It\’s Getting Hot In Here

Aside from the standard risk of death that folks in West Virginia face from mountain top removal mining, say poisoned water, poisoned air, flooding, landslides, flyrock from explosives, overloaded coal trucks and the ever present threat that a seeping, billion gallon sludge dam might bust open some rainy evening, Community Organizer Maria Gunnoe and her family have been facing a much more immediate one: Coal thugs with fire and guns.

To learn more about Maria, do a Google search. A courageous community activist, she has been fighting to save her family’s homeland for years now. She has watched about 5 acres of that beautiful land wash away because of the flooding caused by the Mountain Top Removal site behind her home. She is fighting to save the rest of her community from the same plight.

A week ago,the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, Coal River Mountain Watch and the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy won a preliminary injunction to stop a big mountaintop removal valley fill at Jupiter Coal’s Callisto Mine above her house. In protest, the coal company has said it will immediately lay off 39 workers, and is threatening to lay off over 100 more underground miners.

The coal industry has also worked area coal thugs into a froth using propaganda and lies and then pointed them into the direction of Maria Gunnoe. They blame her (and environmentalists) for the area’s poverty and lack of jobs.

So far they have violently busted into a public meeting OVEC was hosting (drunkenly harassing her, older community members, and winking at her young daughter). She has been told that “sometimes houses just catch on fire and people die in them.” Coal extremists have also posted a virulent 4×8 foot letter ridiculing environmentalists on her children’s bus stop. The list of threats goes on. She and her children are afraid to go to sleep at night because of the constant threat on their family.

Maria and her family are currently taking a number of security measures around their home. What they need now is the support of people from in and outside the community. They need media coverage and outrage. They need you to write letters to the editor, to the mine company, to the government, that coal thugs just aren’t tolerated in the 21^st Century. They also need you to fight the Stream Buffer Zone rule.

There are many in Maria’s community who are so grateful to her for the work she has done, who understand that area poverty is caused not by people fighting for social justice but by a coal company that cares nothing for lives of its own workers or for the community it destroys. As one old man said, “I am so thankful for this ruling. I’ve been a coal miner my whole life and this valley fill would have destroyed my homeplace and everything I have worked for.”