Student's activism reveals coal's woes as energy source

Eric Blevins

On Monday, July 10, me and about eighty other "Earth First!" activists blockaded American Electric Power's (AEP) coal-fired Clinch River plant in Carbo, Virginia. We held the blockade for over five hours. No one got arrested. When we left, there was still a coal truck with flat tires and over thirty police vehicles blocking the entrance to the plant.

We took this direct action because coal is currently destroying Appalachia. The extraction, processing, transportation, and the burning of the coal are all extremely detrimental to the environment, people, economy and culture of these mountains.

Extraction of coal is now being done by a process called mountaintop removal (MTR), which turns mountains into moonscapes. Instead of digging into the mountain to get the coal, they simply blow up the mountains with explosives to expose the coal seams. This process reduces the height of mountains by up to 800 feet or more and leaves a flattened, barren landscape useless for wildlife and development.

The former mountains, or "overburden" (as coal companies call it), is pushed into adjacent valleys, burying the streams below. This pollutes water supplies and causes many flash floods due to the fact that all the plants that drank the rain are now dead.

Over 400,000 acres of forests have been destroyed by MTR in West Virginia alone. Over 1,200 miles of streams have been buried. This is also happening in Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky at a growing rate.

After the companies get the coal, it has to be processed, or "cleaned." The leftovers from the processing are toxic waste referred to as slurry or sludge. This sludge is then either injected underground, a process that has been turning people's well water black, or it is stored in huge ponds held by dams in the mountains. Many of these dams hold billions of gallons of this sludge, some over nine billion.

Sometimes these dams fail and flood the community below. In October of 2000 in Martin County Kentucky, a pond spilled 306 million gallons of coal sludge into Coldwater Creek and Wolf Creek. That spill was 25 times greater than the Exxon Valdez spill. The soil there is still polluted from the spill.

Coal is transported in overweight coal trucks (usually 120,000 pounds on average), which destroys roads quickly and makes losing control easy. Since 2000, at least thirteen people have been killed by coal trucks in West Virginia.

And as any intelligent person knows, coal burning is a major contributor to global warming and respiratory problems like asthma. Asthma is the number one cause of hospitalizations and school absences in children, and Knoxville and Memphis are the worst cities in the country for asthma sufferers.

We are poisoning our children and our planet and it has to stop if we want our civilization to continue. Over half the electricity in the U.S. is generated from coal burning. We need to start using much less electricity and use green power like solar and wind energy if we want our planet to keep sustaining our lives.

Corporate greed has blinded people to the fact that we depend on the earth for sustenance. We take our water and air for granted and place more importance on electricity and money. We already have to pay for clean water, and much of the world has no clean water. I don't want the air to get that way before people wake up.

Eric Blevins is a senior here at MTSU and can be reached best at erb2t@mtsu.edu.

Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition

Coal River Mountain Watch

Concerned Citizens in Mingo County