Hollywood celebrities Woody Harrelson, Daryl Hannah, and Leonardo DiCaprio are only three of 4732 people (as of 5:31 today) who have joined the fight to stop mountaintop removal coal mining. What is mountaintop removal coal mining you might ask. Well according to http://www.ilovemountains.org/, a website dedicated to stopping it, “Mountaintop removal is a radical form of coal mining in which entire mountains are literally blown up — and it is happening here in
America on a scale that is almost unimaginable.” At this same website there is a video which describes the impacts of mountaintop coal removal. It is a short but extremely informative film and I encourage everyone to watch it.
In this mode of removal, explosives are used to blow up mountains and then the debris from the mountains then carries over to land and often times fills nearby steams and rivers. This causes contamination of water for many Americans. So far over 450 mountains have been blown up in the
United States. This has caused many harmful effects for people who live in the vicinity of the mountains. After a mountain has been blown up the excess debris effects the amount and speed of the water in nearby streams which may cause flooding for nearby residents. According to the movie, “Toxic coal slurry is held in hundreds of impoundments throughout
Appalachia. In 2000, one of those impoundments broke and 300 million gallons of toxic sludge was sent into The Big Sandy River in
Kentucky.” The EPA said that that incident was the worst environmental disaster east of the
Mississippi River.
This website is dedicated to the awareness of this problem and how it has negatively impacted the lives of many Americans. If you are interested in learning more about this issue or watching the short film, I highly recommend it, visit the website www.ilovethemountains.org.
Sources: www.ilovethemountains.org
image: (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty) http://accuweather.ap.org/cgi-bin/apl.pl
