engine in the late seventeen early eighteen hundreds here when the began to. 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 might return to the us here 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 energy we have larger quitman it 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 seems 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 to them bring a blank line they were laughed at and they said there's no way in the world you can get a piece of equipment 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 hands.

absolutely going. to be. legal. soon. the easy way. to get to the easiest. sleep and lose. weight think these little children i'm sorry little children will be protected that night from treatment or your family can carry. a bandage you am to be but it becomes real not really for having. been a man. i guess to be able to come in from every car every minor parent comes from the plans to come here to forsake their dad to nurture her to destroy her reaction lower. six months.

going to. sleep. the slum. sleep. it's. never looked down my family's september. we need to keep moving her desperate to meet these communities to match the of dismantling the community and. 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 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 going extinct because the deer are in. order bought this thousand acres.

that's nothing. now the process of mountaintop removal coal mine is an awesome display of coal extraction engineering it is also quite simple once the site is a benefit clear cutting begins next explosives are used to blast away the earth material holes and. 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 hundreds of feet sites are often thousands of acres in size but i think it's our legal 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. say what they're doing one. since some why is there a divide in our community. i've got nothing against free speech but when you come in here demanding people's jobs and clothes or schools. and i am all that you're lucky you don't get hurt her 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 co 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 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 i say it's three hundred feet away three hundred fifty feet away and they are such directly caused the river and you've got. so very got the magnetite you got to walk you've got the ammonia they use this is bad bad still they use diesel fuel in there they mix all the stuff together you've got bad

headaches all the time you've got. problems occurring more and more downer on the sears. tower free trade a lot of kids. are 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 opinion they had 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 players and unlike us that she never came home dirty with or you know any sickness and i've manacle records to prove that she has not had anything other than a common cold up like any other child. we've. been

. frustrated local school and government officials you know action will improve the safety of more work elementary one of the granddaughter kayla attends marsh for commentary launches the pennies a promise campaign to raise six million dollars to build a new schools and so with us here. because. it's inside that money and take your money. money. money if you want to build it in school 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 orders a collector. would

like to see the governor we have some money to present him. as a story of a story. that stuck out to kids everywhere you are doing governor good to see you have a young lady here from our fork elementary in. the south and. let's. face it i don't see. people going to start. at the schools some of them are you going to start. it's. ok to have a little give here. this is our pay and fine ok. now we're let me just you know so . i know we worked on this some we talked about it the fourth time but the school yes or the school where we at with the local board of education start all over that smack up a whole lot we're not going get them you took

a foreigner to protect away from 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 brain 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 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. you do a better job and i appreciate i don't mean to be upset richard but if this was your child would you know. well you know the love you know and she's beautiful sure what

we should we care about our children down there and there are serious problems with a lot of issues and i know you're aware there's intimidation going on there a lot of intimidation the 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 everything in my power 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 dragline 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 they're corporations or call 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.

tolls and everything you needed to man in love disco with you bottom yourself. and if you start now to matters you had to have those two they didn'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 hard you lived near kochi if you work for them they did more kitchen some i also store. and one of the others on matters bad they still owed to company store you could pitch it won't play among. the mad company money group don't price it wasn't good it was a company store i got an updated script it's worth more today than it was made. right. usually and healthy though you could make more to dolls day right here sell

the kit trick merchant so use middle today killed and check 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 a go on board. in one states go he would pull a pic or and here drop it off unhook piecemeal from it come to the phone. right now it really easy loud rock him a few cold who show your life you've got a water tank in a slot. of a little water drip in your career bad. and does a smear of good but it works pretty good. oh. problem oh yes. oh yes you know look at the history of our area faithfully they was big communities now today with scant rings big companies still worth everything the

painful i mean the company housed all down that river off stuff and set their. our schools are good because there's no like all the stores were or close and nothing's coming back these are people with this cold company in their tie can take an entire week and never put it it's all going to go there really west virginia broke in the big go on the road with. bob years. top removal site moved into the head waters of the string 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 letting me know what was coming at me 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 don't holland do 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 a premium on. rome. i don't know nobody knows than i don't own species me and john 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 has worked with my essay for just eight or nine years and they all. we really appreciate last a 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 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 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 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 i asked are the hollering and screaming to my husband 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. sent 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 eight million gallons of slurry was injected in one thousand nine hundred four and one 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 all accounts 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 mayors that down this road well the patients i see from are 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 have seen a fair amount of. 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 causes kidney damage. now several people not necessary has lost babies i have carried them six months and have maybe stillborn.

lose lose lose lose lose. lose lose. the official anti up location. i pod touch from the. child's life on the go. video on demand. gold coast's and feeds now in the palm of your.

question on the. breaking news on our team today the tragic discovery of up to forty children's bodies inside the some complex of closure in central russia it went down in minutes killing around half of the two hundred seventy. hopes. of finding people alive from the sunken ship but the search now goes on to extract the bodies from under the water present it says those responsible for the tragedy are going to be found and prosecuted as he believes the vessel was not in a condition to say just the details. of those postmarked. for me no matter who did it. well it is struggle to accept how their loved ones were dragged to their death for the bulgaria sank you know football to during a weekend trip. hello

it's one am here now in moscow thanks for joining us my name is kevin now and he will be without tea tonight and the main use divers have found the bodies of up to forty children trapped in a room on the sunken pleasure cruiser on the volga river two hundred seven people wrong board when that boat capsized around half of them have perished artie's tom barton is near the rescue operation h.q. in tatarstan. the people here have been waiting hour upon hour with their heads down they haven't wanted to talk to was the media some of them may be related to these young victims some of them to other victims on board the boat some of them may still not have heard about the people they love but this is certainly a great blow and puts a lot of confirmation to the fears of rescuers and their like that none of those children inside that room managed to escape to try and glance back at the journey

that this pope took it was sailing along the volga river popular river cruise location lots of lots of people on the weekends and on the holidays and some a light to go along that when the boat got very rapidly into trouble and when i say very rapidly the whole thing had gone underwater in under three minutes this is what gave rise to such a terrible death toll of the fact that people didn't even have time to put on their life jackets or to organize a proper kind of evacuation before the water was on them or they had to jump into the water one of the relatives of victims on the boat earlier spoke about the ordeal that she has been through. the board means a bed there are three of them in the cabin my son my daughter in law and my grandson my son said he tried to open the cabin door holding his child when the wave crashed into them and he lost a group of my grandson he says you swim towards the light.