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Please join the National Call-In Day—for our mountains!
Background info on the action.
Wednesday, March 20: National Call-in Day to Oppose Illegal Valley Fills!
Please call, and ask your friends and family to call, too. Mark your calendars today! Take a few minutes to save our streams from being buried with our mountains!
ACTION: Please join thousands of others in a national phone-in day. Call and leave messages for two key administration officials. On Wednesday, March 20, between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. EST, a coalition of WV, KY and national groups are asking people to please call:
* Christine Whitman, Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency at 202-564-4700
Mar 20 4PM update: EPA is routing call to other numbers: click here for details.
* James Connaughton, Chairman of the White House's Council on Environmental Quality at 202-456-5147
Leave messages asking them, please:
--DO NOT revise the definition of "fill material" under the Clean Water Act in order to authorize the dumping of waste into our nation's streams, lakes, rivers and wetlands.
--DO NOT attempt to legalize illegal valley fills from mountaintop removal coal mining, which already have destroyed 1,000 miles of West Virginia streams, and which kill all stream life.
--DO reopen this policy change to public comment, and conduct an Environmental Impact Statement before deciding to complete this rulemaking.
The Bush administration is very close to finalizing a change to Clean Water Act rules that would modify definition of "fill" material to allow wastes from mountaintop removal operations bury streams. In mountaintop removal coal mining, coal companies literally blast off the tops of mountains to reach the seams of coal, then dump the millions of tons of waste generated into nearby streams. In October 1999, a federal court found that this practice violates the Clean Water Act and the stream protection provisions of the federal surface mining law. Now, the Bush administration is trying to change the rules in order to legalize this waste dumping.
To make matters even worse, the proposed rule change would also allow hardrock mineral mining companies and all other kinds of industries to dump their wastes into waters, too. The result of this change in regulations will be nationwide devastation of rivers, lakes, wetlands and streams!
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