West Virginia is so fucked (Update)

[Darth Wong]

Has anyone seen the documentary "Burning The Future"? I've read a lot of stories about West Virginia's Appalachian region poverty before, but it's different to see the people living there. I was particularly struck by the people who would turn on their water taps and get brown water coming out. The aerial views of the utter destruction of the landscape were pretty stark as well.

Why is it not a more visible political issue that West Virginia is basically being blasted to the ground in order to make coal cheaper? It's not even just to make coal available; there are other ways to get it, but they cost more.

It's quite bizarre to think about mining operations which literally level a mountain. Faith can't really move mountains, but a few kilotons of explosives every day can certainly do it over time.

[Surlethe]

I've been working this summer with a guy from eastern Kentucky who grew up near a coal mine. Regularly, explosions from the mines will knock things off of shelves. Doors won't shut because the explosions have shifted foundations and the house leans. And they have a crack in their front yard since the entire mountainside is shifting because of the mining operations.

I guess people could turn on their tap waters and get brown water because mining operations will blow cracks into the rock containing the groundwater, letting dirt in, so their wells pump dirty water? My in-laws had a similar problem last weekend, and Rach's dad was tentatively fingering recent heavy construction for cracking the water table rock layers (or so was my impression).

[Broomstick]

Why is it not a more visible political issue that West Virginia is basically being blasted to the ground in order to make coal cheaper?

Because no one gives a flying fuck about West Virgina.

I'm sorry, was that too blunt? It's true. Everything spoken of in this thread was happening when my family (briefly) lived in West Virginia in the late 1960's - that's why my parents got the hell out of there, viewing Detroit as an improvement in circumstances, which it was from at least an educational viewpoint.

The vast majority of people in West Virginia are dirt poor and poorly educated. The very, very few at the top of the heap make shitloads of money at the expense of the peasen--- er, their "fellow" citizens. Add in whacko church shit like snake handlers and strychnine drinkers and, well, it's a mess. It has, in fact, been a mess for centuries now. The system is entrenched, and the rest of the world doesn't care as long as they can get their energy cheap. "You can't eat scenery" is the justification I always heard for destroying the very land itself. Extend that throughout Appalachia. And it's a goddamned shame because the landscape is breathtaking AND chock-full of Devonian and Carboniferous age fossils and other scientific goodies. ("No, no! Those are signs of Noah's Flood!" - shut up you ignorant white trash)

Now you know why I despair over my in-laws, who are exactly the sort of mountain people featured in such documentaries.

[Darth Wong]

I've been working this summer with a guy from eastern Kentucky who grew up near a coal mine. Regularly, explosions from the mines will knock things off of shelves. Doors won't shut because the explosions have shifted foundations and the house leans. And they have a crack in their front yard since the entire mountainside is shifting because of the mining operations.

Yeah, that sounds like what they were describing in the film.

I guess people could turn on their tap waters and get brown water because mining operations will blow cracks into the rock containing the groundwater, letting dirt in, so their wells pump dirty water? My in-laws had a similar problem last weekend, and Rach's dad was tentatively fingering recent heavy construction for cracking the water table rock layers (or so was my impression).

It's much worse than that. It's related to the much-ballyhooed "Clean Coal Technology" that politicians keep whoring on Capitol Hill. Basically, one of the requirements for "clean coal" is that the coal itself be purified before being burned. And how do they do this, when the country burns a billion tons of coal every year? Simple: they extract toxic impurities from the coal before it's shipped to the power plants, and then they dump these toxic impurities into the West Virginia countryside.

I'm not kidding. There are giant pools of run-off sludge: something like a hundred billion gallons of the stuff. They're laying in great stagnant pools, separated from the water table only by ... well, they aren't really isolated at all. It's seeping into the ground-water and showing up in peoples' drinking water. One guy demonstrated by turning on his garden hose and showing how the water stained his hands black. In seconds. They actually call it "blackwater".

[Big Orange]

And the more ignorant or ill informed enviromentalists cry about nuclear power...

[Darth Wong]

And the more ignorant or ill informed enviromentalists cry about nuclear power...

And inside West Virginia, they portray anyone who's against the environmental devastation as a liberal left-wing environmentalist who's out to take away peoples' jobs. Even though cleaner methods would actually be more labour-intensive and therefore produce more jobs. Mind you, they would also raise the price of coal and reduce the coal companies' profit margins, and we can't have that, can we?

[Broomstick]

It's not just pools of sludge, sometimes it's piles of ash which have been known to slide and devastate towns and countryside.

[MKSheppard]

Why is it not a more visible political issue that West Virginia is basically being blasted to the ground in order to make coal cheaper?

Because as others have said; it's West Virginia. It's america's sewer.

[Sea Skimmer]

Settlers skipped over West Virginia and went right into the Ohio valley in the 1700s for a reason, it sucked even back then. The only jobs they ever had were in coal mining and clear cutting the forest from the ENTIRE STATE. Clear cutting ended in the 1920s when litterally all the trees had been cut down. The 1950s shift to surface mining eliminated most of the mining jobs meanwhile, leaving nothing. Somehow though, I don’t think West Virginians would love the idea of all getting new jobs in a shift back to underground mining. That’s the alternative to mountaintop removal and its still not exactly environmentally friendly. One way or another the US needs that coal, and even a radical change in policy could not change that in less then 20-30 years.

