Old King Coal

Two-hundred and twenty children attend Marsh Fork Elementary School out here in West Virginia’s Coal River Valley, the poorest region in West Virginia. Or rather, two hundred and twenty children are supposed to attend the elementary school. The fact of the matter is, about 10% of those students are absent from school every week; sick from the mine dust snowing down from a coal loading silo just 225 feet away.

Runoff from the loading silo flows through outtake pipes into a small creek separating the silo from the elementary school. Sometimes the drinking water here runs clear, but sometimes it’s black or red or brown. A 2.8 billion gallon reservoir of coal slurry with more than 200 safety violations rests uphill of the school and town. If it bursts, as one did in Lyburn, West Virginia in 2002, it will be only a matter of seconds before hundreds of people, including all the children at Marsh Fork Elementary, are encased in a tsunami of toxic sludge.

Mountain top removal (MTR) is the dirty, dangerous, and destructive process of blasting the tops off mountains to get at the coal seams inside. The excess sediment is dumped in the valleys between mountains, leveling not only millions of years of geologic processes, but hundreds of years of Appalachian culture. It is this process that is engaged in by Massey Energy, the latest of twelve different coal companies to rape Appalachia in the past 125 years.

When the President addresses his, "fellow Americans" once a year at the State of the Union, don't take it to mean that he's including the residents of the Coal River Valley. If Bush cared about his fellow Americans, he wouldn’t have molested a Clinton Administration environmental impact statement on MTR into a review of the permitting process for coal companies. If Bush cared about his fellow Americans, the EPA’s department of Environmental Justice would not have remained conspicuously quiet on this issue for the past six years.

The people of the Coal River Valley, and people like them in Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee, are being slowly poisoned to death. They are dying, and their democratically elected government is watching it happen. Democrats, in their newfound position of power within Congress, must instate an immediate moratorium on MTR and commission a study into the environmental, health and public safety effects of MTR on the people and regions most affected.

Two-hundred and twenty children deserve better.