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Mountaintop Removal USA_National Geographic magazine 3/2006 77 images Created 1 Apr 2021

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  • Activist Larry Gibson lead two friends to a knoll in the family cemetery on Kayford Mountain to view a sprawling  mountaintop removal mine. Like a cancerous mutation of strip mining, entire mountaintops are blasted away to obtain a small seam of coal. Unwanted rock is pushed into valleys and streams, destroying natural watersheds, leaving no vegetation, and turning the terrain into unusable land.<br />
More than 300 of Gibson’s relatives are buried in the cemetery and his family has lived on Kayford since the late 1700’s.<br />
<br />
Since 1986, there has been a slow motion, continuous destruction of the mountain—24 hours a day, seven days a week. Gibson occupied the highest point of land around, surrounded by a 12,000-acre level plot of land that was previously a mountain range.<br />
Over the years, Gibson was intimidated, harassed, and threatened by mining company employees for holding out. He remained outspoken against mountaintop removal.
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  • Aerial view shows snow that accentuates the contours of a flattened, freshly cut mountaintop removal site in Cabin Creek, West Virginia. Mountaintop removal is a mining practice where the tops of mountains are blasted away to expose the seams of coal underneath.<br />
As much as 500 feet or more of a mountain summit may be leveled. The earth and rock from the mountaintop is then dumped into the neighboring valleys.<br />
Analysis from a study that Appalachian Voices commissioned along with Natural Resources Defense Council  shows that 1.2 million acres have been mined for coal. “Over 500 mountains have been leveled, and nearly 2,000 miles of precious Appalachian headwater streams have been buried and polluted by mountaintop removal.”
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  • Aerial view of Hobet 21 mountain top removal coal mining site looms over one of the few remaining houses in Mud, W.V. Once this was a quiet rural community, but mining companies can legally come within 100 feet of a family cemetery and 300 feet from a home and they run 24 hours a day and seven days a week. <br />
Hobet 21 once produced about 5.2 million tons of coal, making it among the largest surface mines in the state. The Lincoln County mine expanded to fill in Connelly Branch creek, and after the company was bankrupt in 2015, the site was passed on to another firm who continued mining.<br />
The town of Mud hasn’t been much of a community in the couple of decades since the post office closed, but in 1998 around 60 residents remained. They had two churches and a ball field. In early 1997, Big John, the mine’s 20-story dragline, moved above Mud and more houses, near this one, were bought and destroyed.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6773_1023701.jpg
  • Lorene Caudill prepares for their move by taking down family photographs. She and her husband Therman endured eight years of coal dust and foundation-shaking dynamite blasts as Hobet 21, one of the largest surface mines in the state, inched slowly toward them. They put up apples from their last garden and packed their belongings after signing a letter of intent to sell their beloved home to a coal company.<br />
The Caudills, along with other family members, did achieve a small victory by preserving ownership of a nearby ancestral home but only after a long battle—all the way to the West Virginia Supreme Court—with the coal company.  No one lives there now but the extended family gathers on weekends to garden and for dinners at the house, which was completely surrounded by mining. Since then, the house was burned down by arsonists.<br />
<br />
The Caudill house, where they had planned on spending the rest of their lives, is a half-mile down the road from the old homestead. They are some of the last to leave the community. Therman Caudill, a retired schoolteacher said, “It took the coal company 125 years to run the Caudill family out of Mud River, but they finally did it.”
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  • A father and sons react to the polluted orange/black water in their bathroom. It smells bad, has an oily residue and is mixed with coal soot. The man fears for his sons because his own health is effected. He suffers from rashes and red eyes when he showers and he tells the kids, “Don’t brush teeth in water. Don’t drink the water.”<br />
<br />
When he moved in his home, he thought the only problem was that the water was discolored by iron. At 38 years old, he has since developed gallstones, breathing problems, memory loss, and his hair is falling out. He has anxiety, nervousness, and his pancreas is at two percent function. All of this occurred after he moved to this trailer. Scared for his family, he asks, “What have I done to them?”<br />
A November 4, 2003 Associated Press article by Michelle Saxton of the Williamson Daily News entitled “Water in Mingo Communities Contains Manganese” stated that some security guards quit opening valves on Massey pumps when they realized they were poisoning the community. In a later court hearing it was shown that Massey Coal Company had, indeed, Illegally injected slurry from the Rawls Sales Processing Company (Massey Coal Company subsidiary) impoundment into abandoned underground mines for at least eight years.<br />
<br />
As of the fall of 2011, some 500 West Virginia residents are still in limbo over a suit brought against Massey energy over claims that it and Rawls Sales poisoned hundreds of drinking water wells with coal slurry.
