In Appalachia, more than 500 mountains have been destroyed by mountaintop removal mining.
Mountaintop removal mining is the coal industry’s practice of blowing off the tops of mountains to get to a thin seam of coal.
The industry blew off much of Kayford Mountain, which sits just up from Cabin Creek, West Virginia — between Beckley and Charleston.
It’s there that the late Larry Gibson – son of a coal miner – fought off the coal companies and preserved 50 acres out of thousands.
The Gibson family property — secured under a land trust and conservation easement — used to sit at the base of beautiful mountains all around. It’s now the high point looking down on blown off mountain tops.
Before he died in 2012, Gibson started a foundation — the Keeper of the Mountains Foundation — that gives tours to students, journalists and others.
It’s the one spot in West Virginia where people can see first hand and up close the devastation of mountaintop removal mining.
Elise Keaton Liegel is the executive director of the Keeper of the Mountains Foundation.
She gives anywhere from 50 to 60 tours a year of Kayford Mountain.
“When I came to Kayford Mountain to meet Larry, it was through a class trip organized by a Virginia Tech professor through an Appalachian studies program I was taking,” Keaton Liegel told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview last week. “I’ll never forget walking onto that land and looking at this man who was not even five foot tall. Instantly, he captured your attention. When you did a tour of Kayford Mountain with Larry Gibson, he reached into your chest and grabbed your heart and he led you around his mountain. And when he was finished, he put your heart back into your chest and said — now go do something about it. And very often, people left Kayford Mountain with a duty and responsibility to do something about it, whatever they could do.”
During his years fighting off the coal companies, Larry Gibson faced violence, threats and intimidation.
“Larry told me that there were over 150 acts of violence committed against him during his decades of activism,” Keaton Liegel said. “They shot at him. They ran him off the road on Kayford Mountain. By they I mean people within the community who were pro-mining and who viewed Larry as the number one tree hugger, the person who was taking jobs.”
“Larry became a lightening rod for much of the fear and anxiety within the coal mining community. They shot one of his dogs and hung another. It was dangerous for Larry to do what he did. But that didn’t stop him. He was courageous.”
“When I was a young student and began getting pushback from mine engineering students and miners within my community, I went to Larry and said — I’m scared to talk with miners to talk to people in my own community — it makes me nervous. I don’t want to fight about this. Larry told me — just tell the truth. Never be scared as long as I was telling the truth and knew I was right about what I was staying.”
“That stuck with me. People would say to Larry — you can’t stop them from taking Kayford Mountain. Why do you continue to do this work? And Larry would say — because I’m right. And those of us who continue this work feel the same way — this is the right side.”
“Thirty years from now, what will be the value of a gallon of clean water to our community? And how will we look our grandchildren in the eyes and say — that ton of coal was more important to us than your clean water? That’s not right and I can’t do that in good conscience.”
“By all accounts, this stretch of the Appalachian deciduous hardwood forest is the second most biologically diverse place on the planet — second to the Amazon,” Keaton Liegel says.
“There are scientists who come here and have estimated that there as many as 1,000 unique species per acre in these established ancient untouched forests. Some scientists believe we haven’t discovered all the species here in this forest. It is a temperate rainforest. It behaves as such. It is similar to the Amazon in that way. This part of the forest is the largest tract of standing deciduous hardwood forest in the hemisphere.”
One of the greatest impacts is on water.
“The overburden” is the technical terms for those rocks that are exploded away from the coal seam.
“When you take that rock and push it over into a valley to create a valley fill, you are covering up streams in the bottom of that valley,” Keaton Liegel says. “And those streams feed into the creeks that are the headwaters of our rivers. We are putting heavy metals and toxins into those headwaters. We are disrupting the flow of the streams and the hydrology in that way.”
“We use water and chemicals to wash the coal to get the heavy metals and toxins off of it before it is loaded onto the train to take it to coal fired power plants or take it to export. That water byproduct that is left over is called coal sludge or coal slurry. The coal companies have to do something with those millions of gallons of toxic water. They often store them on existing mountaintop removal sites in slurry ponds. And in recent years, they have been allowed in some cases to inject that water into abandoned underground mines. They would move it from the surface back into the groundwater tables. So, we have had contamination of wells, contamination of groundwater supplies in that fashion.”
“If you are on a well, blasting can often compromise your well. If they blast the strata and rock away from the seams of coal, it can cause the ground to shake and disrupt your well.”
“They drill a borehole into the rock strata and they fill that hole with ammonium nitrate and ignite that with diesel fuel. When you have hundreds of those explosions going off every week around the region, you are putting into the air microparticles of silica, cadmium, barium and all sorts of heavy metals that then fall out onto plant life, which is then consumed by people and animals.”
“You also have diesel emission particulates from the explosions. And these ultrafine particulates are causing some of the lung issues and respiratory illnesses that we see here.”
“There are 26 peer reviewed health studies that have reached the same conclusions — if you live near one of these mountaintop removal mines, your chances of cancer and birth defects increase substantially. The science is becoming insurmountable. Every peer reviewed scientific study leads to a similar conclusion. It is a compromised environment near these mountaintop removal sites.”
[For the complete q/a transcript if the Interview with Elise Keaton Liegel, see 28 Corporate Crime Reporter 31(12), August 4, 2014, print edition only.]