Photos from West Virginia

I just got back from Coal River Road in West Virginia. I was taking pictures for my friend Anand Gopal of Leftwords, who's doing a story for Wiretap Magazine on the mining communities out there. It was a fascinating trip and I want to write a bit more about it, but I'm moving house today so I'll content myself with putting up a couple of pictures.



This is Marsh Fork Elementary School, with a coal silo towering over it in the background. We got started because Anand heard from some folks in Philly about this spot. A lot of kids here have been getting sick, either from the coal dust or from the chemicals the company uses to treat the coal. Out of view in the background is 2.8 billion gallons of water full of mine waste, held back by a leaky dam.



This is Anand with Larry Gibson, a local activist, in Kayford, WV. Larry is pointing out a fissure opened up by explosives used in mountaintop removal mining. The mountain we're standing on top of is honeycombed with old mineshafts which are also full of wastewater; a fissure in the right place could flood the valleys and displace thousands of people.



This is what mountaintop removal looks like: the Samples mine in Kayford. The peak of this mountain used to be 700 feet above where we are standing. Towards the right you can see some of the attempts at restoration - native species don't grow back well on the fill from MTR, so they use imported grasses as a covering. You don't get a good sense of the scale from this picture, but if you look at it at full resolution you can just barely see the dumptrucks they use to pour the rock over the side of the mountain; they have tires the size of an SUV. It's also pretty impressive in Google Maps. Google Earth has a recent picture superimposed on out-of-date topographic information, which helps give a sense of how much the area has changed.



This is the memorial to 12 miners who died after being trapped by an explosion in Sago last year. The company had been cutting corners on safety, and locals say they held back a team that was ready to go in and cut these guys out. Mine safety has deteriorated tremendously with the expansion of aggressively nonunion companies like Massey Coal, who also push mountaintop removal.