Katie Huszcza, Colin Flood, Jimmy Tobias, and Sophie Kern, activists with Mountain Justice and Climate Ground Zero were arrested last night and are held on a collective $12,000 bail. They were participating in an act of non-violent civil disobedience against the destructive and irresponsible practice of mountain top removal by locking themselves to a high wall miner on Coal River Mountain.
Please donate to the legal defense fund by clicking below.
More information on this spill available in the most recent post.
Excerpts from today’s story in the State Journal:
Posted Thursday, July 30, 2009 ; 06:00 AM
Story by Mike Ruben
Mine wars now carry a different connotation around southern West Virginia in the new millennium.
“We’re under siege,” Mingo County coal executive James “Buck” Harless of International Industries recently said regarding the actions of the Obama administration. “There’s a mass movement against coal.”
Read the rest of the story here
Watch the latest international report on the battle for Coal River Mountain:
And Part II
When Danny Cook attempted to visit his family cemetery on Cook Mountain in late June, he found the access roads blocked off by five to six steep, man made berms surrounded by four foot trenches and in some cases, water. The Cook Mountain mine site, operated by Horizon Resources LLC, is several hundred feet away and advancing in the direction of the Civil War-era cemetery and the family’s ancestral land. On the dirt road that runs alongside the gravesite, Horizon Resources LLC has drilled holes to measure coal seam depth. The Cooks, many of whom still live in James Creek Hollow down below, do not own mineral rights to Cook Mountain, and are unsure of their surface rights. Horizon, which is jointly owned by Massey Energy and the International Coal Group, is free to blast away the bones of the dead, exposing a thin strip of coal that will be mined and quickly burned.
The following video shows the family visiting the site and talking about Cook Mountain history and the oncoming devastation:
“We All Live in the Coal Fields”: West Virginians Step Up Protests as EPA OKs New Mountaintop Removal