Sometimes the news is random, and sometimes it aligns itself into tidy patterns and themes. Today is West Virginia day!
To wit:
• A group of residents in Boone County, W. Va., has sued coal giant Massey Energy and several subsidiaries for polluting their groundwater. The suit asks for replacement water supplies and compensation for personal and property damages. Meanwhile, a sympathetic group has raised enough funds to begin delivering clean water to the residents. (See their lurid toilet tank photos.)
• Over the weekend, officials in Bellaire, Ohio, which sits in the Wheeling, W. Va., metro area, mistook a barrel of hydrochloric acid for a barrel of fluoride and dumped it into the water supply. As reported in the Wheeling papers, a “do not drink” order led businesses and schools to shut down for the day on Monday, but everything’s copacetic now.
• A story about driverless taxis coming to Abu Dhabi’s super-green Masdar City mentions that the world’s only such system is in—wait for it—Morgantown, W. Va. A fact that the transit-obsessed must surely know. But do they know that the PRT—which stands for Personal Rapid Transit—is apparently known by the students at West Virginia University as “Pretty Retarded Train”? You learn something every dang day.
Another coal plant bites the dust
Blowing up our clean energy future
Comments
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MrGrant Posted 3:31 am
04 Feb 2009
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Hey, you got your talking points on my peanut butter...
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Pompey Road Posted 9:58 am
04 Feb 2009
I have been warning on this site about the hundreds of coal slurry impoundments in Southern Appalachia that not only contain the mercury, arsenic, lead and other heavy metals the wet waste ash impoundments in Power Generation contain but also a list of chemicals that are considered carcinogens`. The practice of dumping the excess coal chemical waste water into an abandoned mine is probably better than turning the stuff loose into creeks and rivers in the area on the 3rd or maintenance shifts. I have seen this done often enough.
The scourge of Mountain Top Removal Mining is just the tip of the Environmental Destruction Iceberg in Appalachia. The fresh water streams are being covered up by MTR and the water table is being destroyed by coal slurry or sludge impoundments or the new practice of pumping the stuff into abandoned mines.
A virtual toxic heavy metal, chemical cocktail or cesspool of elements and chemicals the EPA individually declare as Hazardous Materials. If however you mix it all up and pump it into an abandoned mine to keep form constructing a legal impoundment it's all good.
The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.
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MrGrant Posted 2:59 am
14 Feb 2009
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Hey, you got your talking points on my peanut butter...
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