Mountain Top Removal Mining is a form of extracting coal that involves using explosives to remove up to 1,000 vertical feet of mountain to reach coal. The runoff and debris goes into an adjacent valley called valley fills. The extraction of coal in this manner is making the air unsafe to breathe and water unsafe to drink. Residents of Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia's wells are now contaminated and the aquatic life in the Appalachia's are degrading due to excess minerals in the water: arsenic, mercury, cadmium, fluorine, selenium, and nickel both from the coal itself and the explosives used. People from the surrounding areas have lost their jobs (in the poorest area of the United States) and are becoming very ill and in some cases dying. The environment is being destroyed as well.
This is historical material “frozen in time”. The website is no longer updated and links to external websites and some internal pages may not work.
