Freeper version of what mountain top removal mining entails:

[cali]

To: tobyhill
“...involves blasting off mountaintops to get at the coal underneath.”

The topsoil is carefully removed, stacked and after coal is removed the mountain top is carefully landscaped into a beautiful piece of property, as I have been told.

True??


To: elpadre

True and the trees that are removed are replaced 4 to 1 and they actually continue to grow.

[Atman]

1. LOL! I've seen it in person. No beautiful landscaping. It is horrible.

And they don't replace the soil...Bush admin rules allows them to dump it all into nearby streams and rivers. Freepers are fucking stupid.

[Permanut]

2. And they carefully remove all the little wild animals

and find them substitute homes in another part of the forest while their original homes are being beautified. Then they bring them all back, and have a party with special surprises for each little creature.

[demmiblue]

4. lol!

:rofl:

[Contrary1]

14. Just thinking about it is enough to bring tears of joy...

*sniff, sniff*

[Rage for Order]

3. And then puppies shit rainbows

It's sad that a person can be so naive.

[CrownPrinceBandar]

5. And then the coal companies ask the dwaves who live in the mountain...

to help them carefully remove the coal and replace it with magic pixie dust that shits gold.

Or some kind of fantasy like that.

[Angry Dragon]

6. Don't forget all the elves too............

:party:


:silly:

[Motown_Johnny]

8. Elves don't live in the mountain silly, they live in hollow trees

[ThomWV]

7. Let me tell you a little bit about it

I took a trip into this state's southern coal fields to look at it for myself. So I went and saw. I am also intimately familiar with the standard strip mining operations that work up in this end of the state - two pieces of property I own have been strip mined here in Preston County.

There is just one thing you have to keep in mind about there and here, and this knowledge will help you understand MountainTop a little better. Up here in the northern end of West Virginia the general topography is quite different than it is in the southern counties. Here the ridge lines run long from north to south. There are hills aplenty but for the most part they are broad, at least in comparison to the lay of the land in the southern counties. Down there the hills are steeper by far and the valleys are very narrow. When they strip mine they first push off the overburden. This is the dirt and rock over top of the coal. it is pushed to one side and a cut into the target coal seam is taken and then the dirt that was pushed aside is pushed back into the hole and the mine marches along the mountain ridge. When they do it that way they grade it when they are done and the grading is done according to a plan that the state approves before the mining begins. They seed it and good companies actually do put back a nice looking bit of land. Now you can't build on it and you can't put animals on it for a long time afterwards and the stuff it grows is generally scraggly crap because the disturbed and mixed stuff that replaced the natural soil is often more rock than dirt and made of minerals that release (among other things) a lot of sulfur into the waterways. So its not nice but its not the end of the world either. They left us with ponds that I have stocked with fish, and they live.

Down south though its different. Because the hills are narrow and steep there is nowhere to push the overburden. So down there they make no attempt at bringing the land back to its approximate original shape. Down there they just push the tops into what used to the the valleys. It both denudes the mountains and takes the overburden and destroys the waterways with it. There is no recovery at all.

So please understand that while all mountain top removal is strip mining that all strip mining is not mountain top removal - and they will purposefully mix the two and distort the image so that they call the stuff that is reclaimed "successfully" to be representative of other mine sites where in fact no attempt at reclamation is made at all.

[cali]

9. thanks, thom

:hi:

as for the rest of the bums commenting in this thread:

:rofl:

[Permanut]

11. Great info, ThomWV!

Thanks for the first personal account! I don't know of any of that going on here in Oregon (yet).

[bbinacan]

12. Thanks Thom

for the perspective.

[Curmudgeoness]

10. They should take a vacation to WV and visit all the beautiful scenery

after the mountain top removal. It is really lovely. And they can swim in the streams in the valleys---oops, no more valleys, and no more clean streams. Scratch that.

[onethatcares]

13. Daddy,. won' t you take me back to Muhlenberg County

Down by the green river
where paradise lay,

Well I'm sorry my son
but it's too late in askin

Mr. Peabodys' coal train
done hauled it away.

Yeah the coal company came
with the worlds largest shovel
and they tortured the timber
and raped all the land

Yeah they dug and they burned
til the land was forsaken
and wrote it all down
to the progress of man.

Paradise by John Prine.
that wasn't the complete song but it sets the drift. It's also one easy song to play on the guitar, and sing to if you're so inclined.

His music is available at john prine shrine, and I'd like to send out a hearty thank you to him for that.

[ThomWV]

15. Something else too - do you know how few coal miners there are in West Virginia?

I said this to my wife this morning when we were riding into Morgantown. I said "I'd be willing to bet you that there are more people working checkout at Wal Marts in West Virginia than there are coal miners". I honestly think its the truth. The highest number I have seen for the number of miners in this state is 25,000. People don't understand, back in the old days when it was all deep mining and there wasn't anything else in the state everyone was or was related to a miner. A deep mine might have over a hundred men on a shift (and it was all men until the last). Now days its mostly surface mining - strip mining - and that requires very few workers, its very common on those jobsites to not have more than two or three men running machines. Most of the time when they were mining the smaller of our properties there was only one guy working, sunrise to way into the night, six days a week, but still only one guy.

[Jack Rabbit]

16. Quick, get me in touch with elpadre and tobyhill

Such a deal I have for them.

[Keith Bee]

17. Don't forget the crisp, clean, new-mountain smell!

:puke:

[11 Bravo]

18. You ought to hear them describe a circumcision!