The 25-mile, five-day Senior Citizens March to End Mountaintop Removal culminated at 4 p.m. Monday in a protest and press conferences at the gates of Mammoth Coal Company, a Massey subsidiary. Mammoth was named by the US Mine Safety & Health Administration yesterday as one of ten mining operators that need to improve performance or face tougher enforcement. The expansive mountaintop removal site at Mammoth Coal Company is currently inactive. See the AP story on the march for complete coverage. For video essays on each day of the march, visit Mobile Broadcast News.
Regina Hendrix, whose family has lived in the Kanawha Valley for over 200 years, returned to West Virginia in the early 90s to enjoy her retirement. Instead, she learned about mountaintop mining and saw the environment around her home totally destroyed.
“I came on this walk to support the incredible people of West Virginia who have been fighting mountaintop removal for years,” said Sue Rosenberg, 62, of Saugerties, New York. She is the mother of Mathew Louis-Rosenberg, who has been living in the Coal River Valley for over a year. He is going to trial on October 15 at the Madison County Courthouse for an action which included a lock down to a rock truck on Kayford Mountain in May 2009.
A press conference and rally kicked off the march at the State Capitol in Charleston on Thursday, October 8th. On Saturday, two young people hung a banner off of the Walker CAT building in Belle as the march passed by. The banner read “Yes, coal is killing West Virginia communities.” Steve Walker, CEO of Walker Machinery Co., equated the two banner hangers to suicide bombers in the Middle East in this radio interview. Evening events, which included talks by Larry Gibson of Kayford Mountain and Jesse Johnson of West Virginia’s Mountain Party, were held at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Charleston.
Roland Micklem, 81, self-proclaimed ‘instigator’ of the Senior Citizens March Against Mountaintop Removal, joined Climate Ground Zero in June. He has since been arrested twice for nonviolent civil disobedience. The first arrest was in opposition to Massey Energy’s infamous coal sludge impoundment located above Marsh Fork Elementary School, and the second for a road-blockade outside of Massey Energy’s regional headquarters in Boone County, W.Va.. Micklem, a former environmental journalist, has written open letters calling senior citizens and Christians to join the fight against mountaintop removal. He was joined on this March by two of his daughters, Sue and Sarah Micklem.
Someone please find these walkers. I call them walkers not marchers, because they sure didn’t march to a MTR site. Planning and preparation is such viable alternative isn’t it?
You guys wasted your time. Why aren’t you protesting at union facilities? Why are you only targeting Massey Energy? Mammoth Coal Company’s surface operations were ALL created and mined out under UNION various union companies, as the permitted area changed hands many times over the years.
If I’m not mistaken, when Massey acquired the current “Mammoth” properties, they also inherited a LOT of non reclaimed, abandoned earth, that was strip mined by aforementioned union operations, then neglected. Massey then invested in the total reclamation of these abandoned areas, within state and federal guidelines.
Some of the most beautiful, reclaimed land you will ever see is along the Mammoth property. Funny though, how nobody started targeting Mammoth till Massey showed up. Maybe there is an alterior motive here, hiding under the guise of environmental concern?
Fo shiznit.
Been saying that all along gang green, I did attend the UMWA rally where Mr roberts said he would disassociate the UMWA from MTR. These KIDS that came to our job and it has even been proven by Antrim Caskey that they do not know that UMWA have MTR sites, past or present. When Ms Caskey took pictures of a Horizon Natural Resources MTR site who is associated with the UMWA ,she recanted(when yours truly pointed that out to her), but then tried her best to yes as they always do STTTTRRRRREEEETTTCCCCHHHHHH the truth by saying Massey bought that job. In fact they did not. Anyways that was a few months back and they still havent learned.