J
Joe S.
Guest
QUOTE
The Government Sanctioned Bombing of Appalachia
By Antrim Caskey, AlterNet
Posted on October 9, 2007, Printed on October 9, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/64547/
On a calm, clear morning in the forested mountains of southern West
Virginia, 12-year-old Chrystal Gunnoe played outdoors in the green mountain
valley where her family has lived for hundreds of years. It was Veteran's
Day and a school holiday. Chrystal's mother, Maria Gunnoe, 38, was inside
when she heard her daughter yell for help.
Gunnoe rushed outside to find Chrystal coming towards her. Chrystal was
coughing and struggling to breath, running from a strange-looking cloud that
was moving down the valley and headed towards their house. Gunnoe would
later learn the strange cloud came from something known as a "slow burning
blast" -- an explosion set at the coal mine above her home that failed to
ignite and instead burned slowly, releasing a wet toxic cloud of nitrogen
oxide and carbon dioxide.
Gunnoe lives in Bob White, W.Va., where coal companies have become
increasingly unfriendly neighbors. Her home is surrounded by thousands of
acres where a radically destructive type of coal mining is practiced --
mountaintop removal/valley fill (MTR) coal mining -- and it's turning Maria
Gunnoe's life upside down.
In the weeks following, Chrystal suffered from a bronchial infection, a
consistent cough, nose bleeds and bouts of painful breathing. Her mother,
who was also exposed, "had sores on the inside of [her] nose," she said.
"First they take our land, then the water, now the air," fumed Gunnoe who
lives in Boone County, W.Va.'s top coal-yielding county, and the epicenter
of Appalachian coal extraction, where the dirty business of mining,
processing and hauling coal is the main meal-ticket in town.
Coal mining dominates the lives of the people in the remote, coal-rich
mountain communities of West Virginia, where coal operators like Massey
Energy are waging a remorseless campaign to extract all the coal they can,
as fast as they can, before coal is legislated into the past and President
Bush is out of office.
Out-of-state coal operators reap billions in profits every year, while
residents of southern West Virginia remain among the poorest in the nation.
In the coal fields, the imbalance is amplified: while Boone county produces
the most coal in the state, 20 percent of its residents languish below the
poverty line without sufficient income to achieve an adequate standard of
living.
Massey Energy Co., the largest coal producer in Appalachia, grossed $1.78
billion in revenue on coal sales of 42.3 million tons in 2005, while
residents have toy drives for the kids around the holidays and often rely on
free medical care administered by a global traveling clinic unit that comes
around once a year.
West Virginia has always been a coal state, and the coal industry has had
unfettered access to the state's low-sulfur coal since mining began in
earnest in the late 19th century. In the early days, underground coal miners
used pick axes to dig out coal and put it in wooden buggies drawn by mules.
Today, coal mining is highly mechanized, using a few men and enormous
machines the size of skyscrapers to take the tops off mountains in order to
get the increasingly harder-to-reach coal.
Pure greed drives the coal operators to rape and pillage Appalachia for
profit. But mountain communities are standing up against King Coal --
lawsuits, citizen protests and national lobbying efforts are bringing the
voices of the oppressed Appalachians to the nation.
Working within the system, citizen activist groups have garnered widespread
support for the restoration of legislation that was written to protect our
waterways -- legislation that the Bush administration has proactively
maligned since he came into office.
When King Coal hits home
The Gunnoe home-place sits on about 24 acres in a beautiful mountain hollow,
surrounded by deciduous forest. Their family-built home sits on a manicured
lawn, nestled along the valley slope. But their home and health are in
serious peril. Since 2001, seven floods have taken almost five acres of
Gunnoe's family farm; two vehicular access bridges have been washed away
forcing the family to cross a rickety bridge, then active railroad tracks to
get into their house; and their well water has been so contaminated that
Gunnoe now must spend $250 per month on bottled water.
