great. and al qaeda is they could come back the terrorist group is reportedly on a recruiting spring spur by the planned u.s. troop withdrawal from iraq. coming up next we'll look at how mountain top removal mining has affected local communities and become one of the greatest environmental catastrophes in american history. a. lead a. list plays. a. lead to. a.

world lead. to an old. mother. and. a. most of the carbon that we buy from across to the earth is millions of years old coal particularly interesting because per unit of energy generated coal actually it

may be the cheapest fuel but it also releases the most carbon to be with her as carbon dioxide beginning in earnest with the development of the steam engine in the late seventeen early eighteen hundreds he winds begin to and extract fossil carbon from the earth's crust coal oil gas even in the absence of humans over some time period it would be uplifted and subject to erosion and removal would return to the most fear but those rates are tiny compared to the ability of humans to go out with large machines to deliver a large quantities of this material to the surface of the earth where it is burned in the useful generation of better g.'s we have larger quitman that was introduced on surface mines about twenty five years ago here in washington which accounted for

the the ability to recover coal seams that heretofore been unmanageable the use of dragline skylab mining scenes that were an economic demand and even physically impossible. without the use of that. many people twenty five years ago when the first company said to them buying a bright line they were laughed at and they said there's no way in the world you get a piece of equipment like that on the narrow ridges southern appalachia and and they were determined through engineering abilities and persistence to make certain that it worked and and it hands.

the man was pleasant. things to. do so. as for the digital be. some. easy ways. to get to liza's. and. sleep lose. weight think these little children i'm sorry little children will be protected this night from treatment or your family can carry. the family do a lot of people get to come in on probably

a very merry christmas and i guess be able to borrow it from me if you call it from her parent comes from your parents are there are a number of years to forsake their dad in our church it destroyed your reaction lord yes and such. a sick mind. can't explain your empire to. sleep. the slum. sleep. it's. out now for the light down my path even september. you need to keep moving her desperate technique is community map if dismantling the community. once these lessons are gone there is no more of a life. there is no more west virginia it don't grow back it's not going come back

i mean you know we had a politician get up on tavi not long ago he said well the reason that jan saying it's going extinct because the deer are in. order to styles an acre well. that's not the garage sale process mountaintop removal coal mine is an awesome display of coal extraction engineering it is also quite simple once the site is a den of clear cutting begins next explosives are used to blast away the earth material polson. them machinery completing massive shovels called dragon lines remove the overburden which is then deposited in adjacent valleys called valley fills mountaintop removal coal mining can bring down the elevation of a peak by hundreds of feet sites are often thousands of acres in size but i believe these are related actually rather than blacksburg and written. in the spring of two

thousand and five a group of activists college students and local citizen conservation groups joined together to oppose the widespread increase in mountaintop removal mines throughout southern appalachian training the group called their campaign mountain just a summer there was going to be kind of this renewal of coal mining in tennessee and some of those mines were going to be you know mountaintop removal mines. you know we were like hey this is you know now we're dealing with this issue too it's not just an issue in kentucky and west virginia like hey let's put something together and kind of up the level of opposition to this issue and let's help make this issue a national issue that everybody has to dealing with. the same what they're doing one. since some ways they're dividing our community. i've got nothing against free speech but when you come in here demand and people's jobs and clothes

are schools day on. and i and all that you lucky don't get hurt. if somebody is in california or north carolina or new york city they are connected to mountaintop removal because they're turning on the lights. their opening strategy was to draw attention to a school situated close to a mountaintop removal site in marsh fork west virginia. the mine is owned by massey energy america's fourth largest coal producer marsh fork elementary is a very very scary situation they have two point eight billion gallons of coast slurry which is why it's toxic it's toxic material it has arsenic. chromium there's a lot of really really bad chemicals in this sludge and there is a lake of two point eight billion gallons of coast laurie sitting behind this elementary school four hundred yards up on top of the mouth. there's two hundred

twenty eight kids in the school. the sophistication of engineering that goes into the construction of those is i suspect not duplicated in any other physical structure anywhere in in the world in one thousand nine hundred two buffalo creek there was this disaster where one of these impoundments basically blew out millions of gallons of this nasty sludge and water went barreling down a small holler and killed one hundred twenty five people destroyed like four thousand houses a thousand cars you know hundreds of people were injured. besides the danger of flooding while you know the residents are concerned about the health effects posed to school children from the coal processing facility located directly behind marsh fork elementary so he sits three hundred feet away three hundred fifty feet away it. sits directly cough the river and you've got syria's chemical bravo