[Broomstick]

Keep in mind, too, that coal mining has always been a nasty, hard, dangerous form of work. It's better than it used to be, but folks mined coal generally because there were few if any alternatives.

[ArmorPierce]

Brown water came out? Were those taps not used for months/years? If so, you could just let the water run for a while and it should be good if it's from rust from water standing there for a long time.

Was actually just reading about this stuff. Further example of the stark contrast of the wealth distribution in America.

[SirNitram]

And the more ignorant or ill informed enviromentalists cry about nuclear power...

And inside West Virginia, they portray anyone who's against the environmental devastation as a liberal left-wing environmentalist who's out to take away peoples' jobs. Even though cleaner methods would actually be more labour-intensive and therefore produce more jobs. Mind you, they would also raise the price of coal and reduce the coal companies' profit margins, and we can't have that, can we?

Indeed. It'd cut into Massey Energy's "Buy State Supreme Courts Wholesale" budget. (THink I'm kidding? The SCOTUS ruled his bought and paid for judge should never have been in trials involving the company.)

[Broomstick]

Brown water came out? Were those taps not used for months/years? If so, you could just let the water run for a while and it should be good if it's from rust from water standing there for a long time.

Actually, water can come out of the tap in colors even if it hasn't been standing for a long time. The water where I live is slightly orange - the water in this area that comes from wells and aquifers have a naturally high mineral content. We get it checked at least once a year, so far it's been just minerals like iron and fluoride in safe amounts, and the bacteria count is lower than that for the city of Chicago (which gets its water from Lake Michigan - less minerals, more fecal contamination.)

In West Virginia, some of the well water is funny colored because of naturally high mineral content (especially things like iron and sulfur) but all too much of it is contaminated - most mining results in the release of heavy metals and toxic elements like mercury and arsenic (burning coal also releases mercury - aside from bad fish, that's the most common source of mercury in humans and animals). "Blackwater" is bad water - it's unhealthy to drink it. In some cases, unhealthy to wash in it.

[SirNitram]

It should be noted that, despite the Chamber Of Commerce's constant churning out through two seperate propaganda arms in the state and vast sums spent, funny-coloured water(Well, outside of known mineral springs. I think White Sulfur Springs bottles the stuff for sale.) is getting rarer via expensive lawsuits carried out by the AG.

The CoC is one of several power groups that are quite happy with WV being fucked and work to keep it so. The Mining Lobby(Coal, Natural Gas) and the Snake Handling Christians happily keep it so. On the plus side, Mike's actually wrong: Locally, you won't hear about the protestors at mines being outside the mainstream.

The best thing you can say about WV, economically and politically, is that our Governer is sensible(State ran a surplus this year.. Though the Teacher's Union wants the entire surplus for itself RIGHT THIS SECOND. And that he calls Special Sessions for things like the unemployment issue. Scheduled for a week or so from now, IIRC.), and the Union/Vet/Pro-Social Safety Net types are the majority. Everyone knows someone whose been on unemployment, disability, VA care, Medicare, or suffered in a non-union shop.

[LadyTevar]

Has anyone seen the documentary "Burning The Future"? I've read a lot of stories about West Virginia's Appalachian region poverty before, but it's different to see the people living there. I was particularly struck by the people who would turn on their water taps and get brown water coming out. The aerial views of the utter destruction of the landscape were pretty stark as well.

Why is it not a more visible political issue that West Virginia is basically being blasted to the ground in order to make coal cheaper? It's not even just to make coal available; there are other ways to get it, but they cost more.

It's quite bizarre to think about mining operations which literally level a mountain. Faith can't really move mountains, but a few kilotons of explosives every day can certainly do it over time.

There is a political movement against Mountaintop Removal Mining, however it is small and extremely localized to the Appalachians. If you honestly think anyone outside of the Appalachians gives a shit, especially those within the DC Beltway, you've another think coming. The movement has backers throughout WV, has enough donations to make the documentary, to get commercials on prime-time, to get articles and adverts in the newspapers and radios... but King Coal still owns the majority of the rule-makers in the State and has flimflammed too many "Friends of Coal" to be budged.

We've been fighting this fight for over a hundred years: WV is owned not by WVians, but by out-of-state Coal Barons and Corporations, many of which don't even bother to get local offices within the state. All that money Massey Energy and other Corps get from mining doesn't stay here. It's not stayed within the state since the days of Bramwell, city of Millionaires (once the only place outside NYC to have Chanel #5, now nearly a ghost town of empty mansions).

WV is fucked. WV is dying. The Coal Barons are just carving up the corpse a little early.