Big Branch Creek, the headwater stream that flows from the mountains through
her property, is now termed a "National Pollution Discharge Elimination
System" stream by the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection
(WVDEP). "There is no enforcement in Big Branch hollow," said Gunnoe.
All this damage and heartache has been the result of mountaintop
removal/valley fill (MTR) coal mining, a highly mechanized process of a coal
extraction that has gained favor with Appalachian coal operators over the
last two and a half decades. With this method, massive machines are able to
harvest coal in remote mountain ridge regions traditionally considered
inaccessible to coal mining operations.
The first step in MTR coal mining is to clear-cut the forested peaks of
valuable hardwood trees. The trees are bulldozed into the valleys below
and/or burned. Next, machines push tons of earth -- the blasted mountaintops
or "overburden" in mining parlance -- into the valleys below to form valley
fills. These decapitated mountain peaks are being used to build more than
4,000 valley fills in the state of West Virginia.
Once the first layer of rock is exposed, massive blasting stages are drilled
and filled with explosives. Three million pounds of explosives are used
every day in West Virginia alone. Layer by layer, mountains are blasted
away, revealing seams of rich, low-sulfur coal, found in horizontal layers
like the icing between cake layers. The coal is removed by giant earth
moving machines called draglines, which replace the labor of hundreds of men
and cost between $50 million and $100 million each.
MTR is big business requiring copious amounts of capital and very few coal
miners. Since the onset and legislative streamlining of MTR permitting, the
traditional underground coal miner work force in West Virginia has
plummeted. The number of men mining coal underground currently hovers around
12,000 employees, and in July 2007, sank to a mere 5,475 underground coal
miners. according to the West Virginia Office of Miners' Health, Safety and
Training.
MTR coal mining is eliminating jobs and killing Appalachia: taking down the
mountains, burying streams, dirtying the air and devastating every living
thing in its path. Entire communities, still vividly alive in the memories
of the local people, have been obliterated, because they stood on top of
vast coal reserves.
Systematic attacks on such communities have leveled mountain hamlets like
Twilight, Cazy, Laurel, Blair and hundreds of others. Towns, communities and
family cemeteries have been burned, bulldozed and buried because they stood
in the path of King Coal.
MTR coal extraction not only annihilates some of the most biologically
diverse temperate hardwood forest habitat in the world, but it also destroys
and displaces entire human communities, destroying the unique mountain
culture of West Virginia. Many Appalachian families have continued to live
on the same land since the late 1700s.
Residents want to retain their home-places, their heritage. Mountain
communities have an extraordinary relationship with the land and all that it
provides -- visually, physically and spiritually. Many have fought to the
last moment before they are forced from their homes by blasting, flooding
and/or illness. Often, by the time the coal mining becomes a threat to a
community, families find it impossible to move: Their homes and land have
been rendered worthless, and they simply cannot afford to leave.
Mary Miller of Sylvester, W.Va., a retired postmaster, has seen her fine
two-story brick home depreciate in value to a mere fraction of its original
worth because of a coal dust-spewing Massey Energy-owned coal processing
plant that moved into the once idyllic town of Sylvester in the early '80s.
No one wants to leave. Those who remain face life-threatening problems,
including contamination of drinking water, damage to homes from blasting,
severe flooding, the threat of coal sludge impoundment failures, and
breathing problems related to blasting. Many people simply have no choice --
they are forced to take a stand.
Domination of the coal fields by the coal industry is plainly visible while
driving through Appalachia. From southwestern West Virginia's Raleigh, Boone
and Mingo counties to southeastern Ohio, one can recognize an informal "Coal
Industrial Zone" consisting of coal extraction operations in West Virginia
and the power plants they feed just over the Ohio River in Meigs County,
Ohio. And then there's the destruction that is difficult to see.
In an effort to get rid of billions of gallons of toxic coal slurry, which
is the waste by-product that comes from chemical cleaning of coal, this
sludge (not sewage) is pumped underground into abandoned mine works,
contaminating the drinking water of the vulnerable communities in between.
