Activists from West Virginia call for end to mountain top removal during DC visit

The coal company that owns the West Virginia mine where 29 were killed in an April explosion is now facing a growing coalition that wants an end to mountaintop removal mining. Coal giant Massey Energy was already besieged with mine safety complaints and penalties from a range of industry violations. But now people from West Virginia coal country are asking President Obama to abolish mountaintop removal. Tanya Snyder reports.

Massey is still fighting with federal investigators over potential causes of the deadly explosion in April. New disclosure rules are further exposing the coal company’s poor safety record. Massey rang up $4 million in fines this spring for more than a thousand safety violations – far more than any other coal producer – according to a Charleston Gazette analysis of SEC filings.

Chuck Nelson started working in the coal mines in 1974, at the age of nineteen. He worked for Massey for seven years.

CHUCK NELSON: When you have workers that work for Massey energy, writing letters to their wife, saying if I don’t return home, take care of my kids. These are letters you write when you go to war, not when you go to pick up your lunch bucket and go to work. These mines should be shut down and they’re not.

Nelson is in Washington to talk, not just about safety, but about mountaintop removal. He says it poisons the air and water of nearby communities.

NELSON: Which, they’ve had the best water you can find anywhere. Now with our mountains, are abandoned underground mines filled with coal waste, it’s cracking strata in the rock, and they’re letting the stuff leach out and it’s getting into people’s well water. And I’ve been to people’s home and they turn the faucets on and it looks like coffee coming out.

Nelson is part of Appalachia Rising, a new coalition dedicated to abolishing mountaintop removal, and led by citizens of coal country and their environmental allies. They want President Obama and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to fly over West Virginia coal country. Debbie Jarrell says the president just needs to see the destruction for himself.

DEBBIE JARRELL: And I’m sure that once you get off that plane, you’ll be saying there ought to be a law.

Jarrell says her roots in West Virginia go back centuries. Her father was a coal miner, and her grandfather died of black lung disease.

JARRELL: President Obama, it’s with audacity of hope for our future, our grandchildren’s future, that Appalachia is rising.

Massey has not returned FSRN’s calls for comment.

Appalachia Rising will converge in Washington DC September 25th to the 27th for teach-ins, hoe-downs, and civil disobedience. They’ll be drawing attention to a new study by a team of ecologists, hydrologists, and engineers that came out this year in the journal “Science,” showing that the impacts of mountaintop removal are “pervasive and irreversible.”

Researchers especially attacked the practice of valley fill, a by-product of mountaintop removal. The rock and earth blasted off the top of a mountain needs to go somewhere, and so coal companies dump it into nearby valleys, burying streams. Melissa Waage of the Natural Resources Defense Council:

WAAGE: There are nearly 2000 miles of streams that have been buried or polluted beyond repair, and the situation is urgent.

The study says the practice destroys forests, endangers headwater streams, and reduces biodiversity. It says that mitigation strategies aren’t working and calls for a suspension of all mountaintop removal permits.

Two bills pending in Congress would ban valley fills from mining, which advocates say would essentially end mountaintop removal. Neither has any support from West Virginia’s representatives.

MATT SHERMAN: I said why do these people put rocks up on fence posts down here? Do you remember this Bo? I said why do these people put the rocks up on the fence posts. And Bo said, ‘Matt, it hasn’t sunk in yet, has it? It rains stones here.’

A lawsuit against Massey and three of its subsidiaries is moving forward, charging that they exposed schoolchildren to toxic coal dust from a silo just 235 feet from an elementary school. Last week, a judge scheduled the trial for next spring.

Tanya Snyder, FSRN