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  • Caudill family members rest on the front porch and yard when they gather on weekends to work in the garden and maintain their homestead. <br />
<br />
It took several years and a lot of money and determination, but kin of the Caudill family fought to keep their family homestead on Mud River from being taken over by the St. Louis-based Arch Coal Company. Nearly swindled out of their homestead, they battled all the way to the West Virginia Supreme Court where they finally won their case.<br />
<br />
For 100 years, Miller’s wife and family owned the 75-acre tract that includes a farmhouse, built in 1920, several small barns and a garden. John Caudill, a coal miner who was blinded in a mining accident in the 1930s, and his wife, Lydia Caudill, raised 10 children in the home. <br />
<br />
Arch Coal wanted to tear down the family’s ancestral home because it stood in the way of the company’s plans to expand its 12,000-acre Hobet 21 mountaintop removal complex. Hobet 21 produced about 5.2 million tons of coal, making it among the largest surface mines in the state. Mines like Hobet yield one ton of coal for every 16 tons of terrain that is displaced.<br />
Under Hobet’s plans, statements from Arch submitted in court say that “ a valley fill and an impoundment pond would destroy the inundate the farmhouse and outbuilding and bury the immediate surrounding land under the valley fill.” A lower court agreed with the company, but in the end, the family won.<br />
The mining operations have expanded to surround the Caudill property.
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  • A woman arranges items on a car to sell at a roadside flea market. West Virginians have always lived with the backdrop of the coal train passing by and money has gone out of town on that train—it is no coincidence that some of the poorest people in the US live in coal country. <br />
One of the main poverty issues of Appalachia stems from the fact that the employed population makes less money that others in the U.S. which was a trade off for other assets like a rich family life.
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  • Children play on a trampoline outside their home in a backyard West Virginia mountain holler.
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  • Bulldozers fill trucks with excess rock at a small mountaintop removal site in Man, West Virginia, where a small crew is mining coal in a site in Logan County that was left by a large coal company as rubble. Mine operator Gordon Justice said, "One man's trash is another man's treasure."<br />
<br />
Large mining operations are only visible from the air, although coal and debris are removed using enormous earth-moving machines known as draglines that stand 22 stories tall and can hold 24 compact cars in its bucket. The machines can cost up to $100 million, but are favored by coal companies because they can do the work of hundreds of employees. A small operation like this one can keep 17 employees working for five years and making good wages.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6773_996257.jpg
  • A worker sets fire to a home that is demolished to rubble as a result of mine expansion. As mountaintop removal mine permits allow the surface mines to expand, they often displace residents in their way.  Dingess-Rum Coal Company served notice to Dehue residents renting old coal company houses, giving them 30 days to move. <br />
Dehue, like dozens of other mining towns, was once a busy center of activity with a grocery, post office, theater, barbershop, pool hall, school payroll office, and Civic Club. These communities become ghost towns and over time are dismantled. Day lilies and fruit trees often mark the spot of leveled homes lining a road.<br />
Dehue was located off Route 10 on Rum Creek south of Logan. It began in 1916 as a coal company town owned by Youngstown Mines Corporation. It existed as late as the 1970s, but the homes were never sold to private residents. Most houses were cleared and burned in 2000 and 2001.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6773_996260.jpg
  • Aerial view of dust surrounding a heavy drag line that scoops coal at a mountain mining site.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6773_1023645.jpg
  • Mountaintop removal involves miners setting up explosive charges at a small coal mine operating in West Virginia. The top of the mountain is blown off with sticks of dynamite in order to obtain a small seam of coal.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6773_1023663.jpg
  • A mother and daughter and other family members visit at the end of a reunion of the Caudill/Miller family at their homestead in Mud, West Virginia. The family fought Arch Coal Company in court to keep their 26 acres where they plant a garden and spend weekends. The home stood in the way of Hobet 21, a 12,000-acre, mountaintop removal mine. After a long battle in court, the West Virginia Supreme Court ruled that a Lincoln County family was wrongly forced to sell its home to make way for the surface mine. Justices said a lower court was wrong to discount the family’s ‘sentimental or emotional interests’ in the property in favor of the economic concerns of a coal operator.”<br />
<br />
The mining operations expanded to surround the Caudill property.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6773_1023715.jpg
  • Coal dust hangs in the air as a truck hauls rock out of the site to dump in into a valley fill.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6773_1023665.jpg
  • Coal dust flies up as a bulldozer scoops up coal and miners shovel by hand at a mine in West Virginia. The Gordon Justice & Mac Hauling coal mine is small compared to massive mountaintop removal mining operations.
