How is it different from underground mining?
SARAH MOON: They’re working from the top down so first they clear-cut then they plant the heavy explosives to loosen up the top of the mountain. That debris is then loaded up into trucks and dumped into valley fills, which is how streams get buried. You have the whole top of a mountain blown up and trucked away to expose the coal seams. Then they use these massive machines called draglines to get the coal and dump it into trucks to go to the railroads. So it’s this massive scale operation that’s only possible with heavy machinery powered by fossil fuels so just the extraction itself is putting carbon monoxide into the air. KATRIN REDFERN: There used to be over 150,000 coal-mining jobs in West Virginia. But because mountaintop removal and other forms of strip mining are heavily automated, that number has been reduced by roughly 90 percent, and there are now around 20,000 coal-mining jobs. Meanwhile, those living around mountaintop removal remain some of the most impoverished communities
