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Environment

Coal Mining Destroys A Way of Life -- And Death

By Jessica Tzerman, Grist.org. Posted August 12, 2006.


Deep in coal country, residents are torn between their economic salvation and the industry that is destroying historical burial sites and family graveyards.
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James Bowe, a lifelong resident of Whitesville, W.Va., knows the mountains around his home better than he knows himself. He's seen friends and family buried there, and has devoted countless hours to protecting his loved ones' resting places and the Indian burial grounds that stand alongside them. So when Bowe pulled up on his four-wheeler in early April and spotted a coal company drilling in the middle of what he says was a known, if unnamed, cemetery on White Oak Mountain, he was livid -- and determined to stop them.

Knowing how quickly surface-mining operations can scrape away any trace of a mountain's natural landscape, Bowe immediately filed a formal complaint with the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection. For the next three days, he waited anxiously for intervention. On the fourth day, a DEP officer arrived, but it was too late: There was nothing left of the headstones that had been there, and only a small section of border fence remained. The investigator's report said he believed "a cemetery did exist at this site," but concluded that the cemetery "was unknown to the core drilling company … and the West Virginia DEP when this permit was issued."

Bowe was, and remains, incredulous. "I don't see how the company wouldn't have known -- there was a tombstone sitting there," he said later. "You can't miss that. When you see crosses on top of something and sandstone markers, what do you usually associate that with?"

The DEP report indicates that the agency turned the matter over to Lora Lamarre, senior archaeologist at the West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office, for a final decision. Contacted in late April, Lamarre said there was no record of this complaint.

Stories like Bowe's have become a staple of local lore in Appalachia. There are hundreds of accounts of sunken graves, uprooted Indian and slave burial grounds, family cemeteries blown to smithereens and compacted into valley fills. Some of the tales have gained an almost mythical status, but residents and activists say they are disturbingly real.

Throughout the coal-rich land of southern West Virginia and eastern Ohio, they say, mining companies are damaging and even destroying burial sites. Industry leaders Massey Energy Company, Arch Mineral, and their subsidiaries are accused of drilling under, mining over, or raining sulfurous and acidic emissions down on tombstones and graves across the region.

"Many a known burial ground has been annihilated by drilling and blasting," says Maria Gunnoe, a member of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition. Such actions, say Gunnoe and other worried activists, are destroying the few pieces of these scarred mountains that locals can still call their own.

Just Mine All Around It

Much of the reported damage takes place along West Virginia State Route 3, which starts south of Charleston and runs along the Coal River. As it winds through coal country, the road and the skeletal settlements along it tell the story of the last quarter-century of mining in central Appalachia, says Peter Slavin, a Virginia-based writer who has covered the industry for more than a decade. Once brimming with life and the promise of prosperity, most of these communities now sit empty and broken. Failed businesses and rundown buildings stand like memorials to a more hopeful past.

Everything changed after Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1970, and the later amendments to it, requiring strict emissions guidelines for high-sulfur coal processing. Companies began to invest in low-sulfur bituminous coal, which can be easily extracted by blasting and scraping away the tops of mountains. With the rise of mountaintop-removal mining, entire towns have been relocated -- in many cases forcibly evacuated -- to allow better access to the coal seams running through these hills.

Stories of mining's impact on communities here are nothing new. Coal companies have had a heavy presence in central Appalachia for more than 100 years. But the earth-moving dozers and evacuations associated with mountaintop removal have raised the stakes. Between 1939 and 2005, this form of mining claimed an estimated one million acres of West Virginia's mountains. More than half of that occurred after 1992.

Because the coal-rich land that companies buy or lease often borders or encompasses communities that date back hundreds of years, companies inadvertently find themselves in possession of the generations-old family cemeteries that pepper the landscape. Though the law requires them to provide access to cemetery visitors and researchers, the plots are often inaccessible, either due to remote locations or heavy mining activity around them. By the time families with limited access or those who have moved away return to visit their ancestors, they often find that the roads have been closed -- or worse, that the cemetery and graves no longer exist.


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A born-and-raised southerner, Jessica Tzerman graduated from the University of South Carolina in 2003. She currently resides in Manhattan, where she is an editorial assistant at Food & Wine magazine.

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View:
Montana or for that matter any state better not be the next "SAGO"
Posted by: NDnative on Aug 12, 2006 12:48 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Coal mining, especially for the purpose of coal-gas, is a real killer. Go to http://www.hemp.com and find out why hemp perfectly replace petroleum and even coal.

