OH AND FUCK MASSEY ENERGY

"You know, and that has always been my feeling as a journalist and as a historian, that a crisis is never a crisis unless it’s validated by a disaster. And so, we’re just waiting for another disaster. And we have all these ticking time bombs ready to go off. You know, the BP oil disaster is horrific, and it’s catastrophic, but it’s in the millions of gallons. And if you look up just a few miles up from the Upper Big Branch coal mine, there’s a billion-gallon coal slurry impoundment held back by an earthen dam. And right now Massey, in massive violations, is blasting with a mountaintop removal operation, a strip mining operation, that is once again compromising and jeopardizing the earthen dam that is holding back almost six billion gallons of toxic coal sludge. And if that earthen dam broke, as it did ten years ago in eastern Kentucky, when not one single mainstream news media covered it, then the people below, the same coal miners who have just lost twenty-nine people in the Upper Big Branch, they will have less than fifteen minutes to flee a seventy-foot tidal wave of toxic coal slurry." - Jeff Biggers