Slurry Communiqués

People drinking city water think this coal sludge being stored above communities or pumped underground doesn’t affect them and that it is not a big issue or anything to be concerned about. Eventually we will find that if this keeps going on then we’ll all have health problems because it comes back to the water we’re drinking.

Everybody trusts that if you are paying for water, you’re automatically going to get safe water or clean water. That’s just not necessarily true.

And what about the animals? How will we protect them from slurry released into streams? Eventually, no one, not even the animals, will have clean water unless we take action and put a stop to this contamination. Animals and people should all have access to safe, clean water.

Please act as fast as possible to help solve this problem and protect your families from suffering from health problems. We are organizing, and all we are asking from the state legislature is that they study coal sludge to find out what is in it, how it is affecting people, and how much of our ground water has been contaminated in the state.

Until we can answer those questions, we are asking them to stop underground injections of coal waste.

Slurry injections have to stop, along with mountaintop removal. Understanding how acid mine drainage seeps out of the mountain, how in the world do they expect slurry injections not to leak out? Fact is they don’t care.

It’s cheaper to inject slurry into the mountain and it’s cheaper to pay heavy equipment operators, instead of miners, to blow off the mountaintop and shove it in a valley. Then they use "Friends of Coal" propaganda to misinform and misdirect the general public. It is no longer coal miners vs. coal operators, now we are one big happy family.

I’m sorry to hear that mountaintop removal is starting or has already started in Pax. It seems that they want to destroy the most beautiful sections first, that way we don’t have much to fight over. I don’t see how we can effectively restore our environment from old mining operations when historical environmental degradations pale in comparison to mountaintop removal, which is absolute permanent devastation.

(an e-mail forward we received)