-------- Original Message -------- Subject: 2 New Ways You Can Help Stop Mountaintop Removal Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2003 12:35:31 -0800 From: "Matthew Wasson, Appalachian Voices" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: "Diana Barbee" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Appalachian Voices is proud to announce two new ways you can help stop mountaintop removal coal mining TODAY! 1) HOST A VIEWING OF "APPALACHIAN TREASURES" Appalachian Voices has just completed a brand new multi-media presentation called "Appalachian Treasures," a gripping overview of the dire threat mountaintop removal poses to Appalachia's rich natural and cultural heritage. You can help stop mountaintop removal by inviting friends and family to your home to watch the 15-minute show. To get your free CD and action kit, contact Appalachian Voices today at [EMAIL PROTECTED] or 828-262-1500. Volunteers have already begun taking this presentation on the road. To learn more about the "Appalachian Treasures" presentation and how you can bring it to your town, click here: http://mailhost.groundspring.org/cgi-bin/t.pl?id=51416:959189. 2) MOUNTAINTOP REMOVAL FEATURED ON WOODY HARRELSON'S WEBSITE - VISIT VOICEYOURSELF AND SEND A LETTER TO CONGRESS A new mountaintop removal action alert has just been posted on VoiceYourself, Woody Harrelson's website. You can send a message to your US Representative right from the website asking them to help protect communities from mountaintop removal. You can also read our friend Joe Hickey's account of seeing mountaintop removal for the first time on a fly-over arranged by Appalachian Voices and Southwings. Click here to see them both on the VoiceYourself homepage, http://mailhost.groundspring.org/cgi-bin/t.pl?id=51417:959189. Go directly to the action alert: http://mailhost.groundspring.org/cgi-bin/t.pl?id=51418:959189. Go directly to Joe's report (or read it below): http://mailhost.groundspring.org/cgi-bin/t.pl?id=51419:959189. To learn more about mountaintop removal, click here: http://mailhost.groundspring.org/cgi-bin/t.pl?id=51420:959189. To support Appalachian Voices' campaign to protect coalfield communities and end mountaintop removal, click here: http://mailhost.groundspring.org/cgi-bin/t.pl?id=51421:959189&cmid=5166:959189&OrgID=1639. ======================================================= Mountaintop Removal - Total Destruction in the Name of Cheap Energy By Joe Hickey, posted Thursday, November 20, 2003, VoiceYourself Up early I left Lexington excited about getting a bird's eye view of something I'd only heard horror stories about...Mountaintop Removal. I wanted to put a face on this unique mining practice known simply as "MTR." On the beautiful early morning drive through eastern Kentucky into West Virginia, the sun repeatedly rose and set again and again as I climbed over the hills and dropped back down into the valleys. The surrounding beauty was abruptly interrupted as the West Virginia border approached. The air turned putrid, the windows went up and the car's fan was turned to re-circulate...welcome to "Chemical Alley" or as the Indians referred to it, the Ohio River. I followed Chemical Alley east up the river along I-64 into West Virginia all the way to Charleston. As I approached Charleston the clear skies became a little hazy, but nothing threatening and it looked like a great day for flying. But where would I find an airport between all these hills and valleys? The airport directions took me away from the river and up between two mountains whose tops had been removed to accommodate an airport capable of landing C-130s. There I met Mary Anne Hitt from Appalachian Voices who had arranged the flight and Susan Lapis who is a volunteer pilot for Southwings, a nonprofit organization based in Asheville. The plane was immaculate and Susan's attention to details was comforting. As we lifted off and flew over Charleston's landmark, their Capital's gold plate dome, I couldn't help but wonder when and why anyone would put so much gold on such a massive structure? I'd heard the MTR owners help finance Bush's presidential victory in West Virginia and all that gold plating started to make sense in an unsettling way. When we climbed to 2,000 feet, Susan pointed out the haze I'd seen on the way into Charleston was coming from a coal fired electric plant on Chemical Alley. Now that cloud of "haze" looked thicker and threatening. Susan asked if I remembered a glass beaker in our high school chemistry lab with that brown hazy color floating about the chemical. That chemical is nitrous oxide Susan said and that brownish haze floating about Charleston and heading northeast, is a mixture of nitrous oxide and sulfur. It made me realize that we're just human guinea pigs taking part in some sort of mad scientist's hair-brain experiment...and we're just setting around waiting to see how it turns out. We flew southeast away from the haze towards Cabin Creek, where some of the biggest corporate mountain top removal mines are located. Off on the distant horizon, little gray patches were barely visible and I was thinking...this doesn't look that bad. But as we closed in on Kayford Mountain, or what's left of it, we got a bird's eye from 3,000 feet of the massive vastness of the site and the unbelievable destruction caused to this now dwarf of a former majestic mountain. Floating over the flattened top of Kayford Mountain, still high about the deep hollows of West Virginia, our pilot Susan pointed out Larry Gibson's cabin nestled in a beautiful grove of trees. Kayford Mountain once cast a formidable shadow over