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  • A man walks down the road in Tom Biggs Hollow in Letcher County, Kentucky, while his great grandchildren play nearby.<br />
Lucious Thompson joined Kentuckians for the Commonwealth when he found his land disrupted from mining above them. “There’s good mining and there’s bad mining,” Mr. Thompson said. “Mountaintop removal takes the coal quick, 24 hours every day, making my streams disappear, with the blasting knocking a person out of bed and the giant ‘dozers beep-beeping all night so you cannot sleep.”<br />
<br />
Mr. Thompson spoke with the authority of a retired underground miner. Underground miners led quieter, more pastoral lives above harsh, deep workplaces that were far out of sight. Now, the hollow dwellers have become witnesses more than miners as a fast-moving, high-volume process uses mammoth machinery to decapitate the coal-rich hills.<br />
<br />
“They make monster funnels of our villages,” said Carroll Smith, judge-executive, the top elected official, here in Letcher County, the location of some of the worst flooded hollows adjoining mountaintop removal sites. “They haven’t been a real good neighbor at all.”<br />
<br />
With underground mining, coal miners led quieter, more pastoral lives above harsh workplaces deep in the ground and far out of sight. With mountaintop removal, a fast, high-volume process that uses mammoth machinery to decapitate the coal-rich hills that help define the hollows, the residents have become witnesses more than miners.<br />
<br />
New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/11/national/11MINE.html
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  • Man on an off-road vehicle drives home after stones and debris turned the flooded road into rubble during a summer rain. Small streambeds are dumped with the excess rock and dirt that the length of the Ohio River is filled in. The result is a threat to clean water and the biodiversity of the ecosystem. Flash flooding occurs where it never has before.<br />
Like a cancerous mutation of strip mining, entire mountaintops are blasted away to obtain a small seam of coal. Unwanted rock is pushed into valleys and streams, destroying natural watersheds.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6773_996275.jpg
  • Attorney Brian Glasser briefs some of the 152 frustrated Sylvester, West Virginia citizens who banded together in a lawsuit in an effort to halt the assault on their air. Armed with video taped evidence, photographs, and testimony, the residents proved that black dust blanketed their town from a coal stockpile and preparation plant.<br />
They won but little has changed (the company bought a street sweeper for the community) but it was a moral victory for a group of people who saw property values plummet in the black cloud that hung over their town. None of the 152 mostly retirees had ever been involved in a lawsuit.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6773_996258.jpg
  • Men who live in Sylvester wait for court testimony to begin in Madison. Their community of 150 residents sued the coal company that assaulted them with black dust blanketing their town from a nearby coal stockpile and preparation plant. They won the law suit but little changed besides the company bought a street sweeper for the town.
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  • Polluted water seeps from a coal refuse dump that when tested, reveals a toxic witches brew of arsenic, mercury, and other heavy metals and chemicals. The orange appearance is from high iron in the water which can cause diabetes, hemochromatosis, stomach problems, and nausea. It can also damage the liver, pancreas, and heart.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6773_996237.jpg
  • Aerial view of Twisted Gun Golf Club,an 18-hole regulation length golf course in Wharncliffe, West Virginia. The golf course is a reclaimed mountaintop removal site, and was recognized by golfonline.com in 2007 as number 17 on the “Top Fifty under Fifty” ranking of top 50 golf courses where the public can play for under fifty dollars. There are very few uses for the moonscape of rock and rubble but this one seems successful. Twisted Gun in Mingo County near Gilbert, has been called the “jewel of the coal fields.” Mining continues in distance.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6773_996253.jpg
  • Coal trains line up side by side move through a railyard on a foggy morning in Appalachia.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6773_1023723.jpg
  • Men with bucket and ladder walk to the garden to pick apples. The family grows corn, tomatoes, beans and potatoes on their land, Several generations of the family lived in the West Virginia holler until an encroaching mountaintop removal mine forced them to leave.
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  • Judy Bonds was an environmental activist that fought mountaintop removal mining in West Virginia. Daughter of a coal miner, Bonds was awarded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize for her efforts to end contamination to drinking water and destruction of rivers and forests. Outside her home she cuddles her dog as a white-tailed deer grazes nearby.
