Take Action: Demand an End to Mountaintop Removal
Coal companies are pushing for more than 100 new mountaintop removal permits. Tell the Obama Administration to stand up for the health and safety of mountain communities and end mountaintop removal.Mountaintop removal mining continues to devastate the health of communities across Appalachia. No one can survive without clean water, and scientific research shows that people living near mountaintop removal mines face greater threats to their health and their lives.
Cancer rates are two times higher in areas of mountaintop removal mining; babies born near mountaintop removal mining are 26 percent more likely to be born with birth defects as well.
Our allies in communities across Appalachia are fighting back against some of these permits.
For example:
These are but three examples from the more than 100 proposed mountaintop removal sites in Appalachia. Take action! Tell the Obama Administration to stand up for the health and safety of mountain communities and end mountaintop removal.
- Ison Rock Ridge, VA: Ison Rock Ridge Mountain shelters five mountain communities of approximately 2,300 people, and many more rely on the streams that flow from this mountain. Wise County is already heavily impacted by mountaintop removal. In fact, 30 percent of the county has been blasted and flattened by mountaintop removal mining. Mountaintop removal on Ison Rock Ridge threatens the towns, homes, and waters below, but citizens in this area are coming together to fight to save the mountain.
- Stacy's Branch, KY: Leeco Coal has applied for a permit to blow up 849 acres of this mountain ridge and create six valley fills, burying or polluting more 4 miles of streams between two counties, Knott and Perry, and contaminating the nearby waters and air with harmful pollution. Many Stacy's Branch residents spoke with EPA officials last spring about the impacts of the proposed mining.
- Buffalo Mountain, WV: Consol Energy has applied for a permit to remove a six-mile-long stretch of mountaintops in Mingo County and dump its mining waste in the Pigeon Creek and Buffalo Creek watersheds, downstream from other mountaintop removal operations. Communities nearby are already living with the impacts of this type of destruction—water contamination, air pollution, loud blasting, flying rocks, shaking homes—but the 177 families living within a half mile of this proposed mine will face the worst of it.
2 comments:
The coal industry has a long history of recklessness and disregard for both their own labor force (miners) as well as the people whose revered mountainous homelands have been essentially raped, plundered, dynamited, and flattened....it needs to be stopped, no doubt.
My Mom has been telling me about this for some time and I watched a Netflix documentary about it. It is going on in Montana, Alaska, and even New Jersey too on Native American lands and they are fighting back. But, in New Jersey it is particularly bad and the infected land is close to NYC. Maybe when people in northern NJ and Manhattan see the effects in their water, public outcry will stop this madness. Just like the Occupy Movement; until a large portion of the population gets effected, nobody really cares and nothing gets done. And even then it's a battle...
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