You have to see it to believe it...Mountaintop Removal/Valley Fill coal mining uses four million pounds of explosives every day to blow up the mountaintops of West Virginia; the blasted mountaintops are pushed into adjoining valleys creating "valley fills;" the resting place of 20% of West Virginia's mountaintops.  Thick seams of low-sulfur coal are the targets that lie beneath. More than 4,000 valley fills in West Virginia alone have buried over 2,000 miles of vital headwater streams -- the source of the southeastern United States' drinking water. The federal government has estimated that, without a significant policy shift, mountaintop removal and other surface mining will have laid waste to nearly 1.5 million acres by the end of the decade, an area larger than the state of Delaware.

A massive MTR site with  dragline in Logan county, WV. April, 2007

Without Valley Fills like this one, Mountaintop Removal coal mining would not be possible. Blasting is set in the bottom right corner and vehicle provides scale.

The first step in Mountaintop Removal coal mining is to clear-cut these mountains of the most diverse temperate hardwood forest in the world.

The extreme coal mining in Appalachia today produces huge amounts of toxic waste called coal sludge or coal slurry. Here, the waste in deposited in “cells” amidst mining activity. The effects of toxic coal waste, a by-product of the chemical cleaning process of coal, is a severe threat to one of the nation’s most valuable sources of water.

A view of the 1929-acres mountaintop removal site directly behind maria Gunnoe's ancestral "home-place" in Bob White, W.Va. In the middle is a valley fill, which contains the mountains that made up Island Creek Mountain and buries the headwaters of Big Branch Creek, where Gunnoe and generations before her played, hunted and gathered food.  The mountain peak on the right has been clear-cut and decapitated; blasting blows away the rock to the coal seam.  “Sediment Control Ponds” or “Crap Catchers” begin at the toe of the valley fill - these are intended to filter the water the flows through the valley fill.  April 2007