“We All Live in the Coal Fields”: West Virginians Step Up Protests as EPA OKs New Mountaintop Removal
CONCERT FUNDS REPLACEMENT OF TOXIC SCHOOL, PROMOTES CLEAN ENERGY
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
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.
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GUNNOE WINS GOLDMAN FOR WEST VIRGINIA Maria Gunnoe Wins Goldman Environmental Prize Second Appalachian Activist to win prestigious prize– Bonds and Gunnoe both radicalized to action in southern West Virginia by atrocities of mountaintop removal coal mining.
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