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  • Miners sweep dirt and rock from a coal seam at a small mining operation.
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  • Aerial view of Hobet 21, a large mountaintop removal mine site was among the largest coal surface mines in West Virginia. The Lincoln County mine ran 24 hours a day, seven days a week expanding over hills and valleys, filling in Connelly Branch creek. At its peak in 2002, the mine produced 5 million pounds of coal in one year. After the company was bankrupt in 2015, the site was passed on to a conservation firm who continued mining.<br />
A lone house sits beside Mud River in the shadow of the mine's encroaching path. The town of Mud hasn’t been much of a community in the couple of decades since the post office closed, and in 1998 around 60 residents remained. They had two churches and a ball field. In early 1997, Big John, the mine’s 20-story dragline, moved above Mud and more houses, near this one, were bought and destroyed.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6773_996269.jpg
  • Aerial view of snow covered mountain top removal mining site. After blasting the top of a mountain, trucks remove debris dumping dirt and rock into valleys and streams destroying watersheds. Over 1,000 miles of Appalachian streams have been buried and 300,000 acres of diverse temperate hardwood forests obliterated with valley hills like the white V in the foreground. Pollution from toxic chemicals fill sludge ponds and in flooding, contaminate drinking water. A moonscape of unusable land is left.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6773_996789.jpg
  • Streams are polluted with coal sludge from a mining accident that occurred when the bottom of a coal slurry impoundment in Martin County, Kentucky broke into an abandoned underground mine in October 2000. An estimated 306 million gallons of oozing black waste containing arsenic and mercury killed everything in a creek and measured five feet deep covering nearby yards and surrounding some homes. Drinking water was contaminated for 27,000 residents as tributaries carried it to the Big Sandy and Ohio Rivers. It is considered one of the worst environmental disasters in the southeastern United States and although largely cleaned up, water quality issues exist and residents still find sludge and slurry in surface water.
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  • Aerial view of the Samples Mine mountain top removal coal mining site. A dragline removes overburden after mountains are dynamited to get to a small seam of coal.
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  • Man fills a jug of drinking water from a spring pouring out on the side of the road. Many West Virginia residents mistrust the safety of tap water because of a common coal-industry practice: pumping chemical-laden wastewater directly into the ground. It can leech into the water table and turn what was drinkable well water into a poisonous cocktail of chemicals.<br />
He trusts this roadside stream more than the well beside his home.
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  • Plastic covers a stockpile of coal at Elk Run Mining Company processing plant seen in a aerial view. The town of Sylvester was covered in black coal dust causing health issues as it seeped inside homes.In 2001, Sylvester residents filed a lawsuit against Elk Run Mining for damages to property.
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  • Multi-state grassroots environmental activists rally against mountain top removal in Charleston, West Virginia.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6773_1023649.jpg
  • A family hunts for ginseng in a West Virginia forest. A native plant in the Appalachian forest, ginseng is highly prized and harvested as a cash crop. It has been used for centuries in North America and Asia for a variety of illnesses and to increase vitality.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6773_996256.jpg
  • A man with a shovels coal sludge after a mining accident occurred when the bottom of a coal slurry impoundment in Martin County, Kentucky broke into an abandoned underground mine in October 2000. An estimated 306 million gallons of oozing black waste containing arsenic and mercury killed everything in a creek and measured five feet deep covering nearby yards and surrounding some homes. Drinking water was contaminated for 27,000 residents as tributaries carried it to the Big Sandy and Ohio Rivers. It is considered one of the worst environmental disasters in the southeastern United States and although largely cleaned up, water quality issues exist and residents still find sludge and slurry in surface water.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6773_1023652.jpg
  • Sediment pond at the bottom of a valley fill that overflowed after a heavy rain at a  mountaintop removal mining site. Over 1000 miles of stream beds have been filled in with rock and debris where water flowed freely into rivers. Flooding occurs where it has not in the past, and sediment fills sources of drinking water.
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  • A home was abandoned after a sediment pond overflowed at a mountaintop removal mine site. Flood waters poured down the holler carrying tree limbs that blocked a bridge over the creek used by residents to get to their house.
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  • Below a mountaintop removal mine site, a stream filled with sediment and coal silt washed into a backyard swimming pool making it unusable.
