Fighting for their land

Taken from the Courier-Journal 6/18/06 in Louisville Kentucky

By Dianne Aprile
Special to The Courier-Journal

Two weeks after coming home from a tour of mountaintop-removal mining sites in Eastern Kentucky, one particular image lingers in my mind. More than all the other sights and experiences of the trip – and they were plentiful – I remember the figure of Daymon Morgan, an 80-year-old World War II veteran, wearing bib overalls and a wide-brimmed hat, standing in the lush green woods of his Leslie County farm, holding a broken wildflower in his hand.

Beneath a canopy of trees, he described in plain but stirring terms his love and concern for the mountainous land above Lower Bad Creek, land he has nurtured and defended for half a century. It was here, among his family and friends, that he returned to build a home after serving his country.

The wildflower he held in his hand was bloodroot, one of the first signs of spring in Kentucky. It was broken because Morgan wanted to demonstrate how the flower got its name. He showed us that when you snap the root, it bleeds a sticky, red-orange sap. Long before Kentuckians inhabited the commonwealth, Indians used the plant for medicinal purposes as well as a dye to paint themselves for battle.

Morgan’s woods are teeming with bloodroot, as well as golden seal, ginseng and wild ginger. Not too long ago, these native plants grew wild and plentiful not just in Morgan’s woods but in the neighboring mountaintops adjoining his property, on the tree-laden slopes that have been part of the majesty of the Appalachian landscape – and integral to the lives of his community – for generations.

But now, the mountaintops surrounding Morgan’s land are bleeding. More precisely, they are being blown apart with explosives. Mining companies are blasting the tops off the mountains, pursuing a technique that makes it easier and faster and cheaper to remove coal from the earth that holds it. It’s an efficient technique: Explode the mountain; remove the coal; shove the waste over the nearest hillside; “reclaim” the site; move on to the next site.

But Morgan is a hold-out, a resister to this process. He’s told the mining companies they’ll never take his mountaintop. Therefore, his land – untouched by their equipment – is a good starting point for understanding exactly what this brutal mining technique is removing from Kentucky’s land, people, communities and natural ecology.

One has only to drive a short distance from Morgan’s home, down dusty, eroded, pot-holed roads, to get a glimpse of what he fears and wants to stop: barren plateaus of land, flat as airstrips and far more desolate, that once, before the bulldozers and explosives had their way with it, looked just like Morgan’s lush woods. Today, many of the neighborhood’s streams – once home to fish and wildlife – are dried up, vanished, filled with sediment or, worse, with the demolition debris that is allowed to tumble down newly decapitated mountains into once-running, now unrecognizable creeks and brooks.

Fears for many (more…)

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An Outlaw Industry

Daymon Morgan
Huckleberry Ridge in Leslie County, KY

We made the biggest part of our living on that land. We planted vegetables, and we had apple orchards. And there was a lot of wild huckleberry back up on that mountain. Actually huckleberry is a wild blueberry. And wild berries, we picked them. And I’ve hunted in there, I’ve dug herbs. And now, that is all gone. It’s completely moved away.

Horizon Resources and International Coal Group, the coal companies that have worked near my home, have trespassed along one of my property lines. They have done damage to the land and to my personal property – trees, rock and dirt debris have been pushed onto my property and down the side of the mountain. This damage causes erosion and may even damage the creek at the bottom of the hollow.

The Coal Industry is an outlaw industry that does not consider the rights of its neighbors 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.

This trespassing issue is just another example of the coal industry’s blatant disregard. Within the last five years two homes on my property have been damaged from the blasting. I believe that almost everyone up Bad Creek has sued the coal industry at least once for damages done to their property.

And my community is not the only community affected by this outlaw industry. Folks over in Raccoon Creek, in Greasy Creek, Viper and Vicco also are complaining.

This is not just a private property issue. It is everyone’s problem and something must be done. The coal industry and our state regulators need to have more respect for the mountains and people of this region.

The coal industry is leaving us destroyed, with no water, no trees, no wildlife habitats or any economic prospects for our future. This must stop.

You know, people have a tendency to not be interested in anything unless they are directly affected by it. Actually, what the coal industry does, it affects everybody. It affects air quality, the water quality, it affects the wildlife habitat, and certainly that’s everybody’s problem.

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Couple Teams Up with KFTC for Change

Kentuckians For The Commonwealth – KFTC
P.O. Box 1450
London, Kentucky 40743
(606)-878-2161

To those who believe our mountains and streams are special, necessary and worth protecting:

Our names are Rully and Erica Urias and we live on Island Creek of Grapevine in Pike County. Our home and our community is surrounded by coal mining going on in every direction in the mountains around Island Creek. We want to tell you what life is like when coal mining takes over your community, and then tell you how you can help out.

