Report from the Newly Flat Lands of West Virginia

In May 2006 a group of Maryland Chapter Sierra Club members, including several from the Montgomery County Group, went to Kayford Mountain in West Virginia to see first hand the devastating effects of our energy-hungry lifestyle on the mountains and people of West Virginia.  The following report on what we saw was written by a member from Carroll County.  She urges support for HR 2719, which would make mountaintop removal much more expensive by obliging coal companies to truck out the rubble instead of filling in the stream valleys.   That is, it would undo the exception to the Clean Water Act that the Bush administration made for the coal industry allowing it to dump rubble into streams.  Please contact your own representative in Congress and urge support for HR 2719!  And would you also sign the Sierra Club’s petition against mountaintop removal.  Click on   http://www.sierraclub.org/petition/mountaintop.  Thank you!

Anne Ambler, Chair

Montgomery County Group

Mining is destroying lives

    The destruction that surrounds Kayford Mountain on three sides is stunning. Mountains, softly rounded and thickly forested in the background, give way to a pulverized, lifeless waste heap in the foreground.

    This is what Larry Gibson looks at daily as he fights to save his homestead atop the mountain from a similar fate.

    I traveled to West Virginia earlier this month to see it for myself. It is devastating.

    It is mountaintop removal mining, which employs $48 million draglines to eat through the ancient Appalachians minute by minute, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with shovels three times the width of a Greyhound bus.

    For years, the coal companies have been given permits that violate the Clean Water Act. First, they bulldoze the forest, pushing trees and topsoil off the ridges into the valleys. The resources are squandered because trucking them out would cut into coal company profits. According to Julian Martin, with the West Virginia Highlands Conservatory, 500,000 acres of prime forest have been lost.

    Once the rock is exposed, dynamite creates vast ledges. The 3 million pounds of explosives used every day sends rocks hurtling through the air to land wherever they will.

    The blasts create deep crevices throughout the surrounding area, destroying foundations and wells. The draglines, which are so massive each takes two years to be transported and assembled, finish the job.

    Coal is extracted, washed and transported. The coal waste that remains is dumped in valleys, burying vegetation, wildlife and streams. The area is then "reclaimed." It's supposed to be made viable again, but the coal companies plant the only thing that grows in the sterile ground -- exotic grasses from China that survive long enough to pass inspection. The once-life-sustaining forests are transformed into wastelands.

    What's not as visible is the destruction to American lives.
    The coal is washed with chemicals and water. The resulting slurry, stored in huge sludge ponds or injected into abandoned mines, gets into the groundwater. In many areas, drinking water has to be trucked in. And residents say the sores on their skin and the cancer in their bodies is from being exposed to polluted water.

    Breached slurry ponds have washed away hundreds of homes and taken many lives: 125 people were killed in the 1972 Buffalo Creek disaster. The ponds are a constant threat to the living.

    Imagine sending your child to a school that sits below 2.8 billion gallons of sludge. Parents in Raleigh County whose children attend March Fork Elementary School do every day.

    The children also get coal dust on their shoes and in their lungs, which causes high rates of asthma and black lung. If the pond fails, many children could die.

    It's not just about mountains; it's about people; it's about place. What would you do if an industry colluded with government to take away your family's land and, in the process, damaged your family's burial grounds and your home, poisoned your well and put your children in danger of drowning in coal slurry?

    Would you have the courage to fight, like Larry Gibson, who has taken it upon himself to challenge King Coal?
    These are the harsh realities of modern-day resource extraction. It not only takes place in Ecuador and Indonesia; it's here in America, to the detriment of us all. It involves those of us who create demand for the electricity generated by the coal; federal and state leaders who receive large campaign contributions from coal and related industries and rewrite laws in their favor; and local leaders who condone the destruction in their own back yards in the name of growth and prosperity.

    Who's prospering in West Virginia? Even the coal industry knows 80 percent of the residents oppose mountaintop removal. But it continues to flood the market with propaganda and underwrite community projects while destroying human habitats, and that's supposed to make everyone feel better about what is going on.

    What can those of us in Carroll County do? Convince U.S. Rep. Roscoe Bartlett to sign on to the Clean Water Protection Act. According to Martin, "the act would nullify changes to the Clean Water Act that the Bush administration made on behalf of the coal industry, one of its main campaign contributors. HR 2719 would shore up the original intent of the Clean Water Act by prohibiting the dumping of former mountaintops into most waterways. Nationally, this bill would prohibit industries from dumping all manner of waste into streams and waterways."

    Coal extraction remains cheap and massively destructive because we continue to disregard the external costs to ecosystems and human health.

    Kim Stenley is a Carroll County Times copy editor. Her column appears Mondays. E-mail her at kstenley@lcniofmd.com.

  And that weblink for the petition, again is: http://www.sierraclub.org/petition/mountaintop