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Panich52

(5,829 posts)
Tue May 5, 2015, 10:01 AM May 2015

ACHE Act: A Way to End Mountaintop Removal Mining

ACHE Act: A Way to End Mountaintop Removal Mining

(Originally published in the Charleston Gazette on Aug. 25, 2014)

Coalfield residents living near mountaintop removal mining sites have long suspected this terrible, destructive practice is hurting our health.

I first started thinking about it during the long fight to replace the Marsh Fork Elementary School, which sat at the foot of a huge mountaintop removal mining site near my home in Peachtree Hollow. We had organized an educational day at the school in 2004, and a teacher came up to me and told me there were a lot of kids at the school getting sick, mostly with respiratory problems.

Coal River Mountain Watch did a survey of 60 families who went to that school and found that 91 percent of the children had respiratory problems. More than 80 percent had felt sick at the school with headaches, nausea and other health problems.

The school was next to a coal processing plant and below a huge sludge impoundment, and in large part surrounded by massive mountaintop removal mining sites.

It got me thinking about how many people I knew who were sick and dying of cancer. Cousins, neighbors. My good friend Judy Bonds had cancer. (Bonds died in 2011.)

Dr. Michael Hendryx at WVU had started doing some research. It wasn’t 100 percent conclusive, but all indications were that a lot of people who lived near mountaintop removal sites were getting sick and dying. Other research showed the rate of birth defects was increasing dramatically in regions where mountaintop removal mining was becoming more prevalent.

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