very got the magnetite you've got the walk you've got the ammonia they use the bad . they use diesel fuel in there they mix all this stuff together we've got. all the time. you got. problems with her and more more down her. planner for you a lot of kids. in a lot of people likely all the time or just drain all the time the kids are coming home with blisters and their mild little tiny blisters the size of opinionated all when they're mild. but not everyone shares their concerns in the small community where many residents work for the coal industry that surrounds them if i wasn't comfortable enough i was scared i would not let her go there and she will be in first grade she was in kindergarten last year played on the playground three times

a day and more like college closed and unlike us that she never came home dirty with or you know any sickness and i have manacle records to prove that she has not had anything other than a common cold up like any other child. we. have been. frustrated with local schools and government officials you know action on improving safety at marsh work elementary while granddaughter kayla attends marsport column entry launches the pennies a promise campaign to raise six million dollars to build a new school and so with us here. i just sat. beside their mother and say your mother. no money to tell. mother that she one of elegance. because i don't like. to start

the pennies or promise campaign while he and his granddaughter kayla present the governor with over four hundred dollars in pennies he can order snow to lecture. we'd like to see the governor we have some money to present him. as the story of a story and step down from kids everywhere regular doing good to see you have a young lady here from marsh fork elementary i heard her say pretty the south and. let's. face it i don't see. people going to start. school since. we're going to the center. and. it's. ok to have a little gable here for us this is our pay i'm fine ok. now we're let me just say

you know so far as i know we worked on this some we talked about at the forefront but the school for us or at the school where we at with the local board of education start all over sure it's back up a whole lot we're not going to get them you took a foreigner to protect the way what's we're going to use it women has to go and tell you today ok and what we're not going to do what we've been doing you put a price on our children here. in our state you put a price this is not an environmental issue this is a little human being i have tried for two years to work with you on this and i've been ignored and i don't mean to put you in a soft spot here but enough is enough enough it's enough we need to get this took care of your business what these coal companies as europe is and your politics this is not about politics we're asking people for money all of this country today is our official announcement of it so it's just it's just in the stages we're going to raise five to ten million dollars it's going to happen we want you to be

a part of this we want you to support our efforts we want to help you do a better job and i appreciate i don't mean to be upset and progressive but if this was your child would you not be well you know that enough you know and she's beautiful and so what we should we care about our child. down there and they're sure it's probably just a lot of issues and i know you're aware there's intimidation going on there a lot of intimidation a teacher spoke out last year now he's been told he better start with you want to you going to do it how do you do everything in my heart that i want to do that that means that i do everything in my ga ga's but that we got a. journalist jeff goodell is book big coal the dirty secret behind america's energy future explores the history and use of coal in america and throughout the world like many americans i didn't even realize that we still burn coal you know i thought coal was something that went out with top hats and corsets i thought that electricity was just something that flowed down from a golden bowl in the sky i never gave any thought to where it came from the idea

that coal produces fifty percent of electricity in america never occurred to me so i went down to west virginia and i didn't know what to expect their memory i first knew i was driving outside of charleston and i saw the boom on one of the big drag line swinging above the hills and i pulled off the road and i hiked up through the woods to the top of this hill and i got this view down into this strip mine and it was just like hell had opened up before me. the money and the coal mining has always gone to the top and been siphoned out by the owners essentially whether their corporations are called barons like don blankenship it's a commodity business every penny they have to spend for safety for wages for health care or anything like that is money that they see coming directly out of their pocket and you know the history of coal mining is very clear on this there's no it's not a subtle thing you know this is an industry that views workers as disposable and

views the landscape as disposable and it's all about getting the coal out of the ground as quickly. tolls and everything mounted love disco with you bottom yourself. and if you start out into madness you had to have those tools they don't let you get a loan created it companies still. for about three presses put it this way love your coke head company stores they hardly you lived near kochi if you work for the and they don't want kitchen some i also store. and one of the others all matters bad they still owed to company store you could pitch it won't pay mo. he made

company money scrip don't price it wasn't good it was company store as i got an updated script it's worth more today than it was. right. usually healthy though you could make more to dolls day right here sell the kit trick which are so use middle today going to. give you a hand polies stamp you number of what you got your car loaded with cold somewhere on this car you would i want to check to see and be a mule driver lead times i'd be go on board back to stay in school he would pull you to cohen here drop it off unhook piecemeal from a call to the phone. all right now it real easy to loud rock him with your code who show your life you got a water tank in a slot. of no little water drip in your career bad writer.

