Massey’s lawyers are now trying to intimidate folks and squash the rising tide of resistance to MTR. After the first three actions, Massey sought and obtained a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) barring those already arrested from interfering with Massey’s operations in any way or assisting others to do so. But the order went further declaring that the restrictions applied to “all other persons allied, associated, confederating, conspiring, or acting in concert with them” and indeed anyone who ever finds about the TRO. You can read the TRO here (the good stuff is on page 5). This means you too are restrained! You are now enjoined from interfering with Massey Energy anywhere in the United States.
We have responded by filing a motion to vacate–get rid of–the TRO because it essentially restrains the entire world and we’re pretty sure you can’t do that. Just as the devastating effects of mountaintop removal mining and the global warming caused by the burning of coal effects us all, so do attempts to silence dissent and attack those that stand up for what is right. Please sign this letter to the court asking that the TRO be vacated.
TOXIC: Goals Coal plant, which contains a coal processing plant, a toxic waste dump and a massive mountaintop removal site, is a few hundred feet from the Marsh Fork Elementary School. photograph (c) antrim caskey, 2008
CONTACT: MIKE O’CONNELL
919-218-5792 / mikeoc@embarqmail.com
CONCERT FUNDS REPLACEMENT OF TOXIC SCHOOL, PROMOTES CLEAN ENERGY
Pittsboro, NC – Spending a summer weekend listening to music will help to ensure a safe school for hundreds of children. How? The Mountain Aid concert June 19-20, 2009 at Shakori Hills Farm in Chatham County, NC benefits Pennies of Promise, a grassroots campaign to construct a new building for Marsh Fork Elementary School in West Virginia.
Tucked into the heart of Appalachia, Marsh Fork Elementary sits in the shadow of a Mountain Top Removal coal mine, just 225 feet from the coal silo and 400 yards downstream from a leaking dam holding back nearly three billion gallons of toxic sludge. Independent tests prove coal dust contaminates Marsh Fork Elementary, a direct threat to the children’s respiratory health. Grandfather Ed Wiley began Pennies of Promise after his granddaughter got sick and West Virginia leaders told him the state could not afford a new school in a safer location. The goal? Raise eight million dollars and create a healthy future for the children of Appalachia. That’s where Mountain Aid comes in.
Grammy-winning singer and songwriter and West Virginia native Kathy Mattea will emcee and headline Mountain Aid. “Hosting Mountain Aid is the best way I can think of to spend my 50th birthday. I love these mountains, and to celebrate them and unite with others who love them, through music, is a great opportunity,” Mattea says. Other performers include Ben Sollee, named one of NPR’s “Top Ten Unknown Artists” of the year for 2007; American music icon Donna the Buffalo; and roots rockers the Sim Redmond Band.
Advance tickets for Mountain Aid are on sale now for $22.50 ($30 at the gate). On-site camping, food and craft vendors will be available. For more details, visit www.mtnaid.com.
Why hold Mountain Aid in North Carolina? According to Duke Energy, North Carolina is the number two consumer of Mountain Top Removal coal in the country. Additionally, a bill before North Carolina lawmakers would ban the use of Mountain Top Removal coal in the state. Mountain Aid organizers hope both to raise funds for Pennies of Promise and to create awareness and support for clean energy.
Mountain Top Removal mining, the practice that causes the environmental harm in and around Marsh Fork Elementary, is the subject of the award-winning documentary, “Mountain Top Removal,” directed by Michael O’Connell.
“Mountain Top Removal” has played film festivals domestically and internationally and won the Reel Current award selected and presented by Vice President Al Gore at the 2008 Nashville Film Festival. In conjunction with Mountain Aid, the film will screen on June 19 at 7:30 p.m. at the Carolina Theatre in Durham.
Mountain Aid thanks our generous sponsors Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition and Coal River Mountain Watch.
Media Advisory
April 27, 2009 Contact: Charles Suggs, Matt Louis-Rosenberg or Glen Collins: 304-854-7372.
