MTR Slideshow

Slideshow of Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining in southwestern West Virginia. Mountaintop removal coal mining basically involves chopping off the top of entire mountains and dumping them in the adjacent valleys after removing the coal. It is destruction on a planetary scale, and mind-boggling. The effects are geologic in timescale.

A couple of notes --

1. Most of the pix were from about 3000' off the deck, and all the mine sites can be measured in square miles. The biggest one (Hobet) that I flew is about 25 square miles, and is roughly square (5 miles by 5 miles).

2. In the slides, you'll see what look like huge earthen wedges. Those used to be VALLEYS, now filled in with debris.

3. The little beetle-like things on the ground are the super-monster trucks. All of them can carry a semi truck in their bed easily.

4. An interesting note when I was doing the ground shoot -- the only vehicles out and about were hillbilly moon-buggies. Talk about adaptation.

Category:

Nonprofits & Activism

Tags:

• climate change
• West Virginia
• mountaintop removal
• coal mining
• coal

[pezeshki]

Hey Coalguy,

Do you find it a compelling argument that it's worth devastating a landscape and chopping off the top of a mountain that's existed for close to 500 million years to build a Wal-mart?

Inquiring minds want to know....

[pezeshki]

There is a certain insanity in calling a 25 square mile chunk of irretrievable devastation, a bigger plat than most cities in the entire region, located in the middle of nowhere, a construction site.

[mountainjustice]

Coal Guy - I think many of these sites have been reclaimed, like the $5 million Laurel County Juvenile Detention Center near London KY, which currently sits vacant due to subsidence of the land - or the Sink Sink Prison in Martin County KY with the $80 million cost overruns due to subsidence .... only 5 percent of the reclaimed MTR land has actually been developed. The remainder of your arguments arent worth responding to.

[Jaggwire]

Can you drink sludge? Many folks in the region are dealing with ongoing damage caused by sludge spills.

I think what this video and others are trying to say is that there is no such thing as "clean" coal, and the earth will eventually run out of mountains (a shame) and coal (serves all of us right). Seeing this might cause some folks to earnestly look at alternative fuel sources, even perhaps wind turbines--right on the mountains.

[TheCoalguy]

Oh, and by the way, these mountains are owned by individuals and companies. They are NOT some collective property that everyone owns. If you want to do that, then pony up the money and buy the land and the mineral rights from the companies and individuals that own it. Then gift it to the federal government for a national park. Till you are prepared to do so, don't try to tell me what I can and cannot do with my land.

[TheCoalguy]

Do you shop at Wal-Mart? Do you live in a home or a cave? Obviously if you live in a home, you moved earth to do it. That earth was also 500 million years old.

If you use electricity you are burning some form of energy. If you drive a car you are using some form of electricity. You flew a plane that used gasoline -- oil.

Get a grip on life. The earth is not a God. It is a gift from God to USE.

We are good stewards of the land. We have a right to develop our communities.

[TheCoalguy]

These are facilities that either wouldn't be there or would have cost the taxpayer millions of dollars more to develop without the help of the coal industry.

[TheCoalguy]

When these sites are needed for alternative development, such as in Hazard, KY where an entire town is shifting to a former mine site, Grundy, VA and others, we can leave these areas in a usable configuration. Currently there are regional airports, residential developments, schools, shopping centers, recreational facilities, industrial plants and a myriad of other facilities making use of these former sites.

[TheCoalguy]

Each year we spend millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours doing the hard work of restoring these sites, regrading and regrading the land to approximate the original contour.

[TheCoalguy]

Let's try these facts and see how your enviro friends stack up.

The coal industry plants millions of trees each year on these sites. These are a natural mix of trees as well as a concerted effort to restore the American Chestnut to its former range. This is an award-winning effort.