Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining

Links:

• Heartwood and Coal Country Music CD Artists Turn Music into Gold to Stop Mountaintop Removal Coalmining
• Appalachian Health Emergency (ACHE) Act of 2013

Mountaintop removal (MTR), also referred to as valley fill coal mining, has become so widespread that it could now be more accurately described as mountain range removal coal mining. The process of blowing up mountains and digging for coal from the top down results in total destruction of ecosystems and transforms some of the most biologically diverse temperate forests in the world into biologically barren wastelands. As the mountain is ravaged for coal, the waste “fill” is dumped into the valleys making watersheds run red, as well as the tap water in many communities. People are being poisoned by their water, as well as incessant dust from the blasting. Their homes are being destroyed along with their way of life, which is intimately connected with forest resources, such as hunting, fishing, and collection of medicinal plants. Many even live in fear for their lives. A young boy was killed in his sleep when a boulder was knocked off a MTR site by a machine in the middle of the night and rolled right through his house and into his bed. Whole towns are located in the shadow of enormous sludge ponds whose barriers could break at any time burying whole communities in thousands of tons of toxic sludge, as happened with an 84 acre sludge containment area in Kingston, Tennessee in 2008.