"We won't stop until YOU do" photograph (c) antrim caskey, 2009
Climate Ground Zero activists face contempt charge for violating judge’s order to halt anti-mountaintop removal protests
Eight activists and three journalists are set to appear before Raleigh County District Judge Robert Burnside to show why they should not be held in contempt for violating temporary restraining orders (TRO) brought by four Massey Energy subsidiaries. Massey said the activists and journalists violated the TRO by stopping work again on March 5 and April 16th on the Edwight Surface Mine in Raleigh County. The defendants, who were cited for trespass and released, are awaiting trial on charges of criminal trespass.
The restraining orders were the result of three protests in February that halted Massey mountaintop removal operations on the Edwight mine and on Coal River Mountain.
The activists say the restraining orders are overly broad and should be vacated because they not only bar those that have already trespassed on company property, but “all other persons allied, associated, confederating, conspiring, or acting in concert with them,” and indeed anyone who ever finds about the restraining orders, from trespassing on Massey property or interfering with the company in any way. The defendants are also barred from aiding or assisting in any way, others in doing the same. Nine of those charged with contempt of court were not named on the restraining orders and activist Mike Roselle is charged with contempt only for allegedly recruiting participants for the March 5 protest.
Lawyers for Massey have requested that defendants be ordered to pay compensatory damages or a maximum of $5,000 per person (whichever is greater) and compensate Massey for all court costs. Massey has also requested that all photographs and videos of the protests be turned over to them, that any and all publication of the same be barred, and that all proceeds from the use of the media be turned over to them.
Finally, Massey is requesting that all the defendants be jailed until they swear in open court never to violate the restraining orders again. According to West Virginia State Code Section 48-1-304, the maximum sentence for civil contempt of court is a 6-month jail sentence.
“Massey Energy cannot silence us” said Mike Roselle of Climate Ground Zero. “Massey Energy is a corrupt and criminal syndicate and we will prove this in court. It is Massey that is trespassing on the public domain by irreparably altering the landscape and poisoning the air and water of this community.”
The contempt hearing is scheduled for May 1, at 10 a.m. in Beckley, W.Va.
Maria Gunnoe, of Bob White, WV, wins the Goldman Environmental Prize today. photograph (c) antrim caskey, 2009
Bob White, West Virginia — Maria Gunnoe, renowned Appalachian activist, has received the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize today, awarded each year to grassroots activists working on community environmental issues from each of the world’s six inhabited continental regions.
Gunnoe has spent the last seven years of her life fighting mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia. Gunnoe’s activism began when her family home-place in Bob White, southern West Virginia, was flooded in 2003.
During an interview in May, 2005, Gunnoe described the June, 2003 flood, the largest of seven floods the Gunnoes endured between the years 2000-2005, to this reporter,
“There was a 30 foot wall of water washed down from this mine site and destroyed not only our property but our lives. The water took a swath 20 feet deep and 67 feet wide right through the middle of everything we owned. It filled my barn full of rock and debris so much that we can’t even open the doors. It washed through the barn and continued down to where our family dog was tied and ripped him right out of his collar as we watched helplessly. Then it took out our only access bridge blocking in the equipment we needed to make our living. After the water took out the bridge, it then washed out the septic system, contaminated our ground water, and washed away about 5 acres of our property including our orchard. We were trapped in with no way out and the emergency services could only get within yelling distance. We came back to the house and went inside. The water was now about 20 feet from the foundation of our home and it wasn’t stopping. I dropped to my knees and begged for God to stop this water. ‘Please God, don’t let this water take our house and our lives, it’s already taken our home.’ ”
“It was like a ragin’ river coming out of there. We sat here all night long listening to trees and tin, you could hear it but you couldn’t see it. It was pitch black. It was an eerie sound. I can’t explain it. You’d have to have been here to understand. you could hear it all night long…There was water washing underneath the concrete floor in the garage. The garage was poppin’ and crackin’… What we’d done through the evening, We got the kids dressed. Plastic bags in their pockets. Coats. Hats…”
“We were haulin’ all that stuff outta the garage. It was five am, I fell asleep sitting up on the couch. Daylight came. I woke up. I looked up and I lost it.”
“I went straight up to the mining company. I told that lady guard that I wanted to talk to Bob Cline now.
She said to me, ‘I’ll give ‘em the message but they are busy men.’ “
“That made me even angrier.”
Fifteen minutes after Maria got home, Bob Cline, the chief mining engineer from Patriot coal, which operated the 2200-acre mountaintop removal site behind her home arrived at her house.
