Reckoning at Coal River: Media and Nation Must Bear Witness to Coalfield Tragedy This Week

By Jeff Biggers, AlterNet. Posted June 22, 2009.

3) Mountaintop removal is a national health care issue: When entire communities in the coalfields are unable to drink their well water or tap water, and entire areas such as Prenter, West Virginia, are afflicted with various illnesses or some form of gallbladder disease from coal slurry contaminated water, our nation must come to grips with this health care emergency. According to a recent report by the University of California in Santa Barbara, the external costs of US coal-fired plants ("harm that comes about by damages to crops and buildings as well as health implications for humans -- sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, particulate matter") add $268 billion annually to our nation's health care system burden.

4) Mountaintop removal is a national human rights issue: As 3.5 million pounds of ammonium nitrate/fuel oil explosives continue to be detonated across the West Virginia mountains every day (with a similar amount ripping across eastern Kentucky, eastern Tennessee and southwestern Virginia), American citizens living under or near mountaintop removal operations have been subjected to a state of terror, including daily blasting, dangerous bombardments of fly rock, rain showers of silica dust and heavy metals, contamination of their water sources, flooding, harassment, and the massive devaluation of their properties.

In announcing the historic Senate hearings last week, on the same day that the Obama administration set forth its intent to do "all it can under existing laws and regulations to curb the most environmentally destructive impacts of mountaintop coal mining," Sen. Carden said: "Mountaintop mining is one of the most destructive practices that already has destroyed some of America's most beautiful and ecologically significant regions. Today's decision by the Obama Administration to limit the practice through a stronger review of mountaintop mining permit applications is an important step in the right direction. However, it does not halt this incredibly destructive form of mining. We must put an end to this mining method that has buried more than a thousand miles of streams."

Senator Cardin is the sponsor of S. 696, The Appalachian Restoration Act, a two-page bill that would outlaw the mining practice.

As bridge between the Congressional hearings on Thursday and the march from Marsh Fork Elementary School on Tuesday, 94-year-old former West Virginia Congressman Ken Hechler will be in the front ranks.

Hechler held the first hearing on the impact of mountaintop removal in 1971. Later that year he introduced a bill to abolished strip-mining. When the House amendment to grant federal sanctioning to mountaintop removal under the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act was introduced on July 22, 1974, Ken Hechler rose and declared:

"Mountaintop removal is the most devastating form of mining on steep slopes. Once we scalp off a mountain and the spoil runs down the mountainside and the acid runs into the water supply, there is no way to check it. This is not only esthetically bad as anyone can tell who flies over the State of West Virginia or any place where the mountaintops are scraped off, but also it is devastating to those people who live below the mountain. Some of the worst effects of strip mining in Kentucky, West Virginia, and other mountainous areas result from mountaintop removal. McDowell County in WV, which has mined more coal than any other county in the Nation, is getting ready right now to strip mine off four or five mountaintops. They are displacing families and moving them out of those areas because everybody down slope from where there is mountaintop mining is threatened. I certainly hope that all the compromises that have been accepted by the committee, offered by industry in the committee, that now we do not compromise what little is left of this bill by amendments such as this."

Let's hope Hechler's voice -- and those of the children and other coalfield residents in Coal River Valley, and around Appalachia -- will be heard this time.

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