What are the goals of the protesters?
Our goal is to shut down mountaintop removal in the Appalachians. Particularly, to stop them from blasting the top of the Coal River Mountain. Q. What is mountaintop removal and its environmental impact? Coal mining has been going here since the 18th century, but mountaintop removal is a relatively new form of coal mining made possible by the much larger equipment that they use today. They blast off the top of the mountain and dump it in the valley. They scrape off the coal, and then they try to plant a little grass. That’s all they do for reclamation. The real problem is associated with what they “coal waste,” which is actually the mountain itself, which goes into valley fills and all the coal waste that they produce—separating and cleaning and processing it—fills out all along the line. Most of that winds up behind a 370 foot damn which is up in the mountains. So this dam is made out of the same material as the stuff that’s holding back—it’s not an engineered dam. All the blasting an