[LadyTevar]

PS: Hawks Nest State Park, the place where Nit and I got married, had to go to court to stop a proposed Mountaintop Removal site from infringing upon Park Land. If they still get the permit, a large chunk of scenic mountain ridges that can be seen from Hawks Nest will be logged clean then blasted to ashes, and the slag and ash run-off will pour into the creeks that run through the park's streams.

A place built by the CCC, a place whose overlook is one of the iconic scenes of WV, ruined for a few megatons of coal and millions of dollars for out-of-state pockets.

Fuck the Coal Companies. Fuck the 'Friends of Coal'. Get the fuck out of my state you bastards, and leave us alone!

[Raj Ahten]

The situation in West Virginia and why no one gives a fuck can be traced to the fact that the rest of the nation benefits from West Virginia's exploitation. I forget exactly who, but some social scientist basically theorized that the US has regional policies that mirror colonialism and that Appalachia has historically been a resource colony. Other cases include Indian reservations in the west where you'll have a power plant polluting the shit out of the reservation while producing electricity for cities hundreds of miles away. Meanwhile the reservation gets very little for the power plant.

On a personal note I've done some interview work with coal miners and the past and despite the dirt and danger of the work every one of them I talked to couldn't say enough about how much they loved the work. This is coming from men who've helped carry bodies out from mine explosions. Some of that might be because many of them eventually owned their own mines that were family operated and they sold the coal themselves on a seasonal basis to local towns and universities. Even the men working in the company mines only worked for a few months out of the year during the depression and were pretty much subsistence farming the rest of the time. Back in those days mining was pretty much the only way to get disposable income.

But often it seemed what really drew the men to have fond memories of mine work is that, like in the military, you achieved close bonds with those who you put your life on the line with every day.

[Patrick Degan]

As an aside: am I the only person who looked at the title of this thread and immediately thought that Robert Byrd had died and therefore the taps to the Federal Highway Money Machine had just been shut off?

West Virginia has always been fucked. It's very creation as a state was part-and-parcel a political and military move during the Civil War and even before that there had always been conflict between the mountain people and the Tidewater aristocrats who controlled Virginia politics and the money flows from taxation and tariffs. It had nothing in the way of an economic base except for its natural resources and, just as with any Third World nation, it was ripe for exploitation by outsiders given that the people and state government had literally nothing else to bargain with and were consequently in the weak position for every and any deal. The state has always been nothing but an object for outsiders to use and abuse at will, with a population of ready-made company serfs who could be kept that way for generations by starving out the schools so as to give the young no options except lives in the mines. The rest, being hillbillies, had even less than that and therefore didn't count, and therefore no hope of even knowing that there could be anything better.

[dragon]

Well there's plenty of land out there that they could move to another state.
But is there anything nice in West Virgina or is it all in the other Virgina state?

[Samuel]

Well there's plenty of land out there that they could move to another state.
But is there anything nice in West Virgina or is it all in the other Virgina state?

It is the Appalacian mountian range. It is nothing at all like the rest of Virginia, culturally, physically or economically.

Also the land is moved to the nearest spot- generally valleys.

[MKSheppard]

As an aside: am I the only person who looked at the title of this thread and immediately thought that Robert Byrd had died and therefore the taps to the Federal Highway Money Machine had just been shut off?

Goddamnit! Now you made me all sad!

DAMN YOU.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Well there's plenty of land out there that they could move to another state.
But is there anything nice in West Virgina or is it all in the other Virgina state?

There are many species found only there, and nowhere else. The Nature there is stunning... or at least was...

[Glocksman]

There's not a lot of coal mines in Evansville proper (though one on the high schools was built on top of an abandoned underground mine), but in nearby counties we have several surface mines.

Mountaintop removal isn't an issue locally because we don't have mountains to remove.
That said, we do have a lot of subdivisions with structural damage from nearby mine blasting and others sinking slowly into the ground because of subsidence from abandoned underground mines.

Ironically one of the area's biggest power stations doesn't even use local coal because it's too polluting for their 'scrubber' technology.
AEP's Rockport station uses western coal.
Though I guess that's keeping with the fact that the Rockport station's power isn't used locally either.
We just have to deal with the pollution.

[Gil Hamilton]

As an aside: am I the only person who looked at the title of this thread and immediately thought that Robert Byrd had died and therefore the taps to the Federal Highway Money Machine had just been shut off?

Impossible. Robert Byrd is sustained by being dunked, once a month, into a tank of gasified pork dollars. So long as he's exposed, he survives.

[LadyTevar]

Well there's plenty of land out there that they could move to another state.
But is there anything nice in West Virgina or is it all in the other Virgina state?

There are many species found only there, and nowhere else. The Nature there is stunning... or at least was...

There are several places in the higher elevations that are remnants of the last IceAge, still living in tundra-like conditions. There is a huge natural preserve called the Cranberry Glades Botanical Area, which is four sphagnum moss bogs filled with plants native to the Canada or Maine, including several predator plants such as the purple pitcher plant. The bog even has species of reindeer moss, all of them 'chased' south by the glaciers during the Ice Age, and this is the only place they survive this far south.

There's been several mining permits applied for outside the Botanical Area. Most of them would bury or pollute streams leading to the bogs.