the late seventeen early eighteen hundreds here winds begin to be an 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 and return to the last year 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 it would be 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 manacled the use of dragline skylab mining scenes that were an economical to mine and even physically impossible. without the use of that. many people twenty five

years ago when the first company said it will bring a bright line they were laughed at and they said there's no way in the world you can get a piece of equipment like in 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 hands.

i'm going. to be. some. easy going. to kill easy. and. soon it's the sleeping lose. weight class and these little children i'm sorry little children will be protected that night from treatment for your family currently. a pandemic you and the people are going to come along the river and. then they might. again be able to cover it from every car and from either parent cars from the air france or there are a number of years for think that data are cheaper to destroy your present your lower. average monthly. please.

we're going to. sleep. sleep. sleep sleep it's. never the light down my family's september. let me needs to keep moving her desperate techniques community map if dismantling the community. once these lessons are gone there is no more appalachian 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 being extinct the deer are in. order to stiles and. 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 a site is a den of five clear cutting begins next explosives are used to blast away the earth material holes. then machinery including 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 think it's our latest action rather than blacksburg and really. 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 demanding people's jobs and closure schools. and i am all that you're lucky you don't get hurt hurt but. 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 they're 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 there's a lot of really really bad chemicals in this sludge 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. 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 cold processing facility located directly behind marsh fork elementary so he sits three hundred feet away three hundred fifty feet away it. sits directly caused the river and you got sick. so very got the magnetite you got the walk you got the ammonia they use this is bad bad still they use diesel fuel in there they mix all this stuff together you've got bad headaches

all the time you've got. problems occurring more and more downer i mean there's. cleaner for you today a lot of kids. in a lot of people likely cold all the time or just drain and 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 towns a day and more like college closed and like i say never came home dirty with colored dirt or you know any fitness and i have manacle records to prove that she has not had anything other than a common cold up like any other child. we. know that.

frustrated local school and government officials you know action will improve the safety of more work elementary one of the granddaughter kayla attends marsport 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 there and take your money. no money down. the money you want to build against. because i don't like. to start the pennies or promise campaign wiley and his crew. daughter taylor presented governor with over four hundred dollars in pennies he can order a collector. if

. we'd like to see the governor we have some money to present him. a story of a story. that stuck out for kids everywhere you are doing good to see you have a young lady here from marsh fork elementary i heard her say great the south in. which. i don't see. people going to start. at the schools. or you going to the center. and. it's. ok one has a little give here. 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 or another school where we at with the local board of education start all over that smack up a whole lot we're not going to get them. to protect the way the west we're going to

use it women has it's own tell you to ok you know 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 vein 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 on the 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 on 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 richer but if this was your child would be. well you know the love you know when she's beautiful we should we care

about our children 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 the spoke out last year now he's been told he better start with you we don't want you going to do this how do you do everything in my power that i want to do that that means that i do everything in my ga ga's with 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 out 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 lines 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 in 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 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 well. disposable and views the landscape as disposable and it's all about getting the coal out of the ground it's because these are.

hollow tolls and everything you needed to man in love disco with you bottom yourself but. if you start now to matters you had to have those two they don't let you get a loan created it company still. for about three presses put it this way lloyd your coke head company stores they are g.e. you lived near kochi if you work for them they don't want kitchens so miles of store. and one of the others all matters bad they still owed to company store you could just won't pay him. he made company money scrip overpriced 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 zelda kept track. so use mail today held

a check to. give you a hand call a stampede number of what you got your car loaded with somewhere on this car you would i want you checked it would be a meal drive or lead times i'd be a young boy back to states go he would pull a pickup or in here drop it off unhook piecemeal from it to the phone pulled it outside. all right now it really easy to love. who show you the law if you've got a water tank in a slot and. the little boy drip in your career about a. really good work. oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh. oh oh oh oh oh oh oh you look at the history in our area especially with big communities down today with rings big company stores everything the people i mean

the company how it all down that river or stuff. or school for good cause there's no money at all the stores are or clothes and nothing's coming back these are people with this coal company in their tie can take and tyke and never put in the bark is all going to go there will only west virginia broke in the big gone there with. the end of the last. five years. top 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 worthless 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 and my kids have a flooding holiday 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 maybe a hillbilly from southern west virginia is in the middle of this hail so am i ask a play lights on. round. i don't know nobody nothin i don't know species me and john i don't own jobs and if i thank god i do their day and run. across appalachians coal fields mining jobs are biting the local

economies my husband us work with my food for. eight or nine years and i own and. we really appreciate my essay 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 out of a coal seam but when you disturb that rock and start grinding it up into 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 samples 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 what happened with 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 water. twenty some years ago. and water turned black and black straight and asked are the hollowness screamin math 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 had never seen water quality that poor. are 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 eight million gallons of slurry was injected in one thousand nine hundred eighty four and nine hundred eighty five

disbursement describes three injections in one thousand nine hundred four into an abandoned underground mine 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 on the ground i have no idea where it goes. if i if i actually aired it was to pull out the moral person or even went bankrupt or whatever all the story pogs you know who is responsible for the county. we got the paperwork we know the calories are responsible for the clean up of the story. clearly don't have the money nobody wanted to help us nobody want nobody was concerned and it wasn't only made it was oh my mate was 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 seemed a fair amount of just ill health my next door neighbors 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 so causes kidney damage. now several people not necessary has lost babies i have carried them six months and have my be stillborn.

culture is the same of you i can tell you that you love her when most of us were totally different to read remember think you could dance to develop separate needs but that's courtney's the peacekeepers to protect civilians during the bosnian conflict field in their.

breaking news on r t a rescue effort that's now a recovery operation sixty five confirmed dead after their pleasure cruiser sank on sunday and the whole river would settle the rescuers say the hope of finding anyone alive at the sinking sites is no next to nothing but the search continues at the signs of the boat sinking under surrounding islands russian president dmitry give orders for those rings responsible for this saturday to be found and punished and he says the boat was too old to be sailed. but even over those close much remains. it with more than two hundred fifty year round distraught relatives struggle to accept how their loved ones were dragged to their deaths when the polls say within minutes.

six pm in moscow i met treasure with our continuing coverage of the tragedy on the boulder river divers there are now undertaking the grim task of retrieving the kit those killed when their pleasure cruiser sank sunday in central russia sixty five are confirmed dead but recovery teams report seeing more than one hundred bodies trapped inside the ball garia artie's tom barton has the latest assessment from the rescue center in tatarstan. it currently stands rather like this there were now two hundred eight people said to be on the boat after some debate about that that's been settled to two hundred eight now two hundred eighty people which is far more than the boat was supposed to hold one hundred forty eighty of those have been rescued we spoke to the emergencies ministry earlier which is coordinating efforts here but they said the prospect of finding other people survivors is now believe.

a sweep in the bottom of the river the boats been searched my sectors index to examine is closer but there is mehrabad visibility the waves are quite high and this is also making the land difficult according to our specialist there is almost no chance of finding any more survivors feel both banks and the ship will be checked the divers have been working around the clock in shifts on a special platform above where the ship lays on the river bed to try to explore the ship and to extract the bodies from it there are now approaching one particular room in the ship the play room where lots of children went to play and indeed between thirty and fifty children were thought to be there just minutes before the the boat began to sing they're going to try and possibly raise the ship as well i think about bringing special craft up from involves a grasp of this of the process of raising the ship and to helping conduct the most .