[CitizensTruth] Mountain Bullies and Villains - Appalachian Coal Mining - The Independent

[Daniel Stafford]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/the-mountain-that-lost-its-top-831037.html


  The mountain that lost its top

It's the one environmental crime that no US politician will confront -- 
the destruction of Kentucky's mountains. Leonard Doyle visits the 
Appalachian peaks being blasted by Big Coal

/Tuesday, 20 May 2008/

  
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The road slicing through the thickly forested hills of eastern Kentucky 
used to be called the Daniel Boone Parkway. It was named for the 
controversial American folk hero who fought his way across Indian 
country to settle a state where many of his descendants still live.

That was before the coal industry began blowing up the Appalachian 
Mountains as a cheap way of getting at the black stuff below, behaviour 
decried by the environmental group Appalachian Voices as "one of the 
greatest human rights and environmental tragedies in America's recent 
history".

Daniel Boone's road is now the Hal Rogers Parkway, named after one of 
the Kentucky coal industry's closest friends in Washington, a Republican 
Congressman of 34 years. It passes through a mountain range older than 
the Himalayas and is blanketed in broadleaf forests rivalled only by the 
Amazon basin in its biodiversity.

But the canopy of trees which lines the parkway as it rises from the 
bluegrass horse country to the mountains is a trompe l'oeil. The lush 
forest gives way to scraggly trees along the ridge-line, and behind 
those trees is evidence of unspeakable ecological violence. In a process 
known as mountaintop removal an upland moonscape is being created, which 
is incapable of regenerating trees. As far as the eye can see, the land 
is grey and pockmarked with huge black lakes, filled with toxic coal 
slurry.

This has come about because of America's insatiable appetite for cheap 
coal to generate electricity, a process enthusiastically backed by the 
Bush administration as it tries to displace the consumption of imported 
oil. And the Democrats are little better. They control Kentucky and 
neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton have dared to challenge "King 
Coal" while campaigning.

The devastation being wrought on Appalachia is best appreciated from the 
air. An organisation called Southwinds offers people an eagle-eye view 
of the carnage, not readily appreciated from the road. Another way to 
see what's going on behind the ridge-line is to take a Google Earth 
virtual tour of an online memorial to the 470 mountains blown up and 
levelled in recent years.

The act of destroying a million-year-old mountain has several distinct 
stages. First it is earmarked for removal and the hardwood forest cover, 
containing over 500 species of tree per acre in this region, is 
bulldozed away. The trees are typically burnt rather than logged, 
because mining companies are not in the lumber business. Then topsoil is 
scraped away and high explosives laid in the sandstone. Thousands of 
blasts go off across the region every day, blowing up what the mining 
industry calls "overburden".

The rubble is then tipped into the valleys -- more than 7,000 have 
already been filled -- and more than 700 miles of rivers and streams 
have disappeared under rubble and thousands more soiled with toxic waste.

The process has accelerated wildly under George Bush. His 
pro-business-at-any-price credo led to the tossing out of strict federal 
restrictions against dumping mining rubble within 250 feet of a mountain 
stream. The toxic spoil laden with heavy metals, which results from 
blowing up mountains, was renamed "fill", enabling the mining companies 
to use the cheapest method possible of disposing of it. Once the rock is 
blown up and the coal separated out, the flattened mountaintops can only 
support a thin cover of grass. Tens of thousands of acres of mountain 
have been transformed in this way in Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia.

Deep in the Kentucky woods McKinley Sumner's yapping dachshund was no 
match for the mine company's bulldozer. It arrived unannounced on Mr 
Sumner's land earlier this year and was soon snapping off full-grown 
trees as if they were twigs.

Mr Sumner, in his seventies, recalls putting on his high-top boots 
"because the copperheads and rattlesnakes were still out" and hotfooting 
it up the small mountain at the back of his house, to confront the 
miners by himself.

By the time he had shooed them off what he calls the "Sumner estate", 
all 93 acres of it, and had obtained a restraining order against the 
mining company the damage was done. The forest his parents had started 
homesteading in the 1930s, and which he has worked since he was a boy, 
had been devastated by the blade of the bulldozer. Trees were piled one 
on top of the other and all the topsoil had been shoved into the valley 
below.

With the help of a lawyer and a social justice organisation called 
Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, Mr Sumner won his court battle and the 
mining company was ordered to repair the damage to his land. Instead of 
doing what the court has ordered, the company is trying to break him in 
other more subtle ways. Mr Sumner's lands have been listed in the local 
paper every one of the past five weeks as earmarked for "mountaintop 
removal", something he has never agreed to.