The first thing Cline said to Maria was, “you know we are not liable for this. This is an act of God.”
Soon after the horrendous 2003 flood, Gunnoe met face to face with Joe Manchin, III, who was campaigning for Governor at the time. Maria described the encounter this way,
“Joe Manchin looked me and my daughter in the face and said, ‘We’ll see if we can get you some help up there.’ Three days later someone calls promising help, but we need you to sign a waiver to release the coal company from all liability,” Gunnoe recalled.
Gunnoe’s resolve to stand up for her rights only intensified in the face of such callousness — it fueled her fight for justice. Gunnoe’s life has been “turned upside down” by what the coal operators above her were doing to the land, all in the quest for the dirties fossil fuel, coal. Patriot Coal decapitated Big Island mountain–removing the top 400 feet, this is mountaintop removal– and buried Big Branch creek, an Appalachian headwater stream that meandered through the Gunnoe home-place, providing fresh mountain water to drink and play in. Today, Big Branch creek is a National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) stream, or in layperson’s terms, “a pollution spillway.”
Thousands of miles of these vital headwater streams have been buried by valley fills, giant plugs of crushed mountaintops that are dumped into Appalachian valleys after the mountaintops are blown up with explosives, which according to Dr. Benjamin Stout, a biologist at Wheeling Jesuit University, has put the drinking water source for the southeastern United States at risk.
Virtual Flyover of Maria Gunnoe’s home produced by Benji Burrell and ilovemountains.org
SUNDIAL, W.Va. – Three activists, who are committed to nonviolently ending mountaintop removal, unveiled a 40-foot-tall banner that said “EPA stop MTR” at Massey Energy’s Edwight mountaintop removal mine. Five people were arrested: the three activists Charles Suggs, Madeline Gardner, and William Wickham, and independent photojournalist Antrim Caskey and independent filmmaker Jordan Freeman. The activists chose the Edwight mine because Massey has recently begun blasting directly above the town of Naoma, W.Va., and the grave danger its slurry dam poses to Marsh Fork Elementary. This is the fifth in a series of such actions over the last 3 months that Climate Ground Zero has taken against Massey Energy and mountaintop removal coal mining.
“With the EPA seemingly considering actually doing its job, we believe they will realize that mountaintop removal is illegal and put a stop to it,” Mathew Louis-Rosenberg said, referencing the five mountaintop removal permits EPA has put on hold for review in recent weeks.
Police arrested the activists and charged them with trespassing.
“Mountaintop removal is killing people and the the blame lies with the people who let it happen, from the politicians, to the out-of-state mining and land companies, to the DEP and EPA who should have never even let this start,” activist Charles Suggs said. “People’s water is getting poisoned by coal slurry, the blasting shakes dishes off the walls and cracks foundations and the rubble buries what makes West Virginia great.”
Marsh Fork Elementary is just two miles from the site of the arrests. It sits less than three-hundred feet from a coal loading silo, where chemically treated coal is loaded onto idling diesel trains, exposing the children to fine, chemical-laden coal dust and diesel fumes.
Marsh Fork Elementary is also directly below a Massey Energy coal sludge impoundment, holding over two billion gallons of coal sludge. Sludge is liquid waste from the coal washing process that is pumped into a dam built into a small valley. Mine Safety & Health Administration inspector Jim Elkins cited Massey in 1999 for improper construction of the dam above Marsh Fork Elementary.
Massey was building the dam in layers up to 10 feet thick between compacting the refuse, which makes proper compaction impossible. Without proper compaction the dam could fail, sending a tsunami of coal sludge through the school and communities downstream. “If the dam failed, fatalities would be expected to occur,” Elkins wrote in his report. “It’s reasonably likely an accident would occur if the condition continued to exist.”
There’s no record the faulty construction was ever fixed.
The Edwight Surface mine, above Naoma and Marsh Fork Elementary school, is a glaring example of everything that is wrong with mountaintop removal mining and coal processing, according to Climate Ground Zero. This banner was dropped to highlight for the EPA what could happen if mountaintop removal coal production is allowed to expand, threatening more schools and blasting above more homes, they said. “This act is a message to the EPA to do the responsible thing, and use its power to stop mountaintop removal mining,” activist Will Wickham said.