"They've destroyed our lives -- our health, our past, definitely any chance
of a future," explains Gunnoe.
A dirty business
Coal has always provided employment in West Virginia, but compared to the
corporate profits exiting Appalachia, miners' salaries serve more as an
enabler to a dangerous, sick, indebted future than a promising career. Union
mines are virtually extinct in West Virginia, and dependable medical
coverage and pension funds are precarious at best.
In fact, the much touted jobs in today's coal mining industry are at best
temporary -- one year, maybe two. Coal miners are forced to work in unsafe
conditions and abrupt layoffs are the norm.
But coal has maintained its hold and flourished in the region because of
politics. The coal industry and politicians have always had a close business
relationship. According to a 2006 midterm election report on CNN, the
efforts of Massey's CEO -- in the end, unsuccessful -- to win the state
legislature for Republicans was describe as this: "Massey Energy Co. CEO Don
Blankenship has spent more than $1.8 million to promote 41 GOP candidates
through contributions and his personal political action committee, And for
the Sake of the Kids."
Blankenship is infamous for his greed and callous attitude towards people,
but also for his efforts to stack the deck politically in his favor, using
strategic donations. In return for such acts of party-line economic
kindness, Bush has aided and abetted the coal barons in their selfish plan
with a complete disregard to its effects on the environment and impact on
global climate change.
While the world determines how to take action against the dangers of global
warming, Bush is blithely backing coal, completely indifferent to the threat
of CO2 emissions -- the leading global warming gas -- to the earth's
atmosphere. He has used the Department of Interior's Office of Surface
Mining to streamline the permitting process for the most radical and
destructive form of coal mining, mountaintop removal/valley fill coal
mining, to serve the needs of the coal industry.
West Virginia helped Bush into office by voting Republican for the first
time in decades in 2000. In total, nine of the 13 Appalachian states voted
for Bush in 2000. In 2002, Bush's first payback to the coal industry was a
small but devastating "executive rule change" to the Clean Water Act that
reclassified mining "waste" as "fill" so that the mountaintops of Appalachia
could be dumped into waterways, burying thousands of miles of vital
headwater streams. That legislation is helping to flatten the coal-rich
Appalachian mountains.
On Friday, Aug. 24, 2007, the Bush administration insulted the American
people again by handing his coal cronies more spoils. The Department of the
Interior's Office of Surface Mining has proposed another rule change that
will further declaw the Clean Water Act by institutionalizing valley fills.
The proposed rule change nullifies the "100 foot stream buffer zone" rule
that prohibits mining within 100 feet of a stream. In the past, the buffer
zone has been easily bypassed with a simple waiver request by coal
operators. This proposed change will eliminate all barriers to burying
Appalachian streams.
If the buffer zone rule is eliminated, coal operators can more freely dump
crumbled mountaintops into valleys, burying thousands of miles of headwater
streams. Joe Lovett, executive director of the Appalachian Center for the
Economy and the Environment in Lewisburg, W.Va., called Bush's latest
environmental assault a "parting gift from this administration to the coal
industry."
Since the late 1990s, and especially after the 2002 rule change to the Clean
Water Act by Bush legalizing the burying of streams with valley fills
composed of former mountaintops, MTR coal mining has become an enormous and
immediate threat to the region. The most biologically diverse temperate
forest in the world, whose capacity at natural carbon sequestration cannot
be underestimated, is being rapidly destroyed.
More than 4,000 valley fills in West Virginia alone have buried or severely
impacted over 2,000 miles of vital headwater streams -- the source of the
southeastern United States' drinking water. Wrapping coal in the flag and
the war-time mantra of becoming "energy-independent" is confusing the
realities about coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel.
Americans use coal for more than 50 percent of their electricity needs.