There is no aspect of our lives that coal mining has not affected in some negative way. We used to live in a beautiful place. When you drove down the road it was like driving through a tunnel of trees. It was beautiful, like a fairy tale experience. Now it is a sad and ugly place. All the trees have been cut down along the road so the coal company could move in their giant equipment.

That was just the beginning. The road has now gotten so bad from the coal company’s use that school buses won’t even run up the gravel road to our community. And we hope no one up here ever needs an ambulance. We either eat the dust from the coal trucks or hope we don’t get bogged down in the muck on wet days. Our neighbor Doug Justice twice had to use his own equipment to remove a mud slide that came into the road off the coal company’s mining operation.

The coal company has even invaded the privacy our home. The blasts that the company uses to blow up the mountain also shake our house. It can be strong enough to knock pictures off walls and stuff off of shelves. One night about 7:45 p.m. the blast was so bad that it took 10 minutes to calm down our two-year old daughter, Makayla.

The water from our well has been ruined, too. We can’t drink it and now we’re even afraid to give Makayla a bath. She loves to take baths and like most children will try to drink the water. We can’t let her play with any toys that she can put water into and drink from because of the contamination of our water. We bought her a kiddie swimming pool last summer and filled it up and it had black specs floating all through it. Our daughter cannot even enjoy her own yard.

All the while the mountains that make this place so beautiful are disappearing so that the companies can get out the coal as cheaply as possible. They blast the tops off of the mountains and push it over into the valleys where we live. We’re sure the companies just want us to go away, but we’re not. Our family has been here for generations and we plan to stay. But we wonder what kind of future Makayla will have if something is not done to control the coal companies.

We are not without hope. Our outlook changed dramatically last year when we started working with Kentuckians For The Commonwealth. KFTC has been around for 25 years helping people like us and our neighbors take control of our future. Since we got involved with KFTC we’ve gotten the attention of the coal company and county officials. KFTC has been very supportive and has helped us find ways to educate and fight for ourselves. They teach us how to be leaders in our community.

It means a lot, knowing we’re not alone. Before we had KFTC we had nobody. I didn’t know there were other people with the same problems going through the same thing we were. Now we know that the problems we experience are faced by hundreds of families who live in the coalfields. KFTC helps us join together so that we speak and act with one voice. The more voices the better we can be heard.

You can help by joining us and becoming a member of KFTC or by making a donation to support KFTC’s work. It’s a great investment because you’re investing in Kentucky’s future. We can’t think of a better way to invest in the future than to preserve what we have now – like our homes, water and mountains. The more supporters, the stronger our voice and we want to add yours.

Thanks for listening to our story and for taking action to make Kentucky a better place for all of us.

Rully and Erica Urias

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Former Coal Worker Speaks Out

Rully Urias Island Creek, Pike County

My name is Rully Urias. I have lived in the right hand fork of Island Creek 23 years of my 26 years of life.

I have never witnessed such blatant disregard for average hard working American people with such negligence towards environmental protection of some of this country’s most beautiful land.

Our county road drainage tiles are clogged up, TECO COAL have cut our trees down and left them lying piled up beside the road. Heavy rains will cause our road to wash out. The coal trucks go flying down the road without any regard for our resident’s safety. The over excessive blasting shakes the house and terrifies my 22-month-old daughter. Our water is unsuitable to bathe in but we have no choice but to use the contaminated water. Mistakes can be made and lessons can be learned but to stand by and let it happen time and time again is pure disregard for local, state and federal mining regulations that should be enforced by our elected officials.

Coal mining industry is a way of life in Eastern Kentucky and as much as we would want it to stop it’s not going to stop. I’ve worked underground and surface jobs and I’ve been forced to break laws and do poor jobs when jobs need to be done right. This needs to stop! If honest hard working American people want to earn a decent pay and honest living we have to step up and let the big coal corporations such as TECO COAL know that we are not going to stand by and let them rape our land, destroy our history and run our heritage into the ground.
I for one encourage everyone here today to take a step forward and take an initiative to contact your local, state, and federal government; write letters and make complaints. Make phone calls and speak your mind! Because until we band together the big steel toed boot of the coal industry will be right on our behind. Kicking us all the way into submission of their rules and destruction. We need your support we need TECO COAL to stop the destruction. Thank you.

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