Fox News cares about clean water, for themselves and their babies. As for anyone else, let them drink Kool Aid.
Many West Virginians don’t blame the coal industry for the spill of a coal-processing chemical that has tainted the water of 300,000 people around Charleston, the state capital.
Indeed, some of those who live in parts of coal country — much of which is suffering from decades-long legacies of mining pollution — say coal is the state’s only hope for employment and progress.
To the outside observer, mining can look like a blight on the Mountain State, not a blessing, with dozens of white and gray scars of blown-off green mountaintops across southern West Virginia visible in satellite images from miles above.
But the feeling on the ground can be very different.
“This is just a freak accident with the water thing, in my opinion,” said Timothy McKinney, 30, a laid-off coal miner in Prenter, W.Va. “I’ve been in coal mining since I was out of high school, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the coal industry in general.”
McKinney said he is upset with the chemical company responsible for the spill, which was one of the most dramatic environmental disasters in recent memory in the area and the cause of national headlines.
He says Freedom Industries should have had better safety measures in place, including multiple walls of containment, to stop the accident. He said that would have halted the leak into the Elk River, which made his family’s water undrinkable for days and emitted a pungent, licorice odor into their homes.
McKinney said reports of rashes due to the contaminated water were “all over Facebook” in his community. But he didn’t connect the coal-processing chemical spill with the coal industry as a whole.
Clean water has been a problem here for decades.
Until a lawsuit against nearby coal mine companies two years ago, many Prenter residents had either drawn sulfurous-smelling water from wells or driven miles down the road to buy bottled water. The plaintiffs in the case said coal processing waste pumped underground by coal companies had seeped into their water supply, turning it a red or orange color and making it smell like rotten eggs.
After the suit, residents say, they received connections to the West Virginia American Water system. Yet on Jan. 9 they found out they couldn’t temporarily drink that either, due to the chemical spill.
Despite the accident, the decline of the coal industry — which McKinney blames on political factors — is what he believes is the region’s biggest long-term problem, not the poisoning of the water supply. His main wish for his state is a bigger, not smaller, coal industry, providing good jobs which are not curtailed by environmental regulations.
“I’m speaking for a thousand, fifteen hundred people that’s been laid off throughout West Virginia. There’s a lot of families that’s lost homes, families that’s been broken up over it,” McKinney said, speaking near a creek that emitted a strong odor of sulfur as a steady stream of large dump trucks from a nearby mine rumbled past.
Many environmental activists find it frustrating that people harmed by coal pollution will apologize for the industry.
“I call it Coalfield Stockholm syndrome, and it is on a mass scale,” said Dustin White, an activist with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, who is from Boone County himself.
“We are programmed early on,” said White, 30, who is also the son of a coal miner. “They (the industry) have ingrained themselves in every aspect of our lives.”
“They are in our schools, telling children they should ‘grow up like Daddy and become a coal miner,’ and telling them they don’t need an education when they can work for the industry and make large amounts of money. Even have ‘coal career days’ for children in grade schools.”
In the boom-and-bust economy of coal, however, the lack of jobs has effects that are hard to ignore and that stoke fears of the industry’s decline.
CHARLESTON, WEST VIRGINIA — Maria Gunnoe remembers a time when the rivers in Boone County, West Virginia ran clear.
“In my childhood, I fished these streams, I spent time in these streams,” Gunnoe, who lives in Bob White, a town in Boone County, said. “That’s what we did. Nobody needed a pool; the streams were our playground.”
In September, the stream where she used to fish and play as a child turned white. The culprit was 2,400 gallons of a chemical called DT-50-D, which is used to cover coal and rail cars to cut down on dust. It had leaked into the river from the Eastern Associated Coal prep plant, and to Gunnoe, it was just one more example of how the coal and chemical industries have polluted West Virginia — the second poorest state in the nation — over her lifetime.
