Mountaintop Removal is the process employed by mining companies to extract coal as quickly and cheaply as possible -- with astounding costs to neighboring residents and ecosystems. While it is used most commonly in far away Appalachia, electric company customers here in New England are connected to this devastating practice.
Mountaintop removal consists of scraping a mountain free of the not-so-profitable timber, topsoil, and sandstone, and blasting the mountain with repeated powerful detonations. The thousands of tons of debris are then pushed into adjacent valleys.
Schoolyards downwind of these sites are coated with fine black dust and there are increasing cases of respiratory illnesses as well as bone damage, cancers and illnesses of the liver, kidney and spleen.
In Appalachia, the blasts can number in the thousands per day. Can you imagine what it would be like living near that? Foundations crack. The lack of vegetation on the hills and the clogged waterways make flooding inevitable. What watersheds still flow now carry the leached toxins from the by-product of coal slurry.
My electricity supplier, GMP, buys 8.5 percent of its energy from NE Market Power. A portion of that comes from Somerset Station in Mass. According to the Web site
www.ilovemountains.org, Somerset (owned by NRG Energy) buys its coal directly from mining companies that use mountaintop removal.
Google has partnered with this site so you can see where your power comes from.
Every time I flip on a light switch, run water sufficient to cause the pump to click on, all the clocks and smoke detectors in my house that suck energy constantly, contribute toward creating a need for energy -- what big corporations are eager to call a demand for cheap power, and they are eager to supply it at a phenomenal profit by irrevocably destroying a region of Earth.
Could I cut my energy consumption by 8.5 percent to counteract this need? Could you? I'm working on it. Mountaintop Removal is one more item in a long list of good reasons to reduce energy consumption.
Many politicians are reluctant to rock the boat on this topic as they collectively receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions from these mega-companies. The effects of mountaintop removal are long-ranging and outlast the energy gain from the coal that is mined.
It is important to let our power companies and governmental representatives know that these practices are unacceptable, and more careful attention needs to be paid to protecting our water, ecosystems and people.
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