County Music Star Visits Mountaintop Removal Sites
Sep 18th, 2008 by admin
“Seeing is believing. It’s shocking that right here in America coal companies get away with destroying our mountains,” says country crooner “Big” Kenny Alphin.
On Wednesday, “Big” Kenny Alphin of the popular country music duo Big & Rich visited several famous sites in West Virginia, but it wasn’t the standard tourist attractions.
“When you take away our mountains, you take away our heritage,” said local resident Chuck Nelson, “and music is a big part of West Virginia’s mountain heritage. Many country music stars reside in Nashville, and they should know that mountaintop removal coal mining is happening here and it’s headed to Tennessee too.”
“The scale of the devastation is shocking. Until you see it firsthand, you can’t really understand how a mountain that’s been here for hundreds of millions of years can be flattened in just a few years,” said Big Kenny, following the trip. “These mountains are the source of country music and America’s heartland heritage. If we don’t stop this senseless destruction, then we’ll be letting a few profit-hungry companies steal the country from country music.”
“One of the sad truths about surface mining is that it employs far fewer people than deep mining it uses machines to do the job of people. If we outlawed mountaintop removal today, we would gain 2-5,000 new underground coal mining jobs in West Virginia alone, by some estimates,” said community member Lorelei Scarbro.
Those visiting the mining sites also learned about alternatives to mountaintop removal coal mining, including the Coal River Wind Project, which aims to put wind turbines to power 150,000 homes as a replacement for a massive, 6600 acre mountaintop removal site. Underground mining would still be done underneath the wind turbines.
