A Sad Good-bye to Bill Maxey, Who Spoke the Truth About MTR

In a painfully sad moment at the July 21 event in Shepherdstown, hydrologist Don Maxey, brother of Bill Maxey, read a message against mountaintop removal from Bill, who lay dying of cancer in a Charleston hospice.

Three days later, Bill died. He was the head of the WV Division of Forestry who resigned his position rather than endorse mountaintop removal.

Bill said, via his brother, "We’re sacrificing thousands of acres of productive forests for a short-term gain by a relative few. But unfortunately, those few are politically powerful people." In his statement, Bill noted that mountaintop removal mining employees far fewer people than does underground mining. He said that it will take hundreds of years, if not millennia, to build up enough soil on mountaintop removal mines to grow trees.