Responding to Harmful Government Inaction, Protestors Stop Blasting on Coal River Mountain

Four Pro­tes­tors cur­rent­ly on Coal Riv­er Moun­tain. Two locked down to drill rig on Bee Tree Per­mit site. Mine secu­ri­ty and coun­ty police are cur­rent­ly there as well. Blast­ing is still halt­ed.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 11/21/09
Con­tact: Zoe Beavers 304–854-7372
Email: news@climategroundzero.org

PETTUS, W. Va. – Ear­ly this morn­ing two con­cerned cit­i­zens, Dea Gob­lirsch and Nick Mar­tin, locked down to a drill rig on Coal Riv­er Mountain’s Bee Tree moun­tain­top removal site, effec­tive­ly stop­ping blast­ing. Two oth­ers, Grace Williams and Lau­ra Von Dolen, joined them in direct sup­port, hold­ing a ban­ner with the mes­sage “Save Coal Riv­er Moun­tain”.

These non­vi­o­lent pro­tes­tors have tak­en this action to bring atten­tion to the extreme dan­ger fac­ing res­i­dents of the Coal Riv­er Val­ley from blast­ing near the Brushy Fork Impound­ment. They plan to stay locked down until law enforce­ment removes them.

Res­i­dent of Rock Creek, W Va., Del­bert Gun­noe, stat­ed his con­cerns with the blast­ing, “You know when they put a blast over there, and it shakes the win­dows over here, at what, ¾‑a-mile dis­tance, imag­ine what it does over there.” Gun­noe con­tin­ued, “if [the impound­ment] did bust…what would be the destruc­tion? The town of Whitesville would no longer exist.”

The four are fear­ful of the blast­ing that Massey Ener­gy began in late Octo­ber. These blasts are 200 feet from the Brushy Fork Impound­ment, per­mit­ted to hold nine bil­lion gal­lons of tox­ic coal slur­ry. The impound­ment sits atop miles of hol­low, abound­ed under­ground mines, fur­ther endan­ger­ing its integri­ty. By Massey’s own esti­mates, rough­ly 998 peo­ple will die should the dam break. The emer­gency evac­u­a­tion plan states that a 40-foot wall of sludge, crest­ing at 72 feet, will flow through the val­ley, reach­ing 20-feet-high about 15 miles down the road. Apart from the ini­tial flood, the impact of this poten­tial spill would be felt along the Coal River’s 88 miles.

“The Brushy Fork Sludge Impound­ment keeps res­i­dents of the Coal Riv­er Val­ley up at night, wait­ing for eight bil­lion gal­lons of tox­ic coal slur­ry to come rush­ing towards them,” said Dea Gob­lirsch, one of the two locked down. “I don’t know how Massey exec­u­tives sleep sound­ly at night.”

Hydrol­o­gist, Dr. Rick Eades spoke of con­cerns about the sta­bil­i­ty of the dam as blast­ing occurs. He ques­tioned “blast­ing where under­ground mines exist­ed in the Eagle coal seam, the pos­si­bil­i­ties for adverse­ly affect­ing near-sur­face bedrock in a way that could pos­si­bly enhance path­ways for slur­ry to be released via the sub­sur­face and bypass the dam.”

The con­cern is that slur­ry will break into under­ground mine shafts and blow out through old mine open­ings on the side of the moun­tain. This poten­tial­i­ty for Coal Riv­er Moun­tain mir­rors the cause of the world’s largest slur­ry spill which occurred in Mar­tin Coun­ty, Ky. In 2000, 250 mil­lion gal­lons of slur­ry broke forth from a 2.2‑billion-gallon impound­ment, killing near­ly all life in the Big Sandy Riv­er. Its impact reached all the way to the Ohio Riv­er, about 100 miles away.

Ear­li­er this week, EPA sent out a let­ter to Mar­fork Coal Co., a sub­sidiary of Massey Ener­gy Co., air­ing con­cerns about the absence of a val­ley fill per­mit, and request­ing an exten­sive amount of infor­ma­tion con­cern­ing the moun­tain­top removal oper­a­tion on the Bee Tree site.

In note of this, Nick Mar­tin, cur­rent­ly locked down, said, “The EPA’s recent action proves that the com­mu­ni­ties’ con­cerns about this site are shared at the high­est lev­els of gov­ern­ment.”

Matt Louis-Rosen­berg, a Cli­mate Ground Zero activist, adds, “Coal Riv­er Wind attempt­ed to get a meet­ing with the gov­er­nor for a year and it took peo­ple sit­ting in his office to get him to sit down and meet with con­cerned com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers, just like it takes our actions up on Coal Riv­er Moun­tain to get the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment to step in.”

The con­cern showed by the EPA reflects what the res­i­dents of the Coal Riv­er Val­ley have known for a long time; the Brushy Fork Impound­ment is putting lives in dan­ger, and the blast­ing on Coal Riv­er Moun­tain only increas­es that dan­ger. The pro­tes­tors on the Bee Tree site are putting out a call to action to save Coal Riv­er Moun­tain and pro­tect all those who would be impact­ed by a cat­a­stro­phe there. This action fits into a larg­er fight against moun­tain­top removal in Appalachia.

On the whole, Gunnoe’s sen­ti­ment was, “Don’t like much about Oba­ma, but he’ll have one heck of a sup­port­er if he stops moun­tain­top min­ing.”

Note: More infor­ma­tion avail­able at http://climategroundzero.org.