Coal-fired power plants produce 40 percent of U.S. annual CO2 emissions, the
primary global warming gas. With plans for 129 new coal-fired power plants
on the drawing board, the coal industry, in collusion with the federal
government and a wide array of industry partners, is ushering in a new tax
payer-subsidized era for coal, making unwitting American tax payers the
co-authors of this destruction. American tax payers are bottom-lining the
construction of new cross-country transmission lines, funding billion-dollar
coal tech projects -- the citizens are paying to develop and construct new
plants and the means to transport the product so that the consumer can have
the luxury of buying the energy.
A people-powered solution
Only the American people can help stop MTR coal mining. Because politicians
are beholden to coal companies and industry partners through political
contributions, only a grassroots movement can alter the energy agenda. To
restore the Clean Water Act to its original intentions, the Clean Water
Protection Act (CWPA) was introduced to Congress on May 8, 2002, by Rep.
Frank Pallone, D-N.J., and Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., to amend the
Federal Water Pollution Control Act so as "to clarify that fill material
cannot be comprised of waste."
The CWPA was then referred to the committee of jurisdiction -- the
Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. The Water Resources and
Environment Subcommittee will be the first to deal with this legislation.
Year by year, the bill gained more co-sponsors. Currently, the Clean Water
Protection Act (HR2169), has 99 co-sponsors. If passed, valley fills and
thus, MTR, would be made illegal by preventing the disposal of mining waste
into headwater streams -- the protection that the Bush administration
stripped from the Clean Water Act in 2002.
The CWPA is an easy bill to sign on to: Lawmakers are committing to keeping
waste out of our waterways. That it has taken years in the House to garner
99 co-sponsors is a testament to the power of the coal industry. But the
tide seems to be changing against coal and towards clean, sustainable
energy. The number of proposed coal-fired power plants for the United States
recently dropped from 150 to 129 -- due in large part to public outcry and
threat of lawsuits because people are more aware of the hazards of coal.
Appalachian mountain communities have been radicalized by the headlong path
the coal industry is wreaking in their backyards, propelling many people on
to local and national advocacy campaigns to save the land and people of
Appalachia from a profit-driven rape.
Maria Gunnoe, who is a trained medical assistant and used to work as a
waitress to support her family, is now a full-time mountain community
organizer with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (OHVEC) and there are
others in her community who've taken up this work full time.
"People here are now unable to deny the impact of mountaintop removal/valley
fill coal mining. They are learning about it through personal experience and
personal impact -- even the strip miners will tell you that there's going to
be a big washout next time the rains come," explained Gunnoe. "They've
robbed my children of their childhood. They robbed me of my motherhood.
That's all I ever wanted, to be a mother and wife. I just wanted to lie in
my little hollow and be left alone. I wanted to teach them what my parents
taught me. They've taken that away."
Community members like Gunnoe who speak out against MTR risk losing
friendships and jobs, peace of mind, family pets or even their life. Many
people are too frightened to talk about how coal mining has adversely
affected their lives -- this kind of talk can easily cost a relative his job
with one of the offending coal companies.
The coal companies turn communities against each other by telling their
employees that the environmentalists want to take away their jobs. In the
way they always have, "the mine bosses sit with the younger miners and put
something in their ear -- something to get worked up about," explains Ed
Wiley, of Rock Creek, W.Va. Unfortunately, as community resistance builds
and lawsuits alleging gross injustice finally come to trial, the stage is
set for a clash. Whereas the effects of underground mining in the past were
far less drastic and coal extraction operations were underground and out of
sight, MTR coal mining is a ferocious, in-your-face type of mining that
affects every part of your life, if you live nearby.
The chronic relationship between coal operators and politicians in
Appalachia, America's most underdeveloped region, continues to this day.
Coal serves only a few while condemning local residents to unhealthy lives
and uninhabitable homes and the rest of us to dirty energy and a warming
planet. Now is the time to stand up and demand clean, renewable energy.
Antrim Caskey has been reporting on the human and environmental costs of
mountaintop removal/valley fill coal mining since May 2005. Caskey is a
Brooklyn-based independent photojournalist whose work focuses on community
and social justice issues.
