Coal Mining To Blast, Flatten Area Equal To Rhode Island In WV By 2015

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"This is not ordinary strip mining. This is mountaintop removal - activists dub it 'strip mining on steroids'. It is the stuff of science fiction and it is booming in the Appalachian mountains, bringing with it environmental degradation and human despair. It is fuelled by a mining industry that has paid millions of dollars into Republican campaign coffers and received in return an unprecedented relaxation of rules.

Mountaintop removal mining does exactly what it says - in order to get at thin seams of coal that lie within, like cream through the middle of a sponge cake. Millions of tons of rock are blown up, scraped away and poured into surrounding valleys, filling them to the brim. What was a mountain range is turned into a flat and almost barren desert of rock. The streams that once flowed through the valleys around Maria Gunnoe's house lie underneath hundreds of feet of boulders. 'It breaks my heart,' she said. All over Appalachia, a series of mountain ranges running from Pennsylvania to Georgia, there are similar stories. Already 1,200 miles of streams have been buried and 400,000 acres have been blasted away. At current rates, over the next decade 2,200 square miles of land will be affected. That is an area larger than the state of Rhode Island. In order to shift the mountaintops more than 3,000 tons of explosives are used each day.

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For Gunnoe the issue is an immediate one. Since the mountains and valleys went, her property has almost been washed away. Her home is now isolated behind a deep gorge that cuts her off from any road. 'It used to be just a little stream you could step over,' she said. The stream has now cut a gully 20ft deep and 67ft wide. Gunnoe's house has lost all its value. She cannot get insurance. She knows that she will eventually have to leave. Not only the floods are contriving to drive her out. Since she began to speak out publicly last summer, the tyres on Gunnoe's truck have been slashed, she has been verbally threatened by mineworkers, her dog has been shot and its body dumped at a shop frequented by her two children. As she travelled with The Observer last week, a man driving a white SUV closely tailed her, its driver making an obscene gesture at her before forcing her to swerve as he overtook. But she will not be intimidated. 'They have already taken away my future,' she said. 'I guess I am just pushing the envelope to see if they take away my life.'

It was a meeting on an airport runway in August 2000 that paved the way for the mining boom in West Virginia. George W Bush met local mining executives as he prepared to fly out from the state capital, Charleston. They complained mining permits were becoming hard to get because of environmental measures. Bush said he understood their problems. In 2002, after Bush became President, regulations governing mountaintop mining were loosened. It was as simple as changing a word. The rubble produced by scraping off mountaintops was defined as 'fill', not 'waste'. Fill can legally be dumped into valleys, waste cannot. The effect was immediate. In 2002 just three sites were approved in West Virginia. In 2003 the figure was 14."

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http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1391448,00.html

And while I'm sorry for Ms. Gunnoe and those fighting the mining companies, ask yourself one simple question: for whom did West Virginia cast its electoral votes in 2004?

Time for lil' ol' West Virginia to pay the piper.

The problem is jobs, jobs, jobs.

I think strip mining is abominble, but these people need work.

Even a big mountaintop removal mine may only need 20 or 30 workers per shift, as opposed to hundreds needed for even smallish underground mining operations.

Maybe you should cross-post this in the West Virginia state forum too.

People are ******* crazy. The humans would blast the whole planet into asteroids to get at a lump of gold or seam of coal.

Where are the media? Stuff like this should be on the evening news every day.

Did anyone see this story a couple weeks ago:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51556-2005Jan5.html?sub=AR

APPALACHIA, Va.

It hurled like a cannonball into Dennis and Cindy Davidson's house, right through the wall of the bedroom and onto the bed where 3-year-old Jeremy was sleeping.

The huge boulder continued its path, crashing through a closet before finally stopping at the foot of 8-year-old Zachary's bed. Zachary would be fine. Jeremy was crushed to death.
A bulldozer operator widening a road at a strip mining operation atop Black Mountain had unknowingly dislodged the half-ton boulder that August night. And now, more than four months later, Jeremy's death is still being felt across the coal mines of southwestern Virginia.

For many residents, the toddler's death has come to symbolize what they consider the companies' and the state's callous disregard for their safety.

"Since the child got killed, it's sort of like when the towers got bombed and the country came together," said Carl "Pete" Ramey, a coal miner turned anti-strip-mining activist. "The death of an innocent child that had nothing to do with what's going on has brought us together. I think a lot of people feel guilty they didn't do something before."

good people everywhere are uniting against the horrific threat of wind and nuclear power.