this problem is difficult to address because coal companies react so negatively to efforts to strengthen the rules.

“It’s ‘Hey, if you put any new requirements on us … We’re going to walk away. And the bond is inadequate, and now we’ve left this huge mess.’”

Today, Appalachia is home to roughly 1,300 coal mines that have been abandoned for a decade or more. Even as the industry fades, abandoned mines continue to pose threats to their surrounding communities, from methane explosions to landslides to contaminated water supplies.

A 2021 report by the environmental nonprofit Appalachian Voices estimated there were 633,000 acres of unreclaimed coal mining lands across seven Appalachian states, carrying a $9.8 billion price tag to reclaim. The states had collected just $3.8 billion in reclamation funds, less than half the actual reclamation costs for these lands, the report found.

The flaws around bonding are one reason that so many coal mines have shut down without being fully cleaned up. Experts say another is the high rate of bankruptcy declarations among coal companies.

Greg Stumbo, a pro-coal Democrat and former attorney general of Kentucky, said that during the coal industry’s freefall in the mid-2010s, it became relatively standard for companies to “acquire operations, build up a large portfolio, then declare bankruptcy, rob the assets, and spin them off, walking away from their reclamation obligations.”

Chapter 11 of the federal bankruptcy code generally aims to prevent companies in dire financial straits from incurring additional costs. If a company’s failure carries high costs for the surrounding community—if it has a large number of employees, for instance, or owns multiple mines—that company may be permitted to reorganize its debts rather than shut down.

Some coal companies realized those incentives, said Stumbo, and intentionally declared bankruptcy. He called the approach “bankruptcy for profit.”

In a 2019 journal article, Yale Law School professor Joshua Macey and energy expert Jackson Salovaara wrote that since 2012, four coal producers had filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy declarations that wound up relieving them of more than $5 billion in regulatory debts, including nearly $2 billion in fees imposed for environmental violations.

The murky bankruptcy process is, in part, how Blackhawk made a name for itself: Founded in 2010, the company rapidly expanded by buying up active mining operations other companies had abandoned. One of its first purchases was Pine Branch.

After bringing 22 mining sites into its operations and generating more than $1 billion in revenue, in 2019 Blackhawk declared bankruptcy itself. One year later, in 2020, it was bought by a Czech company, Sev.en. The company’s foreign ownership is how the case wound up in federal court, said Pillersdorf, which he thought was less favorable to his plaintiffs’ interests than local judges would have been.

These trends—the bankruptcy declarations, the lack of reliable bonds, the repeated corporate restructures—have resulted in many coal mines going unreclaimed, and they’ve dimmed many environmentalists’ hope of seeking accountability for the mining sites left behind.

“I saw dozens of permits where it’s unclear who’s the responsible party, where it’s unclear what’s going to happen,” said Morgan, the environmental attorney. “That overlapped with the 2022 floods, and a lot of the permits over those flooded areas were permits that had fallen into this kind of legal limbo.”

The Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center, where Cromer works, launched in 2002 and spent its first years representing coal miners and others affected by the industry in lawsuits against companies and state regulators—on issues from environmental harms to workers’ rights to black lung disease, an incurable illness linked to mining.

That work got more difficult, Cromer said, as the nonprofit realized the high cost of litigation—especially against coal companies with the money to hire experts and repeatedly appeal decisions, sometimes dozens of times. By the mid-2010s, the group began focusing more on policy research.

“Over time, it became clear it wasn’t possible to sort of scale up our litigation, because that takes so much manpower and money,” she said.

Several other environmental groups have followed suit—prioritizing petitions, social media campaigns, and legislative visits over lawsuits. Thompson Barney, the law firm, also stopped pursuing mining-related lawsuits about a decade ago. Kevin Thompson attributed this shift to bankruptcy proceedings that dramatically reduced the odds of winning settlements from coal companies. The firm now focuses on litigation in other fields, specifically the opioid industry and the radiation effects of nuclear power plants.

Thompson said he believes that many coal companies declared bankruptcy in the 2010s because they were broke, not because they wanted to evade responsibility. “The coal companies were truly out of money,” he said. “So we stopped being able to do anything for our clients, and it stopped making financial sense for us.”

