West Virginia Pictures

When mining organizations level West Virginia hills to find the coal beneath, entire cities vanish. When a Michigan power-plant burns off coal to make electrical energy, it causes asthma attacks among kids residing close by. When coal ash blows onto a Paiute reservation in Nevada, elders die. Sierra asked men and women over the land to describe the way the world’s dirtiest energy source has disturbed their particular resides— and just what they’re performing to stop it.

Mountaintop removal mines in Appalachia have demolished an estimated 1.4 million acres of forested hills, buried around 2, 000 miles of streams, poisoned drinking tap water, and cleaned entire cities through the chart. Lindytown, western Virginia, when house to a large number of families, has become an isolated, lonely spot, with only 1 original family continuing to be. Everyone else sold-out to Massey Energy (today Alpha Natural sources), that was laying waste to a nearby hill. West of Lindytown, a mountaintop treatment my own caused the people of Blair to fall from 700 individuals in 1990s to less than 50 today, based on the Blair Mountain Heritage Alliance.

Here are pictures and descriptions of these suffering from mountaintop elimination in western Virginia. Pictures and captions thanks to Ami Vitale/Panos photos for Sierra Club.

Coal's Impact On West Virginia

An aerial view associated with mountaintop removal my own that caused all but one household in Lindytown, western Virginia, to offer their houses and move away. Your house in which Roger and Quinnie Richmond nevertheless live is circled.