Appalachian groups, citizens head to Washington to advocate for protection from mountaintop removal

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3. UPDATE! Appalachian Residents Rally At The White House

Think Progress
Appalachian Residents Rally At The White House To End Pollution From Mountaintop Removal Mining
by Katie Valentine
Posted on September 9, 2014 at 3:48 pm

Ann League was in the midst of building her “dream home” in the mountains of Tennessee when she found out that a strip mine was going in next door.

“Three months after the mining started on Zeb Mountain, my well water turned bright orange,” Leauge, a member of the Alliance for Appalachia, a group that held a rally in D.C. on Tuesday, told ThinkProgress. “We were lucky enough that we could afford bottled water for drinking and cooking, but we had to use that water for showering and laundry too.”

Ultimately League ended up selling (and losing money on) the house and moving back to Knoxville, even though her neighbors and friends — and as she said, her “heart” — still lived in the mountains. That experience was part of the reason why League started working with Alliance for Appalachia, a group that aims to end mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia and advocates for water pollution policy reforms. Mountaintop removal mining is considered to be the most destructive way of extracting coal — instead of using shafts to reach coal underground, the top of a mountain is blown up to get at the coal underneath. This creates a lot of waste and debris, which easily gets into watersheds. Members of Alliance for Appalachia traveled to Washington, D.C. on Monday to meet with members of the Obama administration about water pollution issues in Appalachia and to attend a rally for clean water in front of the White House Tuesday.

League, one of the members who met with officials from the Environmental Protection Agency and Council on Environmental Quality Monday, told ThinkProgress that the main goal of the meeting was to highlight a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) the Obama administration signed in 2009. The MOU outlined the “unprecedented steps” the administration planned to take regarding mountaintop removal’s pollution of water, including increasing regulation on mountaintop removal mining and requiring stricter environmental reviews for mountaintop mining permits....

MORE at http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/09/09/3565111/appalachian-clean-water-rally/