West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin, III at the state Capitol. photograph (c) antrim caskey, 2006
April 7, 2009 · Gov. Joe Manchin says he and his office were not involved in the decision to ask that Blair Mountain be removed from the National Register of Historic Places.
In fact, he says he was surprised to learn that the Division of Culture and History had asked for the historic battlefield to be taken off the list.
The National Park Service added Blair Mountain to the National Register of Historic Places last week.
James Guin McGuinness and Mike Roselle on Cherry Pond mountain, southern West Virginia, February 25, 2009. Roselle and McGuinness successfully halted coal production for about an hour on the mountaintop removal site as part of a sustained campaign of non violent civil disobedience that has surged in southern West Virginia this year. photograph (c) antrim caskey, 2009
Sgt. M.A. Smith fingerprints Mike Roselle, April 2, 2009, in Beckley, WV. photograph (c) antrim caskey, 2009
Rock Creek, WVa — Yesterday morning State Trooper Bowers pulled up in front of our Rock Creek office and honked his horn. He doesn’t usually come to the door. “How can I help you?” I ask.
“Sgt Smith wants you to meet him at 1:00 at his office in Whitesville” he says.
“Can you tell me what this concerning?”
“No” Officer Bowers replies, and slowly drives off.
In Sgt. Smith’s office I am informed that the Magistrate has put out an arrest warrant on me and that he will have to take me into custody and drive me to Beckley. After a short conversation, we agree that I can surrender myself the next day at 9:00 AM in Beckley and I went home.
This morning at nine I met Sgt. Smith at the State Police headquarters and was fingerprinted and taken into custody. He drove me to the Magistrate’s office where I met Mr. Massie in the lobby. When he saw me he said to Sgt. Smith, “I’d be happy to put him in the holding cell.”
He gave the keys to Sgt. Smith and he locked me up in the holding cell with one other poor fellow chained at the waist and foot. I said down on the cold steel bench and waited for my chance to see the Magistrate.
Sgt. Smith unlocked the cell door 10 minutes later and took me to see Massie.
Massie immediately began to scold me for missing my last scheduled appearance in front of him and laid down the law: $500 bond, no contact with Massey Energy, no leaving the state, bla, bla, bla… I said “Your Honor, I cannot accept these conditions”.
“Then you’re going to jail” he replied, and Sgt. Smith put handcuffs on me and the Magistrate left the chambers.
Twenty five minutes later Massie returns with a slip of paper in his hand and without looking at me asks again, “So, you’re not going to sign this release?”
“No sir, I cannot.” That was my final answer. Then things happened very quickly. Massie hands me and Officer Smith a copy of Judge Kirkpatrick’s order to release me with a warning not to do anything prohibited in the order or I would face arrest. Then he turned quickly and exited his chambers.
I did not get a chance to reply.
Sgt. Smith motioned with his key so I held my hands up and he retrieved his handcuffs. Then he left through the back door and I was standing in an empty courtroom holding a piece of paper.
West Virginia State Trooper Sgt. Smith arrests Mike Roselle for laying down in the road with a banner on Massey Energy owned Edwight mountaintop removal coal mine site, Febraury 26, 2009, exactly 37 years after the Buffalo Creek disaster in Man, WVa.
Arrest warrant issued for Roselle
Rock Creek, WV — The Raleigh County Court issued a warrant for activist Mike Roselle this morning. Roselle has agreed to turn himself in at the State Police office in Beckley tomorrow morning at 9:00 AM.
SUNDIAL, W.Va. – Three activists, who are committed to nonviolently ending mountaintop removal, unveiled a 40-foot-tall banner that said “EPA stop MTR” at Massey Energy’s Edwight mountaintop removal mine. Five people were arrested: the three activists Charles Suggs, Madeline Gardner, and William Wickham, and independent photojournalist Antrim Caskey and independent filmmaker Jordan Freeman. The activists chose the Edwight mine because Massey has recently begun blasting directly above the town of Naoma, W.Va., and the grave danger its slurry dam poses to Marsh Fork Elementary. This is the fifth in a series of such actions over the last 3 months that Climate Ground Zero has taken against Massey Energy and mountaintop removal coal mining.