The Government Sanctioned Bombing of Appalachia
By Antrim Caskey, AlterNet
Posted on October 9, 2007, Printed on October 9, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/64547/
On a calm, clear morning in the forested mountains of southern West
Virginia, 12-year-old Chrystal Gunnoe played outdoors in the green mountain
valley where her family has lived for hundreds of years. It was Veteran's
Day and a school holiday. Chrystal's mother, Maria Gunnoe, 38, was inside
when she heard her daughter yell for help.
Gunnoe rushed outside to find Chrystal coming towards her. Chrystal was
coughing and struggling to breath, running from a strange-looking cloud that
was moving down the valley and headed towards their house. Gunnoe would
later learn the strange cloud came from something known as a "slow burning
blast" -- an explosion set at the coal mine above her home that failed to
ignite and instead burned slowly, releasing a wet toxic cloud of nitrogen
oxide and carbon dioxide.
Gunnoe lives in Bob White, W.Va., where coal companies have become
increasingly unfriendly neighbors. Her home is surrounded by thousands of
acres where a radically destructive type of coal mining is practiced --
mountaintop removal/valley fill (MTR) coal mining -- and it's turning Maria
Gunnoe's life upside down.
In the weeks following, Chrystal suffered from a bronchial infection, a
consistent cough, nose bleeds and bouts of painful breathing. Her mother,
who was also exposed, "had sores on the inside of [her] nose," she said.
"First they take our land, then the water, now the air," fumed Gunnoe who
lives in Boone County, W.Va.'s top coal-yielding county, and the epicenter
of Appalachian coal extraction, where the dirty business of mining,
processing and hauling coal is the main meal-ticket in town.
Coal mining dominates the lives of the people in the remote, coal-rich
mountain communities of West Virginia, where coal operators like Massey
Energy are waging a remorseless campaign to extract all the coal they can,
as fast as they can, before coal is legislated into the past and President
Bush is out of office.
Out-of-state coal operators reap billions in profits every year, while
residents of southern West Virginia remain among the poorest in the nation.
In the coal fields, the imbalance is amplified: while Boone county produces
the most coal in the state, 20 percent of its residents languish below the
poverty line without sufficient income to achieve an adequate standard of
living.
Massey Energy Co., the largest coal producer in Appalachia, grossed $1.78
billion in revenue on coal sales of 42.3 million tons in 2005, while
residents have toy drives for the kids around the holidays and often rely on
free medical care administered by a global traveling clinic unit that comes
around once a year.
West Virginia has always been a coal state, and the coal industry has had
unfettered access to the state's low-sulfur coal since mining began in
earnest in the late 19th century. In the early days, underground coal miners
used pick axes to dig out coal and put it in wooden buggies drawn by mules.
Today, coal mining is highly mechanized, using a few men and enormous
machines the size of skyscrapers to take the tops off mountains in order to
get the increasingly harder-to-reach coal.
Pure greed drives the coal operators to rape and pillage Appalachia for
profit. But mountain communities are standing up against King Coal --
lawsuits, citizen protests and national lobbying efforts are bringing the
voices of the oppressed Appalachians to the nation.
Working within the system, citizen activist groups have garnered widespread
support for the restoration of legislation that was written to protect our
waterways -- legislation that the Bush administration has proactively
maligned since he came into office.
When King Coal hits home
The Gunnoe home-place sits on about 24 acres in a beautiful mountain hollow,
surrounded by deciduous forest. Their family-built home sits on a manicured
lawn, nestled along the valley slope. But their home and health are in
serious peril. Since 2001, seven floods have taken almost five acres of
Gunnoe's family farm; two vehicular access bridges have been washed away
forcing the family to cross a rickety bridge, then active railroad tracks to
get into their house; and their well water has been so contaminated that
Gunnoe now must spend $250 per month on bottled water.