and does a smear of good but it works pretty good. problem almost. oh yes you know look at the history of our area especially they with big communities now today with skate rings big companies still worth everything the people i mean the company housed all down that river or stuff and set their. our schools are good because there is no money at all the stores are or close and nothing is coming back these are people with this coal company in their tie can take and tie can never put it is all going to go early west virginia broke the big go on the wheel. five years ago. mountaintop removal site moved into the head waters of the stream

that runs from a home. in the past five years i've been flooded seven times there's been about five acres my property it's washed away into the stream down below where i live. my property has been completely devastated devalued there's no way i could say one relocate my property it's worth at the mine company had the option of getting in touch with me and letting me know what was coming and they did it and they trapped me and my kids have a flooding hollow and basically trashed our lives now when someone does that to you you don't go along with it you have no choice but to go against i go home to it i live in the middle of this why. because it's ok it's ok that me he'll be away from southern west virginia is the middle of this

tale so am i ask my son. roan. i don't know nobody nuts and i don't own these million jobs i don't own jobs and if i thank god i don't know their day and wrong across appalachians coal fields mining jobs are vital to local economies my husband us work with my essay for. eight or nine years will. we really appreciate message that's where we get our money that you know our way of living but traditional deep mining requires more workers than mountaintop removal since nine hundred fifty the total number of mining jobs has steadily decreased from approximately one hundred twenty thousand to less than twenty thousand today over the same period coal production has steadily increased many cofield residents are also concerned about another byproduct of coal production slurry pons. the slurry impalements the way that

we dispose of the refuse that comes from the cleaning of coal which is literally nothing but dirt and rock coming that's what you're separating from the coal so that's what you're disposing of it's not toxic it's not you know as people many people would like you to believe that there's something only it's the indigenous dirt and rock that is caught up in the coal seam and that natural material includes mercury lead arsenic and a whole suite of heavy metals which as long as they're in that rock you can drink the water because they'll be underground they'll be they will not be exposed to oxygen that if you don't disturb them they will not be brought into solution and you can literally some of the best water we have in west virginia comes out of a coal seam but when you disturb that rock and start grinding it up in a fine particles adding a whole bunch of chemical additives to it to get it to separate the coal from the

other inorganic materials then you come up with this which is a brew of material that you would want any exposure to it all we know almost nothing about it i've got a database now has fourteen samples worldwide of coal slurry that are in the public domain six of these are from the post martin county you know the the the biggest environmental disaster in the southeastern united states six a apples representing what that material that entered our rivers and streams really is which i find rather prosperous three hundred nine million gallons of taking over fifty miles of a major river system a spill bigger than the exxon valdez we took six samples the occurrence that happened in kentucky. was simply one where you had one built over old. underground ones and they gave way in the bottom and that's what happened the structure itself to. go county west virginia within sight of massey energy

c.e.o. don blankenship home carmelita brown has been battling for clean want to see. twenty some years ago. and water turned black and black stripe and asked are the hollering and screaming has been got up and asked and asked me what was wrong take a man and he said when he looked at eight said my god he said that's close laurie. we went and looked at fifteen wells. said the samples off to the laboratory got the testing results back and did some analysis on those results and it was pretty compelling that we needed to do more research down there i had never seen water quality that poor. pretty good compared to what it was this morning these documents from the west virginia department of natural resources researched by mountain just to summer volunteers are permits for coal slurry injections that took

place in the early one nine hundred eighty s. at the slurry impoundment located approximately two miles above carmelita brown's home this permit shows that over two hundred million gallons of slurry was injected in one thousand nine hundred eighty four and nine hundred eighty five disparagement describe slurry injections in one thousand nine hundred four into an abandoned underground mind at the rate of six hundred gallons per minute the basis for. injecting. coal slurry and other things other wastes underground as an e.p.a. one thousand nine hundred eighty sed study called underground injection control all that's the oxymoron of the century underground injection control and what control do we have when we inject something underground i have no idea where it goes. if i if i actually aired it was to pull out tomorrow for some reason went bankrupt or whatever all the story pods you know who is responsible for that count we got the

paperwork we know the calories are responsible for the clean up of the story. nobody wanted to help us nobody want nobody was concerned and it wasn't only made it was oh my neighbors that down this road well the patients i see for all have significant medical problems that other people don't have. a greater number of people of all timers disease old timers disease memory loss i've seen a great number of people who have numbness and tingling of their arms and legs which indicates a heavy metal. accumulation seen a fair amount of just built ill health my next door neighbors on a kidney dialysis another neighbor a man as is has lost a kidney headache had to have a kidney transplant i have problems with my kidneys the timea water exposes them to many types of metals cadmium among others so causes can they do which now

several people not necessary has lost babies i have carried them six months and have maybe still more. cultures that say much is really. a lot of people are very aware of her current realities convenience alone the world will be watching closely be us senate as it debates new climate change.

as moscow breeze freely for the first time in weeks hundreds of wildfires continue to rage across russia. so dedication the finals of the volunteers help the flames and provide vital supplies to those affected it's. helping out from across the border. summertime of course is fine. whose recent development puts an offering to go to the frontline of russia's blades it's. russia's stop so we segue schools to ensure its domestic needs a message to wildfires and drowned prompting a jump in global places.