As the US Supreme Court continues to hear the Brent Benjamin-Don Blankenship case on the compromise of judicial neutrality from special interest lobbies--read: Massey Energy's Big Coal grip on West Virginia courts--five more arrests took place today in a growing campaign to stop mountaintop removal in the Coal River Valley.
If the local and nationwide momentum building from last month is any indication of a promised spring and summer campaign of civil disobedience, Coal River Mountain is destined for an extraordinary Appalachian Spring.
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Calling attention to the mine blasting taking place near the Shumate Dam, a mountain valley Class-C dam which holds 2.8 billion gallons of coal sludge that sits a few football fields above the Marsh Fork Elementary School, five activists unfurled a banner to "Stop Blasting, Save the Kids," and were cited for trespassing and peacefully escorted by the state police to jail at Pettus, West Virginia. They were released.
The 385-foot earthen wall of the dam, built in the 1980s, is within view of both the school below, and the nearby blasting site. The dam was built a half century after the establishment of the elementary school, where a 2005 survey found that over 80 percent of the children suffered from respiratory problems.
Only a week after the anniversary of the 1972 Buffalo Creek Dam disaster, when an impoundment burst and killed 125 people, injured 1,000 and left 4,000 homeless, the protesters called on the state of West Virginia, the EPA, and MSHA, which has recorded violations at the Shumate Dam in the past, to stop the blasting and mountaintop removal mining, given the issue of the dam's safety.
You mean Blankenship won't do something for the sake of the kids? Was his For the Sake of the Kids campaign just a calculated, political ploy?