Big Branch Creek, the headwater stream that flows from the mountains through
her property, is now termed a "National Pollution Discharge Elimination
System" stream by the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection
(WVDEP). "There is no enforcement in Big Branch hollow," said Gunnoe.
All this damage and heartache has been the result of mountaintop
removal/valley fill (MTR) coal mining, a highly mechanized process of a coal
extraction that has gained favor with Appalachian coal operators over the
last two and a half decades. With this method, massive machines are able to
harvest coal in remote mountain ridge regions traditionally considered
inaccessible to coal mining operations.
The first step in MTR coal mining is to clear-cut the forested peaks of
valuable hardwood trees. The trees are bulldozed into the valleys below
and/or burned. Next, machines push tons of earth -- the blasted mountaintops
or "overburden" in mining parlance -- into the valleys below to form valley
fills. These decapitated mountain peaks are being used to build more than
4,000 valley fills in the state of West Virginia.
Once the first layer of rock is exposed, massive blasting stages are drilled
and filled with explosives. Three million pounds of explosives are used
every day in West Virginia alone. Layer by layer, mountains are blasted
away, revealing seams of rich, low-sulfur coal, found in horizontal layers
like the icing between cake layers. The coal is removed by giant earth
moving machines called draglines, which replace the labor of hundreds of men
and cost between $50 million and $100 million each.
MTR is big business requiring copious amounts of capital and very few coal
miners. Since the onset and legislative streamlining of MTR permitting, the
traditional underground coal miner work force in West Virginia has
plummeted. The number of men mining coal underground currently hovers around
12,000 employees, and in July 2007, sank to a mere 5,475 underground coal
miners. according to the West Virginia Office of Miners' Health, Safety and
Training.
MTR coal mining is eliminating jobs and killing Appalachia: taking down the
mountains, burying streams, dirtying the air and devastating every living
thing in its path. Entire communities, still vividly alive in the memories
of the local people, have been obliterated, because they stood on top of
vast coal reserves.
Systematic attacks on such communities have leveled mountain hamlets like
Twilight, Cazy, Laurel, Blair and hundreds of others. Towns, communities and
family cemeteries have been burned, bulldozed and buried because they stood
in the path of King Coal.
MTR coal extraction not only annihilates some of the most biologically
diverse temperate hardwood forest habitat in the world, but it also destroys
and displaces entire human communities, destroying the unique mountain
culture of West Virginia. Many Appalachian families have continued to live
on the same land since the late 1700s.
Residents want to retain their home-places, their heritage. Mountain
communities have an extraordinary relationship with the land and all that it
provides -- visually, physically and spiritually. Many have fought to the
last moment before they are forced from their homes by blasting, flooding
and/or illness. Often, by the time the coal mining becomes a threat to a
community, families find it impossible to move: Their homes and land have
been rendered worthless, and they simply cannot afford to leave.
Mary Miller of Sylvester, W.Va., a retired postmaster, has seen her fine
two-story brick home depreciate in value to a mere fraction of its original
worth because of a coal dust-spewing Massey Energy-owned coal processing
plant that moved into the once idyllic town of Sylvester in the early '80s.
No one wants to leave. Those who remain face life-threatening problems,
including contamination of drinking water, damage to homes from blasting,
severe flooding, the threat of coal sludge impoundment failures, and
breathing problems related to blasting. Many people simply have no choice --
they are forced to take a stand.
Domination of the coal fields by the coal industry is plainly visible while
driving through Appalachia. From southwestern West Virginia's Raleigh, Boone
and Mingo counties to southeastern Ohio, one can recognize an informal "Coal
Industrial Zone" consisting of coal extraction operations in West Virginia
and the power plants they feed just over the Ohio River in Meigs County,
Ohio. And then there's the destruction that is difficult to see.
In an effort to get rid of billions of gallons of toxic coal slurry, which
is the waste by-product that comes from chemical cleaning of coal, this
sludge (not sewage) is pumped underground into abandoned mine works,
contaminating the drinking water of the vulnerable communities in between.
