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 nothing and i don't own space 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 and they all just 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 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 i mean that's what you're separating from the coal so that's

southern appalachians. on january twenty second of two thousand and two president bush returned to west virginia it is such a wonderful day for us and for west virginia to host a special me with those with a special bond to our state please and gentleman the president of the united states i'm. looking to a better job in america one of these days we're going to be driving you know automobiles that are fuel differently and that's going to exciting times for america and we're just new technologies coming down and we can encourage those technologies. so conservation technological development got to be an integral part of energy folks we need more supply you know workers welcome back here in the back and he said i'm real repairing a machine that digs for go we need to use coal we've got a lot of it and we need to make sure that we. were the. way around this. for the past twenty years larry gibson and his family have been fighting to preserve their ancestral home place on kafer down outside charleston west virginia and when i met with a call come in to file my property here me i'm not family members and they tel

coal slurry contained in more than one hundred pound mints in west virginia alone the total quantity of coal slurry in the rest of southern appalachians is not. on december twenty second two thousand and eight acall ash impoundment at the tennessee valley authorities kingston fossil plant failed when an earthen dike broke spilling over one point one billion gallons of coal ash sludge over three hundred acres. coal ash sludge has waste created from the burning of coal at the kingston coal plant it is believed to contain toxic compounds including arsenic and mercury. the tennessee valley authority estimates the cost of the cleanup job or eight hundred twenty five million dollars this spill is ten times larger than the exxon valdez spill in alaska and is believed to be america's largest environmental disaster to date with throwing away the next generation's most valuable resource.