“This happens all the time. The coal companies are using stuff here that would absolutely eat the skin off of your body,” she said. “This time, it ended up in the water supply, and the world knows about it now. But it happens all the time.”
Hannity is a cockroach with a $50 haircut. Someone should step on him. And did others notice how many of the other talking heads were the “usual suspects” from the circular firing squad of the right wing? Like Coulter and Malkin? Didn’t see a whole lot of “fair and balanced” there.
Love the crickets at the end, a much sweeter sound.
I can’t get over that name, Freedom Industries… 😐
Yes, those “Good ‘Muricans” who pillage and rape in the name of capitalism and free markets like to wave the flag and wrap themselves in it.
Look in the business section of your phone book and you will find much “Liberty”, “Patriot”, and “American”. There are so many folks that want to use “American” that you may see someone using “AAA American” so that they can get on the head of the line. LOL
Yeah, the real freedom comes from clean energy that’s there rain or shine, day or night, requires no rail spurs or pipelines coming in and neatly holds the vast bulk of its effluents in a few easily-stored canisters. Let’s not forget the well-paid, SAFE jobs it provides.
Providing what people need and being free from need yourself. What could be better?
Well, at least those big coal companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on green technology that will fuel job growth and create new opportunities for those laid off workers instead of throwing that money at frauds like the Heartland Institute and James Inohofe, right?
Doesn’t anyone want to talk about the Coalfield Stockholm Syndrome? We have a lot if sufferers in SW VA too, just as there are in all the eastern coal-producing states. Home is home, and folks will go to great depths of self-delusion to stay there.
If West Virginia is the second poorest state in the U.S. ,then it doesn’t seem that focusing on the the coal industry has been all that beneficial to the state.
Maybe they should rethink their options.
The problem is that many in W VA and other dying coal mining areas have few if any options beyond coal mining. They are the prototypical folks that the Republicans say should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and succeed…….except that they can’t afford to buy boots (or boiled and ate them long ago).
Yeah,that’s kinda my point.If the powers that be,and the citizens had been more willing to promote economic growth in more diverse industries rather than depending on a failing long term strategy of coal,then they probably would be better positioned to weather the coming fall of the coal industry.
They are swimming against the tide,and the sooner they grasp that,the better off they will be in the long run.In the short run it will be tough sledding…maybe literally!
“You understand coal production is way down … and no projections say that it’s coming back,” Stollings told Helmick. “I urge you to get cracking on that — hog farms or any other post-mining land use.” – Senator Ron Stollings, D-Boone County, WV.
‘Helmick said his immediate focus on expanding the agriculture industry is looking at using reclaimed mountaintop removal sites in southern West Virginia for non-traditional agriculture opportunities, including hog farms.
He said the pork industry in North Carolina produces $2.5 billion in sales, but hog farming in that state has grown to the point where it is impossible to get permits for new or expanded farms.’
From:
Senator raises issue of legalizing growing marijuana for export
http://www.wvgazette.com/News/201401140098?page=2
Out near Beckly, WV there are abandoned coal mines that are perpetually on fire; so says my college roommate who lives in the area. The fires can be seen at night through the mine shaft openings on the mountains.
There are a couple of hundred coal fires burning in the U.S. and many more around the world, some have been burning for 50 years and more. The best known one in the U.S. is probably the Centralia, PA fire. There’s a great book about it —-“Fire Underground”—-reads like a novel.
Do Republicans want Dirty Air and Dirty Water and to Throw Grandma off a cliff? No. But they DO seem to want to inflate every perceived point of debate into a hallucination from the coming Communist Apocalypse. Having a civil debate on policy shouldn’t require we enter the recesses of Hannity’s actively fear-based imagination, to fight its endless ranks of Strawman Zombie’s.
Don’t think this is unrelated to Tom Perkins, all $6 billion of him, comparing himself to the victims of the Holocaust. Who knew that advocating for the well-heeled was so stressful? These guys are suffering from PTSD.