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By the way, why don't WVs use their GUNS to kill the coal fuckers !
Posted by: NDnative on Aug 12, 2006 12:52 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
There are plenty of uses for guns and fighting the coal drillers is one of them !

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Sounds like government corruption to me
Posted by: wynna on Aug 12, 2006 3:02 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
It sounds to me like both the DEP reps and the SHPO (State Historic Preservation Officer) are in the pockets of the mining companies. I'm not sure what WV's historic preservation legislation is like, but there are plenty of federal laws that should protect these graveyards, especially those that are known to be Native American burial grounds.

I know there was a recent attempt to change the language of the laws that determine how sites are selected for the National Register of Historic Places, but I don't know if it passed. IF IT DIDN'T, a site only has to be ELIGIBLE for the National Register in order to be eligible for any protections that inclusion offers (and unfortunately - there aren't many). The author may have erred in stating that only inclusion on the National Register provides protection.

Perhaps an important question to ask here is why haven't the state and the mining companies worked out an arrangement to MOVE the graveyards? This is not an uncommon practice in many other states, and often resolves many of the problems that are being experienced by the folks in WV. Another question to ask is WHY are the mining companies getting away with the coal dust pollution? Regarding the 100 foot safety perimeter - does that include the vertical dimension? If settlement and collapses are occuring - might not mining be occuring less than 100 feet below the graveyards?

Situations like this break my heart. As an archaeologist who has worked on graveyard archaeology projects and other public archaeo projects, it is very disturbing to me that the rights of the citizens, and the greater public as well, are being completely disregarded by both the mining companies and the state officials who are chartered to protect them.

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Look for the Cause of the Event
Posted by: Oryoki on Aug 13, 2006 6:37 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
The destruction of the environment in the drive to extract more and more coal from the earth causes me to ask this question.

I know that the deforestation of the North West, a time when we shipped our forests directly to Japan, was the 'quid quo pro quo' for their support of our federal deficit.

How much of this coal is exported? Where does it go? Perhaps this is part of the price we are paying for "Low Prices" ?

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Great Grandmother
Posted by: Maryanne on Aug 13, 2006 1:29 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
The desecration of graves is absolutely unconscionable. There is no excuse for this.

My great grandmother is buried in a cemetery, which was "modernized". without the knowledge of the families whose loved ones were buried there. By the time this was discovered, it was too late to do anything. The stones had been bulldozed away and the ground leveled (for easier mowing) only in the area which cannot be seen from the streets. My great grandmother's stone had information about her birth and death noted. Had we had any idea that such desecration would occur, this information would have been copied, but since it was such a sturdy stone we assumed it would be there forever. What is regrettable is that we now not only do not know the exact spot in which she is buried, but also have no record of her existence, since this was the only one. Even cemetery records provide no information beyond her name. She has numerous descendents to whom this gravesite is important.

So, too, are the graves of those in West Virginia. Shame on the greedy! Nothing has any value anymore. Only profit. This is what our country is now being noted for!

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Friends of Coal
Posted by: 1word on Aug 14, 2006 1:18 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
My brother works for CAT in West Virginia which supplies and repairs a lot of the equitment that the mines(strip or otherwise) repair. I was visiting him the other day and a stripmine had been opened near his old house down near summersville, and he noticed they had dug up a 150 yearold cemetary. He told me they would get in trouble for it and we had a debate wwith me saying they, as allways, would get away from it. Seems to me like I was right, but this is nothing new. Still there are no jobs in West Virginia worth having outside of Coal for the most part, so were all friends of Coal, and no one wants to rock the boat( or the vote for that matter in the other direction). There really arnt any options those the Dems and Republicans are both so far up Coals ass, that there is no hope for stopping any of this bullshit anytime soon.

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Register rules
Posted by: OldManMcCoy on Aug 17, 2006 1:36 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Actually, a property merely has to be elligible for the National Register of Historic Places in order to receive its protections. However, those protections are few and far between and only apply if and when the potential threat to the property is financed by the federal government, in which case a govermental review (Section 106) is in order. Section 106 reviews are typically provided by someone in the state historical commission, the state historic preservation office, or in some cases the state department of transportation. Unfortunately, Section 106 doesn't have a lot of teeth, and often results in a recommendation to "minimize" impact on the historic property. My guess is a 106 Review would do little more, if anything, than the state is doing at present.

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