you're watching of the week here on r.t. with us today's top stories and the best outlines of the past seven days rescuers are preparing to lift the russian cruiser in the bottom of the volga river in a matter of minutes last sunday claiming around one hundred thirty dives so the operation will provide answers as to why the catastrophe happened in the first place. richard monoliths a former c.e.o. in the u.k. is arrested as part of the investigations into phone hacking and police bribery of the news of the world the media mogul has repeated his apologies on ethical

practices by the newspaper in an effort to save his empire is crumbling. libyan rebels now have are full of diplomatic recognition from washington and with access to colonel gadhafi assets frozen in the u.s. it on a covert intensified attacks in the capital tripoli in an effort rather to oust the libyan leader he vows never to leave. plus intercontinental cash crunch as america faces up to the possibility of to fold europe's debt crisis contagion up piles more pressure on the euro the u.s. congress needs to raise the debt ceiling to avoid financial disaster italy is on the verge of needing out. parts of my colleague old auto bring you all the latest news and half an hour's time but for now an award winning documentary about one of the biggest environmental and human rights disasters in american history thanks for watching.

a. leg lewis blayse says. sled slowly led to the car a lead. slowly. slowly slowly lee's leg

long luck i am lead led . most of the carbon that we mine from across the earth is millions of years old coal particularly interesting because. you know there's been a g.e. generated coal actually it may be 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 badgett in the late seventy's and early eighty's hundreds humans began to hide and extract fossil carbon from lee 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 we would not return to the atmosphere but those rates are tiny compared to the ability of humans to grow large machines to deliver a large quantities of this material so the surface will be yours where it is burned it will be used for generation of better doing. we have larger quitman that was introduced on surface mines about twenty five years ago carol washington which accounted for the the ability to recover coal seams that heretofore been on. the use of drag on stuff that mining seems that we're an economic it's. and even physically impossible. without the use of it. many people twenty five years ago when the first company said it wasn't going to brag land they were last place edition away in the world and you get

a piece we'll put them like that on the marriage of southern appalachia and they were determined through engineering abilities and persistence to make certain that it worked and end it hey it's. ok man cliff. when things are going. to be.

easy going. to sleep in something. and. be seen the saying. great think of these world you know right now we got our children will be protected this guy from treatment are you going back and i can't get this. the people who come in on. my guess be able to cover for me if you call it from under current president if they're not. forcing. church to destroy your work. is it not a plea.

to see. the. damage at least some of them. need to keep getting out there and pretending he's community snap if dismantling the picture. once these mountains are gone there is no more afterlife there is no more west virginia it don't grow by a it's not going to come back i mean you know we had a politician get up on t.v. not long ago he said well the reason the ginseng it's being extinct because the deer in. well what about this thousand acres. that's not the garage sale process mountaintop removal coal mining it's an awesome display of coal extraction engineering it is also quite simple once a site is a dinner for clear cutting begins next explosives are used to blast away the earth

and period holes and. then machinery including massive shovels called drag lines move the overburden which is then deposited in an 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 these are likely actually. in 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 appalachia training a group called their campaign mountain just this summer there was going to be kind of this renewal of coal mining and a c. and some of those mines were going to be you know mounds of removal mines. you know we were like hey this is you know now we're dealing with this issue it's you 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 let's help them make this issue of national issues that everybody has the dealing. say what they don't want. since some ways they're dividing our community i've got nothing against free speech if someone you come in here the man didn't pay for the jobs and clothes or schools they own. and i and all that you're lucky you don't get 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 and marsh fork west virginia. c'mon 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 khowst slurry which is why it's toxic it's toxic material it has arsenic layer chromium there's a lot of really really bad chemicals in this sludge there is a lake at the two point eight billion gallons of coast guard sitting behind this elementary school four hundred yards up on top of a mile. there's two hundred twenty eight people to the school. the sophistication of engineering it goes into the construction of the woods as i suspect not duplicated in any other physical structure anywhere in in the world nine hundred seventy two buffalo creek there is this disaster where one of these impoundments basically blew out and millions of gallons of this nasty sludge and water went barreling down

a small holler and killed one hundred twenty five people just with 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's been made since the earthquake off the river and you got seriously local problems over you got the magnetite you got to walk you got the ammonia they used the bad and the bad stuff they use diesel fuel in there they mix always stuff together you got bad headaches all the time you got i asked my problems with her more more down there i mean here's. the train car wash ok it's. with i often look in

a lot of people. all the time it is there i even call the time the kids are coming home with a listers in their mile little tiny blisters the size of opinionated are when their mild little. but not everyone shares their concerns in the small community where many residents work for the coal industry that surrounds them to power point counterpoint to 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 confident and more like collard players and unlike us by she never came home filthy dirty with her or you know any big mess and i've made a call right first approve that she had she's not had anything other than a common cold like any other can you not child. we've. been. frustrated local school and government officials you know action on the safety of marsh working elementary eduardo whose granddaughter kayla

attends mark's work home entry launches the pennies a promise campaign to raise six million dollars to build a new school and so with us here. is that. the side they're going to take your money. no money to build. and let's you want to build a school because i like. to start the pennies or promise campaign wiley and his granddaughter taylor presented governor with over four hundred dollars in pennies he couldn't orders have collected. we like to see the governor we have some money to present him. and so the story is going to. step kids everywhere regular doing a good to see if we have

