SouthWings Helps OVEC Bring Home the Full Horror of Mountaintop Removal Mining in Appalachia

It’s hard to grasp the massive scale of the mountaintop massacre/valley burial going on in southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky (as well as parts of Virginia and Tennessee) unless you get an aerial view, be it in person or from photographs.

	SouthWings pilot Susan Lapis and her Cessna four-seater, with OVEC organizer Abe Mwaura after a flight.

Thanks to SouthWings, hundreds of people, including legislators and journalists, have viewed the heartbreaking vista with their own eyes, while hundreds of thousands, if not millions, have seen aerial photographs of mountaintop removal taken from a SouthWings Cessna.

Our website and newsletters are peppered with photos we would never have gotten without SouthWings. We shout out: THANK YOU, SOUTHWINGS!

Founded in 1996, SouthWings is a non-profit organization that, according to their website, www.southwings.org, "uses a network of volunteer pilots and small aircraft to protect and conserve the natural resources and ecosystems of the Southeast. We do this by providing a bird’s-eye view of the natural wealth of the region’s forests and watersheds, and by exposing environmental degradation and illegal land management practices that would not otherwise be known."

OVEC is especially indebted to SouthWing pilots Susan Lapis and Hume Davenport, who have volunteered hundreds of flight-hours flying reporters, legislators and our members over the ecological and cultural devastation that is mountaintop removal/valley fill strip mining.

With her bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. (wow!) in chemistry, Susan knows those bizarre colored water bodies on mountaintop removal sites are laden with heavy metals.

Susan also can fill you in on the brown haze her plane often cuts through – the result of burning the coal blasted out of our mountains (and driving those cars).

Hume first flew for a similar group out West. He moved back East and founded SouthWings.

Susan recalls that Hume started Southwings with one telephone in a hangar outside of Chattanooga, using his own plane. As Susan says, "He’s amazing! (Hume built Southwings) on the strength of his own energy, personality and passion."

Thanks so much to SouthWings for helping to spread the word around the world about mountaintop removal coal mining!