"They've destroyed our lives -- our health, our past, definitely any chance
of a future," explains Gunnoe.
A dirty business
Coal has always provided employment in West Virginia, but compared to the
corporate profits exiting Appalachia, miners' salaries serve more as an
enabler to a dangerous, sick, indebted future than a promising career. Union
mines are virtually extinct in West Virginia, and dependable medical
coverage and pension funds are precarious at best.
In fact, the much touted jobs in today's coal mining industry are at best
temporary -- one year, maybe two. Coal miners are forced to work in unsafe
conditions and abrupt layoffs are the norm.
But coal has maintained its hold and flourished in the region because of
politics. The coal industry and politicians have always had a close business
relationship. According to a 2006 midterm election report on CNN, the
efforts of Massey's CEO -- in the end, unsuccessful -- to win the state
legislature for Republicans was describe as this: "Massey Energy Co. CEO Don
Blankenship has spent more than $1.8 million to promote 41 GOP candidates
through contributions and his personal political action committee, And for
the Sake of the Kids."
Blankenship is infamous for his greed and callous attitude towards people,
but also for his efforts to stack the deck politically in his favor, using
strategic donations. In return for such acts of party-line economic
kindness, Bush has aided and abetted the coal barons in their selfish plan
with a complete disregard to its effects on the environment and impact on
global climate change.
While the world determines how to take action against the dangers of global
warming, Bush is blithely backing coal, completely indifferent to the threat
of CO2 emissions -- the leading global warming gas -- to the earth's
atmosphere. He has used the Department of Interior's Office of Surface
Mining to streamline the permitting process for the most radical and
destructive form of coal mining, mountaintop removal/valley fill coal
mining, to serve the needs of the coal industry.
West Virginia helped Bush into office by voting Republican for the first
time in decades in 2000. In total, nine of the 13 Appalachian states voted
for Bush in 2000. In 2002, Bush's first payback to the coal industry was a
small but devastating "executive rule change" to the Clean Water Act that
reclassified mining "waste" as "fill" so that the mountaintops of Appalachia
could be dumped into waterways, burying thousands of miles of vital
headwater streams. That legislation is helping to flatten the coal-rich
Appalachian mountains.
On Friday, Aug. 24, 2007, the Bush administration insulted the American
people again by handing his coal cronies more spoils. The Department of the
Interior's Office of Surface Mining has proposed another rule change that
will further declaw the Clean Water Act by institutionalizing valley fills.
The proposed rule change nullifies the "100 foot stream buffer zone" rule
that prohibits mining within 100 feet of a stream. In the past, the buffer
zone has been easily bypassed with a simple waiver request by coal
operators. This proposed change will eliminate all barriers to burying
Appalachian streams.
If the buffer zone rule is eliminated, coal operators can more freely dump
crumbled mountaintops into valleys, burying thousands of miles of headwater
streams. Joe Lovett, executive director of the Appalachian Center for the
Economy and the Environment in Lewisburg, W.Va., called Bush's latest
environmental assault a "parting gift from this administration to the coal
industry."
Since the late 1990s, and especially after the 2002 rule change to the Clean
Water Act by Bush legalizing the burying of streams with valley fills
composed of former mountaintops, MTR coal mining has become an enormous and
immediate threat to the region. The most biologically diverse temperate
forest in the world, whose capacity at natural carbon sequestration cannot
be underestimated, is being rapidly destroyed.
More than 4,000 valley fills in West Virginia alone have buried or severely
impacted over 2,000 miles of vital headwater streams -- the source of the
southeastern United States' drinking water. Wrapping coal in the flag and
the war-time mantra of becoming "energy-independent" is confusing the
realities about coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel.
Americans use coal for more than 50 percent of their electricity needs.