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  • After coal is extracted at a mountaintop removal mine site, a land reclamation project begins by spraying hydroseed on steep rocky slopes where little can grow. Mines are legally required to restore the land to its “approximate original contour.”<br />
Roughly 1.2 million acres, including 500 mountains, have been flattened by mountaintop removal coal mining in the central Appalachian region, and only a fraction of that land has been reclaimed for so-called beneficial economic uses, according to research by environmental groups.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6773_1023668.jpg
  • Arial view of a terraced V-shaped valley fill that sits at the edge of a reclaimed West Virginia mining site. Entire mountains are blasted away in mountaintop removal mining in order to obtain a small seam of coal. Unwanted rock is pushed into valleys and streams destroying natural watersheds and the length of the Ohio River has been filled in. The result is a threat to clean water and the biodiversity of the ecosystem.<br />
<br />
The Central Appalachian Plateau was created 4 million years ago, and one of its richest assets is wilderness containing some of the world’s oldest and biologically richest temperate zone hardwood forest. A flattened moonscape on top is mostly unusable.
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  • A family works together snapping green beans at the Caudill-Miller family homestead.<br />
It is a summertime ritual for everyone to put up produce from the garden.
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  • Jars of green beans and tomatoes from the Caudill-Miller family garden that will be consumed throughout the year. Canning in mason jars is an annual ritual.
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  • Men and a teenager remove trays of honeycombs from bee hives so they can collect the honey.
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  • A coal mine above Mc Roberts causes flooding and water problems for the residents that live in the shadow of this valley fill from a mountaintop removal mine.
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  • A girl gives her great grandfather a hug while he peels an apple on the front porch of his home. Her brother hangs out watching as a car drives up the holler.
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  • Family gathers around the table at the homestead for a summer lunch with corn and tomatoes from the garden.
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  • Young girls playing with silly string at a family reunion where it's all fun and games and great pitch in dinners.
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  • The Miller and Caudill family sit at a picnic table preparing string beans from the summer garden for canning in Mud Creek.
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  • Framed portraits are displayed on the family organ in the living room of the Caudill-Miller homestead.
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  • House with swan flower planter sits on a post above a wagon wheel in front yard that marks the driveway.
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  • A man on the porch gives a treat to his dog who performs a trick while a child and her grandmother sit in chairs on the lawn.
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  • Families gather outside a small, white-painted church for a ramps dinner. Allium tricoccum, wild leek, wild onion, spring tonic, or most commonly, the ramp is a wild plant that grows in the mountains of Appalachia. It resembles a scallion and tastes like a cross between an onion and garlic and dinners are a long-standing community tradition.
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  • Men cook ramps in the church kitchen during spring ramps dinner while women greet families who gather at long tables for the traditional feast.
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  • Mary Miller gives a warm hug and greets a young boy at a church ramps dinner.
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  • A ginseng plant and it's roots in a woman's hand as a family hunts for ginseng in a West Virginia forest. A native plant in the Appalachian forest, ginseng is highly prized and harvested as a cash crop. It has been used for centuries in North America and Asia for a variety of illnesses and to increase vitality.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6773_1023708.jpg
  • A brother and two sisters weed a corn patch in the garden at the family homestead.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6773_1023712.jpg
  • Women set a table with food for a pitch in dinner for their family reunion. Reunions are a long standing tradition for families in rural areas.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6773_1023714.jpg
  • A woman dusts a portrait of herself as she packs to move. The family was forced to leave because of an encroaching mountaintop removal mine. The mine is now closed but no one lives in the community that was destroyed. Her husband said, "It only took the mining company a hundred years to run out the Caudill family but they finally did it."
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  • An inhabited house is next in line to be vacated and burned down as a coal company moves out families in the way of a growing mine. The homes were company owned.
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  • Bulldozers line up to scrape layers of coal that are loaded into trucks at a mountain top removal mine site.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6773_1023725.jpg
  • Snow accents the contours of a fresh valley fill at a coal mine site seen in an aerial view. Tops of mountains are blasted away and flattened to reveal a small seam of coal, and the rock and debris is dumped into V-shaped valleys filling in stream beds.
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  • Aerial view of a drag line that scrapes through rock after a explosives blast away the top of mountains. A fresh snow contrasts the blackened coal that is revealed. Mountaintop removal mining devastates the landscape, turning areas that should be lush with forests and wildlife into barren moonscapes.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6773_1023728.jpg
  • Elevated view of a small mine operation finding coal after a larger company left. The owner of this operation stated that "One man's trash is another man's treasure." His equipment works on a mountain top coal mine.
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  • A truck dumps rock over the edge of a cliff creating a valley fill at a mountain top removal coal mine.