“It’s the perils of a dying industry,” added Kovalchik, Thompson’s colleague at the firm. “A lot of people get left hung out to dry.”

THE CHANGING LEGAL LANDSCAPE around coal companies’ reclamation negligence in Appalachia is an exception to a broader trend: Lawsuits focused on environmental accountability are surging worldwide.

Lawsuits have become an increasingly popular tool among climate activists, who in recent years have brought cases arguing that public officials have failed to protect people from extreme weather events or that corporations have failed to protect their investors. In perhaps the most famous climate lawsuit, a group of Montana teenagers argued successfully in 2024 that the state’s deregulation of the fossil fuel industry violated their right to a healthy environment.

More than 3,400 climate-related lawsuits were filed worldwide in 2025, according to Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law—nearly four times the number that were filed in 2017. But the nature of those cases has changed. In 2015, there were more than a dozen lawsuits filed that mentioned the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act or the office tasked with enforcing it. But so far this year, no such cases have been filed, while Sabin Center data shows that the number of climate lawsuits filed in the U.S. in 2025 and focused on youth was double what it was in 2015.

Part of the reason for the decline of reclamation-focused lawsuits may be the rollback of both federal and state protections that made it easier to spot wrongdoing by coal companies.

This February, the Trump administration reversed a long-standing policy that stipulated that when an environmental violation was reported at a mine, state authorities had ten days to act before the federal government stepped in. State lawmakers in Kentucky slashed water pollution protections with a bill whose sponsor said the bill was inspired by his desire to “do everything I possibly can to burn coal as long as possible.” Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, vetoed the bill, but his veto was overridden by the Republican-led legislature.

Environmental advocates say some Kentucky lawmakers’ opposition to greater mining oversight is the product of nostalgia for the industry’s heyday.

“Kentucky especially, but other states as well … has really been very lax in enforcement of the reclamation deadlines, allowing mines to sit idle and unreclaimed,” Cromer said, “in the hopes that eventually the market is going to turn around and they’ll start mining again.”

Pillersdorf said that these changes contribute to a culture of impunity around mining. He believes that coal companies are being granted “extension after extension” by state legislators, while unreclaimed mine sites become “ticking time bombs.”

He said he worries that his lawsuit’s defeat will make the coal companies that are still left feel emboldened to disregard requirements to reclaim mined land. “This is permission to act totally recklessly,” he said. “It’s a shameful, shameful decision.”

Stumbo, the former Kentucky attorney general, said he does not think coal mines contributed to the damage from the July 2022 floods or other recent floods in eastern Kentucky. But he does want stronger protections for when flooding does happen. He recalled an adage a college professor once taught him: “Flooding is an act of God, but flood damage is an act of man.”

Some residents of eastern Kentucky just think it’s time to move on from blaming the coal industry.

“Folks in that part of the county feel those ponds caused them damage,” said Bobby Thorpe, a former coal miner who now owns Breathitt County’s local newspaper, The Breathitt Advocate. “I’m not going to quarrel with them and say, ‘No, it didn’t’ … But I can also tell you other counties got just as much damage.”

Thorpe is a lifelong resident of Jackson, a town of about 2,000 people and the seat of Breathitt County. He said he had never seen the riverways in Jackson reach as high as they did that July.

“It’s just an act of God for that much rain to fall,” said Thorpe.

Hays sympathizes with eastern Kentucky residents who are unsure if mining contributes to flooding. He thinks their doubts stem in part from larger worries about the region’s decline. Mining activity at the site near Hays’s house recommenced just days after the July 2022 flood, although the mine has since shut down.

“I am not anti-coal by any means,” said Hays, who hails from a long line of coal miners. Many of his friends and acquaintances in Breathitt County saw Pillersdorf’s lawsuit as insulting to their heritage. He’s tried to reassure them otherwise.

“So many people are full of fear that if you hurt those coal mines, you’re also hurting the employees that work for those coal mines. And I understand that mindset,” he added. “But, you know, if you’re guilty, you’re guilty.”