Archive for October, 2007
Over the course of one year, from September 2003 to September 2004, I watched at close range as one mountain was dismantled and destroyed so its coal could be extracted and sold to twenty-two other states and other countries. I visited the mountain at least once a month. I hiked over a hundred miles as I climbed to its summit over and over, then explored its flanks and descended along its headwater streams.
Today there is no summit. It may be too obvious an irony that this particular ridge was called Lost Mountain. But it is the truth, and now Lost Mountain exists only on topo maps of Perry County, Kentucky. The real thing is gone.
What follows is an account of events I witnessed over the course of that year. It is the story of how the richest ecosystem in North America is being destroyed and how some of the poorest people in the United States are being made poorer by a coal industry that operates with little conscience or constraint.
From Erik Reece’s book Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness: Radical Strip Mining and the Devastation of Appalachia, published in 2006.
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It’s hard to say which problem has caused the most concern among the residents of Laurel Creek, like Johnnie Bailey and Esau Canterbury. Was it the rocks – some more than three-feet high -that sailed off the mine site, the dozens of dead fish in the stream, the silt runoff that filled in one end of Laurel Lake, the half-mile wide coal sludge lake looming over the valley, the well water that turned orange, the loss of access to the mountain land, or the mere sight of their mountains being chopped off?
Marrowbone Development/Triad Mining Company has been mining the mountains along the west side of Laurel Creek for nearly a decade. Much of the mountaintop portion of those mines finished a couple of years ago. But deep mining continues.
However, mountaintop mining is far from gone in Laurel Creek. Marrowbone is starting another mine about three miles north of Laurel Lake. And Consol Coal has applied for a permit to mine the mountains on the east side. Laurel Creek residents protested and halted another mine’s plans for those mountains a few years ago. Some have vowed to stop the new Consol mine.
Click here to learn more about Kirk, WV and the communities that live nearby.
Story and photo contributed by distinguished author Penny Loeb, www.wvcoalfield.com.
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Kayford Mountain has been the home of Larry Gibson’s family since the 1700’s. More than three hundred of his relatives are buried in the family cemetery. Growing up on Kayford’s beautiful slopes, Larry treasures the best memories of his life from his early days on Kayford. He recalls “it wasn’t the fast life then, it was the good life.” When he was growing up on Kayford’s beautiful slopes, the mountains rose in every direction from his house.
In 1986, mountaintop removal operations began near his home. Over the next 20 years, according to Larry, “the slow motion destruction of Kayford Mountain has been continuous – 24 hours a day, seven days a week.” Coal companies have flattened more than 12,000 acres of mountain landscape around Larry’s home. Where he once looked up at the peaks of Kayford from his family graveyard, he now looks 300 feet straight down at a blasted and devastated landscape.
Currently, the mine comes within 200 feet of his family cemetery, and the blasts continually shake the ground. Flying rocks from the explosions land near the gravestones and scar the ground. As one visitor noted, “gone is the peace and stillness that the old cemetery once harbored. For Gibson and other family members, mountaintop mining is practically raising the dead, while burying the living.”
Larry Gibson has been one of the most powerful voices opposing mountaintop removal for the last two decades and has been featured in dozens of documentaries, news stories and articles on mountaintop removal, including National Geographic and a 2006 story by Vanity Fair that called mountaintop removal, “the greatest act of physical destruction this country has ever wreaked upon itself.” He has formed a foundation called the Keepers of the Mountains Foundation to support his family’s ongoing fight to protect their homes, community and mountains.
Click here to see video footage of Kayford Mountain, WV and Larry Gibson’s ongoing fight to stop its destruction.
Photo and text contributed by Lucas Brown and provided courtesy of Appalachian Voices.
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The following story was contributed by Kentucky resident Brenda Mutter Urias, whose family home was at the foot of Hylton Knob. Brenda is now actively fighting mountaintop removal and is a member of the non-profit group Kentuckians for the Commonwealth.
My name is Brenda Mutter Urias. I’d like to welcome you to my home here in Island Creek of Phyllis, Kentucky.
My father’s dad came to settle in this area around 1825. He built a home and raised a large family. He was a farmer. My father built the house I live in back in 1955 with lumber he sawed himself from a particular type of tree taken from the mountains that surround the homeplace. He built it solid and with pride, just like his dad before him. It was a place he was proud of and he took comfort in knowing his family would always have a place to call their own.
We had good well water, beautiful mountains, clear streams and clean air. We were poor in material things but we were also rich. Most of our food came from the garden. We had fruit orchards and, of course at that time, farm animals.