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  • Tail lights of a pick up truck glow as a miner drives to work and climbs a mountain road  through morning fog that hangs in southern West Virginia valleys.
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  • Aerial view of a golf course on old coal mine site after it was reclaimed as mining in the distance continues.<br />
Twisted Gun Golf Club is an 18-hole regulation length golf course in Wharncliffe, West Virginia. The golf course is a reclaimed mountaintop removal site, and was recognized by golfonline.com in 2007 as number 17 on the “Top Fifty under Fifty” ranking of top 50 golf courses where the public can play for under fifty dollars. Twisted Gun in Mingo County near Gilbert, has been called the “jewel of the coal fields.”
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6773_1023735.jpg
  • Protest songs by two like-minded friends entertained picnic patrons on Kayford Mountain. Ken Hechler, left, represented West Virginia in the US House of Representatives for nearly 20 years and was Secretary of State from 1985-2001. He died in 2016 at age 102. George Daugherty, known as Earl of Elkview, a trial lawyer specializing in medical liability cases, was a regular on a televised statewide country music show and co-hosted NPR's Mountain Stage. He died in 2017 at age 86.
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  • A double rainbow over Sylvester after a summer rain.
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  • Vivian Stockman protests King Coal and mountain top removal coal mining joining a number of multi-state activists at the state capital.
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  • Activists protest mountain top removal coal mining at a rally outside Charleston's state capital building.
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  • Multi-state activists of all ages protest mountain top removal coal mining outside Charleston's state capital building.
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  • A few boxes are left as this family packs to move from their home because of an encroaching mine in their back yard.  The impacts on communities of blowing up mountains and dumping the rubble into streams are profound. It forces residents to contend with contaminated drinking water, increased flooding, dangerous coal slurry impoundments, and higher rates of cancer and other health issues.
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  • A young girl in braids sits on a swing at the Caudill homestead during a weekend family reunion bringing relatives together.
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  • Children playing in the snow on a hillside outside their home in Sylvester.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6773_1023949.jpg
  • A worker sets fire to a home that is demolished to rubble as a result of mine expansion. As mountaintop removal mine permits allow the surface mines to expand, they often displace residents in their way.  Dingess-Rum Coal Company served notice to Dehue residents renting old coal company houses, giving them 30 days to move. <br />
Dehue, like dozens of other mining towns, was once a busy center of activity with a grocery, post office, theater, barbershop, pool hall, school payroll office, and Civic Club. These communities become ghost towns and over time are dismantled. Day lilies and fruit trees often mark the spot of leveled homes lining a road.<br />
Dehue was located off Route 10 on Rum Creek south of Logan. It began in 1916 as a coal company town owned by Youngstown Mines Corporation. It existed as late as the 1970s, but the homes were never sold to private residents. Most houses were cleared and burned in 2000 and 2001.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6773_996260-1.JPG
  • Aerial view shows snow that accentuates the contours of a flattened, freshly cut mountaintop removal site in Cabin Creek, West Virginia. Mountaintop removal is a mining practice where the tops of mountains are blasted away to expose the seams of coal underneath.<br />
As much as 500 feet or more of a mountain summit may be leveled. The earth and rock from the mountaintop is then dumped into the neighboring valleys.<br />
Analysis from a study that Appalachian Voices commissioned along with Natural Resources Defense Council  shows that 1.2 million acres have been mined for coal. “Over 500 mountains have been leveled, and nearly 2,000 miles of precious Appalachian headwater streams have been buried and polluted by mountaintop removal.”
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6773_1023729-1.JPG
  • A home was abandoned after a sediment pond overflowed at a mountaintop removal mine site. Flood waters poured down the holler carrying tree limbs that blocked a bridge over the creek used by residents to get to their house.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6773_1023658-1.JPG
  • Aerial view shows snow that accentuates the contours of a flattened, freshly cut mountaintop removal site in Cabin Creek, West Virginia. Mountaintop removal is a mining practice where the tops of mountains are blasted away to expose the seams of coal underneath.<br />
As much as 500 feet or more of a mountain summit may be leveled. The earth and rock from the mountaintop is then dumped into the neighboring valleys.<br />
Analysis from a study that Appalachian Voices commissioned along with Natural Resources Defense Council  shows that 1.2 million acres have been mined for coal. “Over 500 mountains have been leveled, and nearly 2,000 miles of precious Appalachian headwater streams have been buried and polluted by mountaintop removal.”
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6773_1023729-2.JPG