Published: December 04, 2007 07:30 am         

Lawmakers get real close view of mountaintop removal

Kodak, Ky — Go on. Drive up the mountain – if you’ve got the nerve. Up a narrow, winding road 15 miles southeast of Hazard, criss-crossing railroad tracks, past the little Kodak Church of the True and Living God, up Montgomery Creek, along a ledge precariously perched over a holler.

Watch out for the huge coal trucks, carrying 40, 50, even 60 tons of coal – what the locals call “a graveyard hump because they can’t stop and if you’re in the way, you’re in trouble” – coming down that same road, snaking between the cliff on one side and house trailers perched on the ledge over that holler on the other.

But when you get there – there’s no there. The mountaintop is flat gone. Just rock and rubble.

Look over the side, down into that valley where the little stream used to gurgle and now runs muddy along a man-made – well, ditch really. There’s your mountaintop, pushed over the side by the coal companies hauling out the coal – and the profits.

According to the folks who live on the road, the coal companies don’t much mind who or what gets in their way when they’re pushing the mountains down into the valleys and streams and hauling out their coal. And they think people in Frankfort don’t care. That may have changed Monday.

Several members of the House Appropriations and Revenue Committee, led by Chairman Harry Moberly, D-Richmond, made that drive Monday and they were struck by what they saw and heard.

“It was very moving,” Moberly said. “It’s one thing to hear it in testimony but it’s another to see it up close and the people who are directly affected by it.”

Committee members were there to fulfill a promise they made earlier this year after Teri Blanton of Berea, a past chair of the Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, testified against incentives for coal companies in an energy bill before the General Assembly.

“We heard a lot of passionate testimony about the heavy footprint coal mining has on the quality of life in eastern Kentucky,” Moberly said, explaining Monday’s trip.

Committee member Rep. Don Pasley, D-Winchester, twice unsuccessfully tried to pass a bill to prevent coal companies from pushing the land over the coal, the “over burden,” into streams. But it languished in the committee of Rep. Jim Gooch, D-Providence, who is a coal champion. Now, according to the KFTC, 421 miles of stream are gone. (Gooch also recently made headlines by inviting testimony from non-scientists who said global warming isn’t man-made or a serious threat.)

Pasley said he introduced the bill after learning how sediment from the valley fills pollutes the headwaters of the Kentucky River, affecting the drinking water of nearly 800,000 people living in central Kentucky where his district lies in Clark and Madison counties.

John Roark, of Montgomery Creek, worked for CSX for 30 years, hauling coal out of the mountains. But this is different, he said. The people of Perry County aren’t against coal mining, just this kind of coal mining which destroys their mountains, their way of life, and leaves the coal producing counties poorer than ever and their ecologically devastated.

Roark recalled how a coal company blasted rock into a child’s inflatable swimming pool down the road while his mother video taped the event.

“But then she got a real good job with the coal company and wouldn’t let us have the tape,” Roark said. “They get away with it because of the politicians. They take suit cases of money down to Frankfort and control the politicians.”

Maybe not any more. Moberly said what lawmakers saw Monday will inspire them to pass Pasley’s bill.

Truman Hurt, pastor of the Kodak Church of the True and Living God, said the creek behind it has been cleaned of coal sediment four times in three years to prevent flooding. The church no longer draws its water from wells destroyed by the blasting. They bring it in in tanks. A coal company brought a nearby resident “four or five cases of bottled water” after blasting destroyed his well.

The taps in Ricky Handshoe’s house leak methane gas.

“The inspector said it was safe, but then he asked me if anybody smoked in the house. I said, no, and he said it wouldn’t be a good idea. So, how can it be safe?”

“Several times a day, it blasts the pictures off the wall,” said Sam Gilbert of Letcher County who lives “halfway up Big Black Mountain” underneath a containment pond and a mountaintop removal operation. “It destroys the peace we once felt and the dust hovers in the valleys. The stream next to my house, every couple of months, runs like chocolate milk.”

Gilbert said eastern Kentuckians have always been willing to share their pure water with folks downstream, “but now I guess you’ll just have to share the filth, too.”

He begged legislators to pass Pasley’s bill.

“You owe it to the people of eastern Kentucky,” Gilbert told them. “You owe to the environment and ecosystem. You owe it to your honesty and integrity. You owe it to God who made us stewards of this land and water. And most of all, you owe it to all mankind to stop this trend that supports evil and destroys our land and water.”



RONNIE ELLIS writes for CNHI News Service and is based in Frankfort. Reach him at rellis@cnhi.com.



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