LARRY GIBSON (citizen activist, Kayford Mtn, West Virginia) INT truck: "All these mountains you see right here, See all through yonder. All them mountains are slated to be destroyed like the ones around me.”
VO: “Larry Gibson is fighting to save his family cemetery, and the mountains he calls home, from an unthinkable threat.”
Explosion
Jeff Barrie running behind camera: “Right behind you!”
GIBSON: “Come on! Quickly now! Aw, there they are”
GIBSON: “This is, this is madness! This is madness! This should not be allowed to happen. I don’t have anything against the working man, but I have everything against the operation of what’s happening here. I have everything a-a-against what they’re doin here! They are not only destroying the land. They are destroying the environment, they’re destroying it for the future of everybody that comes after me and after you.”
VO: “From this vantage point, Larry once looked up the side of a giant mountain covered in dense forest. Today he looks down onto this flat plane, nearly a thousand feet lower than the original mountain top. What happened? Coal companies removed the mountain.”
GIBSON: “They got a permit for 2400 acres for 4 million tons of coal. In order to get that 4 million tons of coal they had to remove 24 million tons of earth. Now how is it feasible? How’s it feasible that they can move 24 million tons of earth to get 4 million tons of coal? Simple. All they do is blow the mountains up.” Nat Sound, quiet mountain explodes. GIBSON: "BRDRDRDRD... It's like a machine gun blowing the mountains away." Nat sound explosions, various.
JUDY BONDS: "They use 2500 tons of explosives a day in Appalachia And that’s why I say we are under assault. This, this- we are under attack."
VO: "The mountains are turned inside out, and millions of tons of debris are dumped into valleys below. More than one thousand five hundred miles of streams have been buried. The natural landscape is altered beyond repair, leading to severe floods. In recent years, the town of Dorothy West Virginia has faced the worst floods in its history.”
VOICE: “Thare goes the bridge… thare it goes…thare goes the bridge”
BONDS: "This is insane. this is completely insane."
VO: “Processing the coal leaves behind massive amounts of toxic slurry
waste, stored in giant sludge ponds throughout this region. Hundreds of these
lakes threaten communities across Appalachia. In the fall of 2000, one of these
lakes failed, sending an estimated 300 million gallons of thick black sludge
into the Big Sandy River in Martin County, Kentucky. The size of the spill was
30 times greater than the 1989 Exxon-Valdes oil spill in Alaska. Fish and aquatic
life were wiped out along more than 100 miles of the river, and residents were
left with contaminated drinking water. A state of emergency was declared. The
Environmental Protection Agency considered it one of the worst environmental
disasters ever, east of the Mississippi river, but few people heard about it.”
VO: "Mountain top removal is taking place 24 hours a day, right now. Some of the world’s richest and most diverse forests are transformed into a barren wasteland. The people that live here are saddened and outraged.”
Community Activist: “It’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to the state.”
VO: “In the past 30 years, mountain top removal has claimed more than 450 mountains in Central and Southern Appalachia, and there are dozens of permits for new mines in the works.”
GIBSON: "People- a lot of people ask me if I have a picture of the mountains when they were still here. For one, you can't take a picture of a mountain when you're on it. But two, Lord have mercy, why should you take a picture of a mountain. It's gonna be there forever. (laughs) Or at least I thought.”