a leap. 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 wins begin to day and extract fossil carbon from the earth's crust coal oil that will 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 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 and it would be 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 scene step work and 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 can 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. commander was pleasant. feeling. to see. digital be. released. soon. the easy way. to get lisa's.

dad. says it's sleek lose. weight think these little children i'm sorry little children will be protected that night from treatment for your family currently. event that you am to be but it becomes real no longer we're going to marry your name and i guess be able to borrow it from me to come and from either apparent cause from the air france or there are a number of years to forsake your dad and our children to destroy your reaction lord. and such are. simply a plea. bargain to take your empire to come the. league. the slum. sleep. it's.

never the life down my family's september. let me need to keep her back for jamie's community 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 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 is the knicks think the deer are in. order bought this thousand acre. site that's nothing. now the 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 including massive shovels called drag 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 would say 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. say 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're lucky you 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 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 it sits three hundred feet away three hundred fifty feet away it. sits directly caused the river and you've got serious problems over you got the magnetite you got the walk you got the ammonia they use the bad. 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 more down or sears. tower for you a lot of kids. in allow them keep like look all the time 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 times a day and more like college close and like i say 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. have. been . graded at local schools and government officials you know action on improving safety and more work elementary. 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 little. but inside they're going to take your money. no money no. money she want to tell her things. because i don't like. to start the pennies or promise campaign wiley and his granddaughter kayla presented governor with over four hundred dollars in pennies he put in orders never collector. we'd like to see the governor we have some money to present him. to. right. now to step down kids everywhere regular doing a good to see if we have a young lady here from marsh fork elementary in. the south and. let's. face it

i don't see. people going to study. after school since. well you get to seventy three and. it's. ok to have a little get what you get this is our pay i'm 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 were we out with the local board of education let's just start all over that smack up a whole lot we're not going get them you took us for north to protect the waveland west we're going to use it women has its 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 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 in a soft spot here if you're good 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 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 for you know since she's beautiful what's your what we've seen we care about our child. down there in there sure is probably just a lot of issues and i know you're aware there's intimidation going on there a lot of intimidation teacher spoke out last year now he's been told the better shot you want to going to do it how do everything in my power that i want that that means that i do everything in my god god's word 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 is 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 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 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 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 these. tools there is not in love disco with you bottom yourself. it if you start out into madness you had to have those tools and 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 all matters dad to a still owed to company store you could pitch it won't pay him well. he made company money scrip don't place it wasn't it was company store i got an updated script it's worth more today than it was made. right. usually until the you know you could make more to dolls day right here sell the kit trick maturing so use middle today killed the chick to. give you a hand full of aids stamp you number on what you got your car loaded with cold somewhere on this car you and i want to check to see and be a mule driver lead times i'd be go on board. in one state school he would pull

a pic or in here drop it off unhook his meal from it come to the phone. right now it really easy loud rock him if you cold who show your life you got a water tank in a slot. of the little water drip in your career bud see it right there. and doesn't smell really good but it works pretty good. all. right number oh yes. oh yes you know look at the history of our area faithfully they was big communities that are they were skate rings big companies still worth everything the people i mean the company housed all down that river. or. our schools are good because there's no money at all the stores are or close and nothing's coming back these are people with this coal company in their tie can take

an entire week and never put it is all going to go there really west virginia broke the big go on there with. five years ago. mountaintop removal site moved into the head waters of the string that runs by my 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 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 fall into 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 hail so am i ask my son. roan. i don't know nobody knows than i don't own species me in 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 my essay that's where we get our money in 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 will 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 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 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 fals 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 one half of the structure itself. domingo 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 it he 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'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 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 in 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 the moral for some reason went bankrupt or whatever all the story pods 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. 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 with all timers disease old timers disease memory loss of say 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 headache had to have a kidney transplant i have problems with my kidneys the timea water exposes them to many types of metals cadmium and others so causes kidney damage now several people not necessary has lost babies i have carried them six months and have maybe stillborn. hungry for the feast we've got. the biggest issues get the human voice face to face with the news makers.

in india in the movie. hotel the grand imperial truly.

runs as the colonel was hoto treat. today's top stories the. rescuers are preparing to lift a russian cruiser from the bottom of the volga river where. one hundred thirty nine . relatives and investigators are all looking for answers as to why the ship sunk so fast we'll bring you all the details from the recovery site in just a moment. the apologies keep coming and so do the arrests rupert murdoch once again says sorry for the phone hacking by one of his british papers as his former c.e.o. in the u.k. . banking on change libyan rebels now have full diplomatic recognition from washington with access to. u.s. . intercontinental cash crunch as america faces up to the

possibility of default europe's debt crisis. you're watching the weekly on r.t. with the main headlines of the past week and the latest developments it's been described as the biggest disaster in russia's modern history in the space of just three minutes a pleasure cruiser with two hundred eighty. people onboard went down in the volga river taking over half of its passengers with it really one hundred thirty people were killed many of them children a week later the operation to raise the ship from the bottom is underway as tom barton now reports the bulgaria is still under the water at the moment behind me you can probably see the tops of two enormous cranes that have been brought up from

further downstream and they're attached to them or is it an enormous cable that goes down and is threaded underneath the ship and that cable is going to be used first of all at the moment divers and the crane teams are in the process of trying to write that will garrett was leaned on his left side and then once they've righted it they'll be able to start to lift it up a lot of the complications that divers are facing are due to the way under speed that the ship sank. firstly the fact that it's on its left side will mean that divers will have to go under that left side as it's righted first of all to check that the ship is structurally sound to be ready to be raised and also to try and look for some of the fifteen bodies which have still to be accounted for which still haven't been found then once they start to raise the ship divers are going to have to first of all try and find essentially the hole that let in all the water and on some of the ship once they have found out they'll want to seal that hole and all.