A Turning Point for Mountaintop Removal Coal?
Forbes
I
first wrote about mountaintop removal mining – the practice of blowing
the tops off mountains to excavate coal - about four years ago, and
the shock of the reporting is still with me. On one of my first visits
to a mountaintop site in West Virginia, I stood on the edge of a vast
area under excavation. A mountainside had been rendered like a side of
beef. You could spy thin, darker layers of coal amid the thicker shale.
Trucks crawled over the makeshift roads, carting boulders to dump in a
nearby valley. Suddenly, a huge demolition blast went off; the earth
shook under my feet. As a companion and I walked away, noxious-smelling
yellow smoke enveloped us. In short: you can’t truly understand the
total war-like devastation that this does to mountains without...
John McQuaid, Forbes
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