from the streets of canada. trying to corporations rule the day. welcome back it's half past the hour here in the russian capital if you're watching r t a recap of our top story. we've been rebels are gaining on colonel gadhafi as they advance and westwards closer to the capital tripoli. as strikes help them recapture several key oil town meanwhile nature has agreed to take over command corporations in the country which will go beyond enforcing the no fly zone. and most of the pouring intervention is a result of good office crimes against his own citizens that ordinary people shouldn't suffer during their strikes russia's forces have been too reckless in

their reactions as reports from forces in and come forward. and in all the news this week over two hundred arrested in london just serious rioting pulling the future approaches of half a million people against bridges go on plans to slash public spending by two billion pounds but demonstrations also agreed with citizens angry cuts cash flows into banks and. the fukushima nuclear facilities management has apologized for wrong reporting that the radiation levels at the top ten million times the norm a mistake brought the media about creation of or just the teams at the site. now we explore a controversial mining technique which is fear it could bring a bald one of the greatest environmental catastrophe in american history and the.

winning film is next. i am up a leg lewis blayse says good. sled sled to start a leg of the leg. a. long. pole

leg long lug and leg. a leg . most of the carbon that we mine from across the the earth is millions of years old coal particularly interesting because per unit of energy generated coal actually is maybe the cheapest fuel but it also releases the most carbon to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide beginning in earnest with the development of the steam engine in the late seventeen early eighteen hundreds hemans began to ma and extract fossil carbon from the earth's

crust coal oil natural gas even in the absence of humans over some time period it would be uplifted and subject to erosion and remove what would return to the atmosphere 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 and in the useful generation of energy. 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 on. the use of dragline skylab all that mining seems that were an economic. and even physically impossible. without the use of that many people twenty five years ago

when the first company said that even buying a bright line they were laughed at and they said there's no way in the world you think you can get a piece with quitman like that on the narrow ridges of southern appalachia and and they were determined through engineering abilities and persistence to make certain that it worked and and it has. been there. cliff. when things are going.

to. be. sunny. peavy going. to sleep in spain. and dad and me seeing the saying. wait think these little children. will children will be protected this night from dream and are your family currently. did you am to be for it because. i get to be able to find it for me to call and from either parent cause friend of mine to come here or think damn our children to destroy your reaction lowered. my. plea. to.

see. if the light down might easily stop them. you need to kill her they can ease community map if dismantling the community. once these mountains are gone there is no more of a life. there is no more west virginia it don't grow back. it's not going to 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 the unix thing the deer are in. order bought this thousand acre. site it'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 holes. then 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 legal action 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 demanded people's jobs and clothes or schools they own and i and all that you lucky don't get hurt. if somebody is in california or north carolina or new york city they're 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 that has arsenic. chromium and 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 a mile. there's two hundred twenty eight kids in the school and the sophistication of engineering that goes into the construction of that 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 cold processing facility located directly behind marsh fork elementary so it sits three hundred feet away three hundred fifty feet away it. sits directly cause the river and you've got serious problems over you've 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 you've got. all the time. you've got. problems with her and more and more downer i mean there's

. a lot of kids. in a lot of people like look all the time just drain and all the time the kids will come home with blisters and 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 accountable and if 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 close and unlike us that she never came home. or you know any thickness and i have manacle records to prove that she has not had anything other than a common cold up like any other child. we. didn't. see

graders at local schools and government officials human action on improving safety at marsh work elementary as widely as granddaughter kayla attends march for commentary launches the pennies a promise campaign to raise six million dollars to build a new school and so with us here. it is that. it's inside that money and take your money. no money down to the mother that she wanted to build against. because i don't like. to start the pennies or promise campaign wiley and his granddaughter taylor present the governor with over four hundred dollars in pennies he can order snow collector.

we'd like to see the governor we have some money to present him. the story of a. step down kids everywhere regular doing good to see you have a young lady here from marsh fork elementary in. the south in. which. i don't see. people going to start. at the schools some of them are you going to the center. and. it's. ok to have a little give what you know it's this is our campaign 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 yes sir i'm at the school where we at with the local board of education start all over sure that smack up a whole lot we're not going get them you took us for north to protect the waveland what's we're going to use it women has it's own tell you today ok now you know what

we're not going to do what we've been doing you put a price on our children see it. 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 it is your business 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 going to stay just 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 the enough you know and she's beautiful would say what we should we care about our child. down there and there's serious problems with a lot of issues and i know you're aware there's intimidation going on there

a lot of intimidation a teacher the spoke out last year now he's been told he better start with you we all want to going to do everything in my heart that i want to do that that means that i do everything in my god because of that we got to. learn english jeff goodell's 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 it 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 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 it's 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 as you.

call it tolls there is a mountain 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 moan created it company still. for about three presses put it this way lloyd your coke head company stores they hard you live near kochi if you work for them they don't want kitchen so my also store. and one of the others all matters bad they still owed to company store you could pitch it with home payment. he made company money scrip or price it wasn't good it was company store i got an updated script it's worth more today than it was made. all right. usually until the you know you could make more to dolls day right here sell the kit trick which you so use middle today killed

a chick to. give you hand crawley's stamp you number of what you got your car loaded with cold somewhere on this car you die when you check to see and be a mule driver lead times it be a young boy back to good and stay in school he would pull you to cohen here drop it off unhook his meal from it come to the phone. right now it real easy to loud rock him that you cold who show your life you got a water tank in a slog. of a little water drip in your career bud. and does a smear of good but it works pretty good. problem on all sides. oh you know look at the history of our area especially they with big communities now they will skate rings big companies still worth everything the people i mean the company housed all down that river off stuff and set their.

our schools are good because there is no money 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 all good to go early west virginia broke the big go on the road with. five years. 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 of 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 let me know what was coming at me and they did it and they trapped me in my kid's mouth of 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 don't fall into 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 where is the middle of this hail so am i ask my son. roan. i don't know nobody nutten i don't own these million jobs i don't own jobs and if i thank god i do their day and roam across appalachians coal fields mining jobs are

vital to local economies my husband us work with my essay for just 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 coalfield residents are also concerned about another byproduct of coal production slurry pongs. 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 i mean 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 right out of a coal seam but when you disturb that rock 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 brew 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 posterous 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 one half of 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 gray and asked are the harness cream going to mass has been got up and asked

and asked me what was wrong take a man and he said when he looked at it he said my god he said that's close laurie. we went and looked at fifteen wells. sent 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've never seen water quality that poor. or pretty good compared to what it was this morning these documents from the west virginia department of natural resources researched by mountain just to some are 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 eight million gallons of slurry was injected in one thousand nine hundred eighty four and nine hundred eighty five disbursement 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. tell me don't have it nobody wanted to help us nobody want nobody was concerned and it wasn't only maybe it was oh my mayors 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 with 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 of seemed a fair amount of. ill health mannix the numbers on a kidney dialysis another neighbor a man as is has lost a kidney had it 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 because canadian which now several people are not necessary has lost babies i have carried them six months and have maybe stillborn.

issues that seem much different if you could be sitting on the market if you will be in the arab league one off detour for the meet in some western military intervention in the arab.