My dad was a miner and he fought to help establish the UMWA so that the workers and their families would have better pay and medical coverage. He died at the age of 68 from black lung. He had one son and his one wish was that his son would never go into coal mining to make his living. Glad to say, he didn’t.
Today, the beautiful mountains have been destroyed by mountaintop removal mining. The streams are buried and have dried up. The air is full of dust and the well water is contaminated. The house is not as solid as it was just a few years ago. The nearby blasting is taking a toll. The mountains around the house now also pose a threat to our home in regards to flash floods and mudslides. I fear daily as to what may happen to my home. I don’t want to see it destroyed but sometimes I feel I’m watching a slow death to it and to the environment that surrounds it.
Click here to learn more about the mountains and communities near Island Creek, KY.
Summary contributed by Kentuckians for the Commonwealth. Photo courtesy of Virginia Tech Special Collections.
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Daymon 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.
Morgan’s fear isn’t just for the streams, or the trees, the deer or the wild turkeys, the ginseng or the bloodroot. It’s for his family and friends; their health and safety. And he fears for the welfare of all the rest of us who, let’s face it, live downstream.
“We are going to be the endangered species,” Morgan said, his eyes stubbornly fixed on his visitors, making it clear whom he meant when he said “we.”
Click here to learn more about Huckleberry Ridge and the communities that live nearby.
From a story contributed by Dianne April, special to the Louisville, Kentucky Courier Journal, June 18, 2006. Part of a 2006 authors tour organized by Kentuckians for the Commonwealth.
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Mary Farley was sound asleep on the couch when a loud blast went off from the mine above her small house.
“It woke me from a sound sleep,” said the 71-year old Farley. She and her husband built the modest white house 48 years ago. After following her husband’s changing jobs around the country, Farley had returned to live in Wharncliffe. A couple of years ago, she had open-heart surgery and has been slowly recovering She was delighted when her son, who works for a builder of upscale homes in Ohio, treated her to a new kitchen floor.
Then the blasting began from a coal company above her house. First the kitchen wall above the sink separated from the ceiling in a 1-inch crack. Next the floor dropped 6 inches in one corner. “I thought the house was coming down around me,” said Farley.
The inspector from the Division of Environmental Protection checked the seismograph records at the mine. He reported that the blasts were all within permitted limits. A spokesman for this coal company confirmed that no violations occurred. Farley is not satisfied: “They have the audacity to tell me they are within the legal limits.”
Click here to learn more about Glen Alum Mountain, WV and the communities that live nearby.
Story contributed by distinguished author Penny Loeb from her website www.wvcoalfield.com. Photo by Kent Kessinger provided courtesy of Appalachian Voices and Southwings.
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My name is Carl “Pete” Ramey. I am 75 years old. I have worked in the coal industry for 37 years from 1949 until retirement in 1985. All of my financial and health benefits have been provided by the coal industry. I have no desire to damage the coal industry. However, I do not want to be damaged by the coal industry.
Due to my fear for the safety and lives of my family, I was forced to move from my home in Roda, Virginia, where I resided for 30 years. Not everyone can move away from the strip mining operations.
Citizens of the coal camps have lived in fear of the blasting that has bombarded our homes with fly rock, flooding, dust and noise. Open silos and thousands of tons of stockpile coal are dumped in different places in our communities, causing a big problem with coal dust. There is an open silo and haul road within about 1000 feet of Appalachia Elementary School. In the past, I have passed the playground at the school and you could barely see the children for all of the dust. I have black lung disease from the years that I worked in a mine, but working there was my choice. Our children don’t have a choice when they have to breathe coal dust at their schools.
Then came August 20, 2004, when Jeremy Davidson, a three-year old boy asleep in his bed, was killed when a boulder was pushed from a strip mine above his home. This tragedy was based upon the cumulative failure of the state of Virginia to take any action upon at least 48 complaints that came from not only the residents of the Inman community, but from other communities such as Roda. A huge gamble was being taken that no one would suffer injury and the Davidson family was the loser in a gamble they had no control over. Other citizens of these communities have not suffered the death of a loved one, but daily they are tormented by the dust, noise and blasting of the mining operation.
I am a patriotic American and I don’t believe it is wrong to say publicly that we shouldn’t sacrifice our homes, health, safety and right to free speech for the coal industry, the economy, or anything else.
Click here to learn more about Fork Ridge, VA and the communities that live nearby.
Story provided by Pete Ramey, a retired coal miner, veteran, and a recipient of the World War II victory medal. This article was originally printed in the Appalachian Voice, December 2004. Photo by Taylor Barnhill provided courtesy of Southwings.
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A remembrance by Roxie Sells, a Tennessee grandmother and member of Save Our Cumberland Mountains.