Company executives have put the word out that he is "holding up mining 
in the area", setting him against the coal mining families in the area. 
Strange people showed up on his land to remove the markers of a land 
survey, which cost $6,000, in order to delineate his hillside from a 
neighbour's, which has been approved for mountaintop removal.

"I feel just awful," Mr Sumner, said. "We live in a democracy and this 
is not supposed to happen in a democracy. They are taking our rights 
away from us."

The daughter and sister of miners, Teri Blanton is a self-described 
anti-coal activist and prime mover of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth. 
As a young single mother she returned to Harlan County from Chicago in 
search of what she hoped would be a healthier lifestyle for her 
children. What Ms Blanton could not have known is that the well water 
her family and community were drinking from was contaminated by the 
toxic chemical run-off from a mining equipment repair shop.

"They had this great big vat filled with degreasing chemicals which they 
would dump into the ground every few months," Ms Blanton said. "They 
even sprayed the gravel roads with the stuff in summer to keep the dust 
down."

At 29, Ms Blanton developed cancer, which she survived. But many of her 
friends and neighbours from Harlan County died young, and she has 
dedicated the past two decades of her life to helping those threatened 
by coal-mining interests and getting the word out to an uninterested 
American public about the ecological devastation which is taking place 
in Appalachia.

"For the last 100 years Kentucky has provided the coal that fuelled 
America's growth and wealth," she said. "But our wages are low and our 
schools and hospitals are lousy. This is one of the poorest places in 
America and I often think that it is deliberately so, so that they can 
do whatever they want to this polluted community."

The headwaters of several major rivers on America's eastern seaboard 
rise in the Kentucky Mountain. They should be teeming with steelhead 
trout at this time of the year, with fishermen working the banks. But 
the rivers have been dead for much of the past 100 years, and the 
Kentucky Tourist Authority came up blank when asked to find a fly 
fishing destination within 50 miles of where the mountaintop removal 
takes place.

There is plenty of public money being spent promoting the coal industry, 
including the practice of blowing up mountains. Each year the state 
gives about $400,000 (£200,000) to groups controlled by the coal industry.

A website describes mountaintop mining as "simply the right thing to do 
-- both for the environment and the local economy -- a true win win".

"The environmentalists throw out a lot of negative stuff, like kids are 
suffering from asthma because they breathe particulate matter from 
living near coal-fired power plants, or deaths caused on the roads by 
big coal trucks," says Bill Caylor of the Kentucky Coal Association. 
"We're trying to counteract that."

The message he gives out is that mountaintop removal is actually good 
for the environment because "what's left is flatter, more useful land on 
top of the mountain". Teri Blanton laughs off the audacity of the 
propaganda effort and takes me to see Damon Morgan, at least 80 years 
old, in yet another part of the mountains.

A veteran of Second World War (he survived Iowa Jima,) Mr Morgan 
returned to the mountains after a career on the railways. A couple of 
years ago, he claims, two mining companies, Horizon Resources and 
International Coal Group, trespassed along one of his property lines. 
"They have done damage to the land and to my personal property -- trees, 
rock and dirt debris have been pushed on to my property and down the 
side of the mountain."

But worse was to come and now land he calls his own is threatened with 
being mined because an estranged relative is challenging his title. "We 
made the biggest part of our living on that land." he said. "We planted 
vegetables, and we had apple orchards, and there was a lot of wild 
huckleberry back up on that mountain ... we picked them. And I've hunted 
in there, I've dug herbs. And now, that is all gone. It's completely 
moved away.

"The coal industry is an outlaw industry that does not consider the 
rights of its neighbours or the rights of the land and environment. The 
industry is out to make a profit and has no regard for the damages done 
to the citizens of this country," Mr Morgan said.

He has now been gagged by the courts and but for Teri Blanton his story 
would remain untold. She takes me to another part of the mountains. Mary 
Jane and Raleigh Adams, also in their seventies, are fighting Whymore 
Coal Company. When the Adams family declared that the mining company had 
violated its lease to cross their land the fight went to court. The 
ruling went against the Adamses and the court ruling now bars them from 
walking on their own land.

"We believe we were just run over by the Circuit Judge House and by the 
coal company lawyers who lied and said that we had said that the lease 
was valid," said a traumatised Mary Jane Adams. When Raleigh Adams took 
a picture of the mining taking place on his land and sent it to the 
local paper he was found to be in contempt.

"We now can't get on our own land, and the mining is going forward 
without our permission. We are even blocked from stepping on our 
property even when they aren't working," Mr Adams said. "Who knows what 
will be left of it when they are finished."


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