Sherry Chandler

A real change?

From Ronnie Ellis, posted by Mark Hebert on the WHAS11 Political Blog:

Kodak, Ky. – Go on. Drive up the mountain – if you’ve got the nerve. Up a narrow, winding road 15 miles southeast of Hazard, criss-crossing railroad tracks, past the little Kodak Church of the True and Living God, up Montgomery Creek, along a ledge precariously perched over a holler.

Watch out for the huge coal trucks, carrying 40, 50, even 60 tons of coal – what the locals call “a graveyard hump because they can’t stop and if you’re in the way, you’re in trouble” – coming down that same road, snaking between the cliff on one side and house trailers perched on the ledge over that holler on the other.

But when you get there – there’s no there. The mountaintop is flat gone. Just rock and rubble.

Look over the side, down into that valley where the little stream used to gurgle and now runs muddy along a man-made – well, ditch really. There’s your mountaintop, pushed over the side by the coal companies hauling out the coal – and the profits.

According to the folks who live on the road, the coal companies don’t much mind who or what gets in their way when they’re pushing the mountains down into the valleys and streams and hauling out their coal. And they think people in Frankfort don’t care. That may have changed Monday.

Several members of the House Appropriations and Revenue Committee, led by Chairman Harry Moberly, D-Richmond, made that drive Monday and they were struck by what they saw and heard.

Read the rest.

I’m particularly struck by this little detail:

The taps in Ricky Handshoe’s house leak methane gas.

“The inspector said it was safe, but then he asked me if anybody smoked in the house. I said, no, and he said it wouldn’t be a good idea. So, how can it be safe?”

Let me also recommend Jeff Hess’s picture of his own carbon footprint up north in Cleveland, where it turns out his electric energy links back to Sam Martin’s stomping ground in West Virginia, down around Beckley looks like.

Possibly related posts:

More on Gooch

A metaphorical fog and a real fog

This election is brought to you by…

Missing Mountains

Enshrined?

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.