Word: coaling
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Loud blasting began years ago. Massey and other large coal-producing companies like Patriot Coal, in St. Louis, employ a particularly destructive form of excavation called mountaintop mining, which exposes entire coal seams by blowing off a mountain's summit; used mostly in Appalachia, such mining produces 130 millions tons of coal in the region per year. It's less popular in other coal-rich spots such as Texas, where the coal is deeper underground and requires a different kind of mining to unearth. Coal companies say mountaintop mining is also cheaper than traditional mining: rather than burrowing under...
Some three million pounds of explosives are detonated each day in West Virginia for coal mining, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, and the process shears up to 800 feet of elevation off each mountain peak, says Margaret Palmer, director of the University of Maryland's Center for Environmental Science. The black scars run visibly up the spine of the central Appalachians. And the explosions don't sound lightly: "When they put these blasts off, it's horrendous," says Maria Gunnoe, 41, of the community advocacy group Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, who lives in Bob White, W. Va., 12 miles...
Stuck Between a Rock and a Coal Mine...
...mountaintop mining. Recently, representatives of the U.S. Office of Surface Mining visited Appalachia to study the effects in the area. Such mining is devastating the environment, "polluting our streams, poisoning our air and destroying our culture and heritage," says Judy Bonds, co-director of the West Virginia-based Coal River Mountain Watch...
That may be true, but coal mining is not going away anytime soon. More than one-third of the coal burned in the U.S. is mined in the central Appalachian Mountains, which stretch from Tennessee to Ohio, and nearly half of the electricity used by Americans is powered by coal. Despite ongoing talk of a new clean energy economy - "Whoever builds a clean energy economy...is going to own the 21st-century global economy," President Barack Obama said at a meeting of governors in Washington in February - coal is too plentiful in the U.S. to be abandoned. The International Energy...