Appalachian Coalfield Leaders Turn Tables at Congressional Hearing on Mountaintop Removal

In gut-wrenching testimonies on the devastating economic costs and mounting humanitarian crisis related to reckless mountaintop removal operations, two courageous Appalachian coalfield leaders turned the tables on an EPA-bashing Republican-led Natural Resources House Committee hearing in Charleston, West Virginia today.
“The coal industry obviously wants to bury and pollute all of our water and all of who we are, for temporary jobs,” 2009 North American Goldman Prize Winner Maria Gunnoe testified. “Jobs in surface mining are dependent on blowing up the next mountain and burying the next stream. When are we going to say enough is enough?
In holding the hearing in the Appalachian coalfields, Republican members–and their Big Coal bankrolled Democrat allies–had initially brought their thinly veiled political circus of coal industry wags under the banner of ““Jobs at Risk: Community Impacts of the Obama Administration’s Effort to Rewrite the Stream Buffer Zone Rule.” In a parting gift to the coal industry, George W. Bush altered the ineffective but longstanding rule that was supposed to prevent companies from dumping toxic coal waste within 100 feet of a stream. Under the Obama administration, the Interior Department has spent more than two years to study a reversal of the manipulation by the Bush administration.
Unlike every single coal industry spokesperson that testified, Gunnoe and legendary coalfield activist Bo Webb live under the fallout of mountaintop removal operations, which have led to the largest forced removal of American citizens since the mid-19th century and left the region in entrenched poverty and unemployment. Webb, who has been actively petitioned by West Virginia residents to wage an independent 2012 Senate campaign against disgraced West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, quickly framed the hearings in a devastating reminder of the overlooked human and health care crises...

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Jeff Biggers @'AlterNet'

Seems to be the way of all mining interests, that the environments and communities are only there to be destroyed, the toxification of land and water; the degraded blight that remains is someone else's tab to pick up, the taxpayer. All that tax revenue from the mines' put back to repair what was the mining companies responsibility to restore. It happens with oil, with gas, with uranium, with coal, etc, etc. Time for mining to start fixing their problems and not wandering off all the time, before they have fixed and resolved any problems, to some new venture of destruction......beeden