This week I’m going to be in Wise County, where Dominion Power is planning to build a $1.8 billion coal-fired power plant. Members of the Sierra Club, Appalachian Voices, Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards and CCAN are putting on events around the meeting of the Air Board on Tuesday.
There’s been a lot of talk about the old ways here in Appalachia. Today is the first day of my trip to Wise County to see what we’re fighting for, to get to know the people who are fighting in this community to stop this plant and to attend tomorrow’s Air Board meeting, where they will decide whether or not to grant Dominion’s final permit.
We started the day by helping the Clinch Coalition build a trail in Jefferson National Forest. The forest is a glorious example of the Appalachian eco-diversity. Hickory, Red Oak and Beech gave way to rhododendron and hemlock. Hemlock is rare these days because of a small beetle, the woolly adelgid, which has infested large numbers of hemlock stands in Virginia. But these hemlock were free from infestation, as was the forest in general. There are few invasive species there, even though the roads and more populated trails have numerous examples of invasives like kudzu. The rhododendrons were still in bloom, and as we looked out over the vista of mountains and deep forest, the scars from mountain top removal mining were clearly in view.
A quarter of this county has been destroyed by mountain top removal mining. We visited black mountain with Larry Bush, whose family has been living there for generations, and we witnessed the intense scarring that mountain top removal mining cuts into this landscape. Miles of land, where a mountain once stood, was leveled, barren and destroyed.
Communities like this have had few resources to stop these mines. If a proposal is presented and community members object, they are ignored. “These regulatory agencies act like buffers between the coal companies and the people,” Larry said, “they’re there to make it easier for the coal companies to ignore the people.”
Devastating costs have been paid by the people of Wise. Larry took us to a site where a coal company started mining with out a permit and caused a rock slide. A rock fell and smashed into a house and killed a small boy. The company was slapped with a small fine and no criminal charges were pressed. This is the old way of things in Virginia: whatever’s good for coal is what’s good for Virginia. Politicians, government officials, and industry all participate in this mode of thinking.
It was this thinking that led to looser environmental regulations on coal. We passed 4 huge coal silos on the way up the mountain. I was told that this was a coal-cleaning facility that is now lying unused. When the Bush Administration decided that the restrictions on cleaning coal to get high BTU grade coal were too tough on industry, this facility closed. Now, coal of any grade can be used in coal-fired plants. Dominion’s Wise County plant is going to use some of the dirtiest form of coal