Larry's property, but no longer...now that 1000 feet of her top has been surrendered to MTR. Susan said Larry Gibson's family gravesite below us had many of its gravestones broken and destroyed by blasted rock from Kayford Mountain. John Denver's song started playing in my head, "Almost heaven, West Virginia, Mountain Mama, take me home." And I thought how could anybody stand by and watch as a mountain disappeared before their very eyes? Doesn't anybody notice when a mountain simply vanishes, filling the valleys and rivers below? Little did we know that one of America's greatest living heroes, Granny D, had noticed and was visiting Larry Gibson below as we circled his homestead. The next day she wrote that "over the last dozen years, the destruction wrought by mountaintop removal coal mining has turned Larry's once-idyllic landscape into a horror of blasting and flattened mountains and buried forests and streams. The surviving streams run black with toxic goo. Larry has refused to leave the mountain to make way for the destruction, despite being shot at, burned out and driven off the road. Great stones have fallen from the sky onto his family cemetery from the blasting. I prayed and cried with him in that place." We then flew on to Eunice Mountain where Massey Coal's giant equipment was drilling hundreds of blast holes as even bigger trucks dumped the blasted rock down into the valley below. I started to realize how far the rock were falling as I started to count the seconds it was taking to travel down what was left of the steep mountainside...1001, 1002, 1003, 1004, 1005 and it was still near the top. Seeing boulders the size of cars cascading down the mountain causing a continually growing dust storm to the bottom, started to put a little perspective on what was happening below. Next it was Williams Mountain's Independence Coal Company that had neatly terraced rock shelves that looked like giant stairs stepping down into the valley below. A concrete drainpipe sticks out from where a beautiful stream once flowed and below it giant rocks littered a treeless barren landscape. Is this what humanity has come to...destroying whole mountains in the name of cheap energy? Susan did a half circle over Brushy Fork's coal slurry dam explaining that fresh dug coal is 'dirty' and 'washing' it creates black ponds like the one below us. And these 'ponds' aren't the little ponds we all grew up swimming in. These are humongous, toxic lakes covering hundreds of acres. Another slurry dam we passed over called Sundial, was located high above a local middle school. Susan said these slurry ponds, built above abandoned deep mining operations, have a history of bursting and flooding everything downstream. I couldn't help but wondered...does the school have an evacuation plan? I remembered a couple years ago hearing about the flash flood in Inez, Kentucky where 250 million gallons of black coal sludge collapsed into an abandon mines, destroying every living thing along 60 miles of the Big Sandy River. I found out later West Virginia's Buffalo Creek slurry dam collapsed in 1972, killing 118 innocent unsuspecting souls and left 4,000 more homeless downstream. So it's not a question of 'if' it will happen again; it's only a question of 'when.' The last two sites we passed over were older abandon sites that had been "reclaimed." These reclaimed sites are little more then mountains of blasted rock camouflaged with a few inches of soil and spray-painted with green seeded straw. It was almost funny, in a strange way, to see the MTR sites struggling to mimic mother nature by artificially coloring these barren abandon no-man's lands with so many odd shades of green. Having experienced the devastation I'd come to see, Susan turned the plane north and we headed back towards Charleston. From our vantage point 3000 feet above I-64, I suddenly realized that MTR is invisible from the ground. Could that be the reason nobody seems to notice or care, because it's high above and out of view from the public's eye? On the way back I saw a train crawling like a snake through once pristine valleys. It was hauling 'black gold' to Chemical Alley's electric plants that will soon be spewing toxic clouds of nitrous oxide and sulfur into our air and water...bringing that hair-brain human guinea pig experiment a few steps closer to its conclusion. I'm fighting back tears now recounting my experience. Seeing all of the unfathomable destruction was so mentally overwhelming, that it takes a little time for it all to settle in. It's still difficult to clearly express my feelings about this heartbreaking experience. The best way to describe the shock of seeing Mountain Top Removal for the first time, is the recollection of the total disbelief I felt watching the first World Trade Tower collapsing in on itself. You see it happening, but it can't be real....it just can't be real! But as reality sinks in, the destructive practice of MTR continues to escalate at a rapid pace. There is hope though...real hope! Hope is alive in determined activists like Mary Anne, Susan, Granny D and the thousands of other brave, dedicated and inspired people who are starting a revolution in the mountains where King Coal has subjugated its inhabitants for 100 years. Together they are resolved to defend their communities' way of life and they're not going to give up without a fight! If you're interested in learning more and want to join in the fight to help end Mountain Top Removal, then click http://mailhost.groundspring.org/cgi-bin/t.pl?id=51422:959189 and start lending a hand. ======================================================