a right to hear from our fork elementary like her usually pretty fair let's. face it i don't see. people going to start. school since. all you get is a step three and. it's. ok one has a little bit this is ok i'm fine ok. now we're let me just say you know this because i know we worked on the summer we talked about it the force of the school yes or the school were we out with the local board of education to start all over sure that smack up a whole lot we're not going to get them you took us for north to protect the way what's we're going to do it's the women test it would fill in for you today ok you know what we're not going to do what we've been doing you put a price on our children see it when you store dislike of what's ration in our state

he 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 nowhere and i don't mean to put you in a soft spot here sir but enough is enough enough is 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 do a better job and i personally i don't mean to be upset and from various but if this was your child would you not be well you know the you know since she's beautiful so what we've seen we care about our children down there and there are serious problems with a lot of issues and i know you're aware of there's intimidation going on there a lot of intimidation the teacher the spoke out last year now he's been talking about are so. what are you going to do now do everything in my heart that i think

that that means that i do everything in my god god's word that we got to be a. journalist jeff goodell his book big coal the dirty secret behind america's energy future explores the history and use a pole 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 i 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 district and it was just like hell had opened up before me. and the money from the coal mining has

always gone to the top and siphoned out by through the owners essentially whether their corporations are called barons like our 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 grounds quickly. i. owe to little's everything of mine and love just go with you part of yourself like

. and people started out into manners you had to have those tools and they let you get a more creative company still. for about three presses but it is way lower your coke head company stores they are g.e. you live near kochi if you work for the in need of your kitchen some i also store mine and one of the others on matters that are still owed to a company store you can pay just won't pay them well. he made company money group don't place it wasn't it was appropriate store as i got an updated script it's worth more today than it was. right. usual and healthy though you can make more two dollars in a row heres an advocate trick question so use will to kill the chip to. give you a handful of stamp you number of what you got your car loaded with coal somewhere

on this car you highways checked. i would be a mule driver the times i'd be go on board. in one state school he will pull a and think oh and here drop it off unhook each meal from it called the phone. right now it real easy loud rock him what you call and we show you why you got a water tank in a slot. of a little water dripping occur about a writer. and the spirit is good but it works pretty. much. a problem oh yes. oh yes you know look at the history of our if they finally they was big communities the other day with great rings big companies still worth everything the people i mean this is the company house down that river off the set down. our schools are getting there because there's no money at all with

the wars were closed and nothing's coming back these are other people with this coal company in their tie can take an entire week and never put nothing dark it's all going to go early worth reviewing your broker to be gone there will. be. five years. topper move will cite moved into the head waters of the stream that runs from a home in the past five years i've been flooded saving times there's been about five acres of my property it's washed away into the stream down below where i live . my properties been completely devastated devalued there's no way i could say on relocate my property it's worth it the mining company had the option of getting in touch with me and let me know what was coming in

they'd be they trapped me and my kids the 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 home to it i live in the middle of this why. because it's ok it's ok that maybe he'll be away from southern west virginia where is the middle of this scale so. my son. roan. i don't know nobody knows than i don't these million jobs i know i'm john and i thank god they are doing their day and wrong across appalachians coal fields mining jobs are vital to local economies my husband forthwith left me for. a going on here sales and 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 and 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. and 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 it's good you have 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 will be underground they'll be they will not be exposed to oxygen then 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 thing 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 the brew of material that you would want any exposure to it ought 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 and six of these are from the post martin county you know the biggest environmental disaster in the southeastern united states six samples representing

what that material that our rivers and streams really is which i find rather prosperous three hundred nine million gallons 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 once 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 soem carmelita brown has been battling for clean want to see. twenty some years ago. our not a lot of time but lacked strike an asteroid hollering and screaming and my husband got up and asked and asked me what was wrong he came in he said when he looked at me he said that i want god he said that's post sorry. we went and looked at

fifteen wells and sent the samples off to the laboratory got the testing results back and took 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 pour. pretty good compared to what it was this morning these documents from the west virginia department of natural resources researched by mountain justice summer volunteers are permits for courseware injections that took place in the early one nine hundred eighty s. at the slurry impoundment located approximately two miles above carmelita brown soem this permit shows that over two hundred million gallons of slurry was injected in nineteen eighty-four in one thousand nine hundred five this permit 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 thing was other wastes underground as an e.p.a. one 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 these i have last year the with the pull out the normal for some reason went bankrupt or whatever all the story towards you know who's responsible for it and i got the paperwork we know the calories are responsible for the clean up of the fully. clearly don't have it nobody wanted to help but nobody want nobody was concerned and it wasn't only me it was oh my neighbors that down this road the patients that i see for all have significant medical problems that other people don't have. a greater number of people thought i was disease and 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. humiliation that seems a fair amount of i've just ill health my next door neighbors on a kidney dialysis another neighbor i'm on his own 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 the causes kidney damage. now several people are now necessary has lost babies they carry them six months and have maybe stillborn. great for the fleece look we've got. the biggest issues get the human voice face to face with the news makers.

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