Don’t ever let anyone tell you that land that has been strip mined can ever be reclaimed to anything like it was before.
We had never heard of strip mining before 1948 or 1949 when they started working not far from our home in northwest Claiborne County, Tennessee. We thought they had found a rich pocket of coal and when they got it they would leave. Never did we dream that 57 or 58 years later they would still be there ripping and tearing up what used to be such a beautiful place.
No one who was not blessed to be born and live there for 25 years could know all the damage that’s been done. But many people must remember when in the early spring of 1955, a sludge pond broke loose and did so much damage. I cannot remember exactly how many homes were lost, but three I remember well. One was a log house that looked like nothing could move it – but that flood did. The mother barely made it to a hill with her children. The older child of another family ran to a hill and watched as his home, his mother, and two little sisters were washed away.
Click here see aerial video of Cooper Ridge, TN and learn more about the communities that live nearby.
Story contributed by Save Our Cumberland Mountains. Photo first published in the Appalachian Voice, provided courtesy of Southwings
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Buffalo Creek: No two words carry more drama and pain in the coalfields. They symbolize all the dangers of surface mining. They speak of the callous attitude the mine operators sometimes show towards those who live nearby. On February 26, 1972, a dam constructed of coal waste broke loose near the head of Buffalo Creek. The poorly constructed dam was holding back a lake of water used for cleaning coal. The lake was perched between two hills. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of toxic, black water rushed down the valley like a tidal wave. The death toll totaled 125. Hundreds of homes were swept away.
Now residents of the coalfields use “Buffalo Creek” to express their fears of possible floods from the ponds at the ends of valley fills. Others fear a collapse of similar dams made of coal waste that hold back large ponds of discarded coal sludge in places like Laurel Creek, Ragland and Lick Creek. Part of the federal Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act was enacted as a response to Buffalo Creek. The federal and state laws are supposed to prevent any more deadly floods. So far, no dams such as the one at Buffalo Creek have broken. However, more and more coalfield residents believe that the valley fills are exacerbating floods.
Click here to see video interviews of survivors of the flood and learn more about the Buffalo Creek Flood and the mountains and communities near Buffalo Mountain, WV.
For more information about sludge impoundments, visit www.sludgesafety.org
Click here to take a Google Earth tour of more than 330 coal sludge impoundments in the coal bearing regions of Appalachia. A kml file will automatically download and open in your “Temporary Places”
Story contributed by distinguished author Penny Loeb from her website www.wvcoalfield.com. Photo by Kent Kessinger provided courtesy of Appalachian Voices and Southwings.
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Blair Mountain is home to one of the most important and dramatic chapters in American labor history, and the largest armed conflict on US soil since the Civil War. In 1921, Blair was the battlefield for the clash between over ten thousand miners fighting for the right to unionize, and the anti-union forces of the local sheriff and neighboring non-union counties. Labor organizers had decided to march on the area in protest of Sheriff Chafin’s harsh and violent treatment of union supporters, and they knew that they were calling for the union to gamble its future in one desperate show of force – if the march was successful in the Logan County, the bastion of nonunion labor, then the United Mine Workers would be able to organize in any mine in the state. If they failed, it would take years to recover. Thus the greatest domestic armed conflict in American labor history began.
After days of brutal fighting, in which home-made bombs dropped from planes marked the only time the US has bombed its own soil, federal troops arrived and the weary miners dispersed. Though ending in a defeat, the march and battle prompted a series of investigations into the harsh conditions of Appalachian coal mining, and word of the miners’ struggle spread throughout the nation.
The Battle Today
Now, Blair Mountain is the site of another battle. Local residents, including descendants of the 1921 miners, have been fighting mountaintop removal mines for years. In 1993, a coal company and its land agents began a plan to buy out all the nearby residents, so that no one would be around to complain about the mine’s blasting, dust, and sludge.
“Our philosophy is not to impact people,” said David Todd, a spokesman for Arch Coal. “And if there are no people to impact, that is consistent with our philosophy.”
Enacting this plan to turn an entire community’s homeplace into an industrial mine with “no people to impact,” A coal company bought more than half of the homes in Blair, forcing every resident who sold to sign an agreement saying that they would never protest strip mining again, and that they would never move back to any area near the mines.
Due to the ongoing threat of mountaintop removal mining on the historic battlefield site, the National Trust for Historic Preservation named Blair Mountain one of America’s 11 Most Endangered Places in 2006.
Click here to watch virtual flyovers of Blair Mountain, WV and learn more about the communities nearby.
Text contributed by distinguished author Penny Loeb from her website www.wvcoalfield.com. Photo provided courtesy of Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition and Southwings.
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