Coal-fired power plants produce 40 percent of U.S. annual CO2 emissions, the
primary global warming gas. With plans for 129 new coal-fired power plants
on the drawing board, the coal industry, in collusion with the federal
government and a wide array of industry partners, is ushering in a new tax
payer-subsidized era for coal, making unwitting American tax payers the
co-authors of this destruction. American tax payers are bottom-lining the
construction of new cross-country transmission lines, funding billion-dollar
coal tech projects -- the citizens are paying to develop and construct new
plants and the means to transport the product so that the consumer can have
the luxury of buying the energy.
A people-powered solution
Only the American people can help stop MTR coal mining. Because politicians
are beholden to coal companies and industry partners through political
contributions, only a grassroots movement can alter the energy agenda. To
restore the Clean Water Act to its original intentions, the Clean Water
Protection Act (CWPA) was introduced to Congress on May 8, 2002, by Rep.
Frank Pallone, D-N.J., and Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., to amend the
Federal Water Pollution Control Act so as "to clarify that fill material
cannot be comprised of waste."
The CWPA was then referred to the committee of jurisdiction -- the
Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. The Water Resources and
Environment Subcommittee will be the first to deal with this legislation.
Year by year, the bill gained more co-sponsors. Currently, the Clean Water
Protection Act (HR2169), has 99 co-sponsors. If passed, valley fills and
thus, MTR, would be made illegal by preventing the disposal of mining waste
into headwater streams -- the protection that the Bush administration
stripped from the Clean Water Act in 2002.
The CWPA is an easy bill to sign on to: Lawmakers are committing to keeping
waste out of our waterways. That it has taken years in the House to garner
99 co-sponsors is a testament to the power of the coal industry. But the
tide seems to be changing against coal and towards clean, sustainable
energy. The number of proposed coal-fired power plants for the United States
recently dropped from 150 to 129 -- due in large part to public outcry and
threat of lawsuits because people are more aware of the hazards of coal.
Appalachian mountain communities have been radicalized by the headlong path
the coal industry is wreaking in their backyards, propelling many people on
to local and national advocacy campaigns to save the land and people of
Appalachia from a profit-driven rape.
Maria Gunnoe, who is a trained medical assistant and used to work as a
waitress to support her family, is now a full-time mountain community
organizer with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (OHVEC) and there are
others in her community who've taken up this work full time.
"People here are now unable to deny the impact of mountaintop removal/valley
fill coal mining. They are learning about it through personal experience and
personal impact -- even the strip miners will tell you that there's going to
be a big washout next time the rains come," explained Gunnoe. "They've
robbed my children of their childhood. They robbed me of my motherhood.
That's all I ever wanted, to be a mother and wife. I just wanted to lie in
my little hollow and be left alone. I wanted to teach them what my parents
taught me. They've taken that away."
Community members like Gunnoe who speak out against MTR risk losing
friendships and jobs, peace of mind, family pets or even their life. Many
people are too frightened to talk about how coal mining has adversely
affected their lives -- this kind of talk can easily cost a relative his job
with one of the offending coal companies.
The coal companies turn communities against each other by telling their
employees that the environmentalists want to take away their jobs. In the
way they always have, "the mine bosses sit with the younger miners and put
something in their ear -- something to get worked up about," explains Ed
Wiley, of Rock Creek, W.Va. Unfortunately, as community resistance builds
and lawsuits alleging gross injustice finally come to trial, the stage is
set for a clash. Whereas the effects of underground mining in the past were
far less drastic and coal extraction operations were underground and out of
sight, MTR coal mining is a ferocious, in-your-face type of mining that
affects every part of your life, if you live nearby.
The chronic relationship between coal operators and politicians in
Appalachia, America's most underdeveloped region, continues to this day.
Coal serves only a few while condemning local residents to unhealthy lives
and uninhabitable homes and the rest of us to dirty energy and a warming
planet. Now is the time to stand up and demand clean, renewable energy.
Antrim Caskey has been reporting on the human and environmental costs of
mountaintop removal/valley fill coal mining since May 2005. Caskey is a
Brooklyn-based independent photojournalist whose work focuses on community
and social justice issues.
