[NYTr] The Government Sanctioned Bombing of Appalachia

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Altermnet - Oct 9, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/64547/

The Government Sanctioned Bombing of Appalachia

By Antrim Caskey

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. ]

© 2007 Independent Media Institute.