Tuesday, January 16th, 2007

My name is Danielle Eldridge, and I reside in an area of Perry County, Kentucky known as Sixteenmile. I am a nursing student at Hazard Community College and a member of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth. Like most of us who call Eastern Kentucky home, coal has impacted my family for generations. As in most cases, most of my experiences with the coal industry have been extremely negative. Time after time, I have seen the carelessness and blatant disregard of coal corporations destroy families and our environment. These companies view their workers, citizens, and our land as disposable resources. The workers can be replaced in an instant and everyday citizens mean nothing to them. Several of my family members have been injured to the point of complete disability due to mining accidents, and I saw first hand that they had absolutely no meaning or importance to the companies in which they had invested over twenty years of their lives.

I also know the feeling of wondering if my home and family is going to be swept away in the middle of the night. Our house sits in the middle of an abandoned deep mining site, and no more than fifty feet from our front door is a “reclaimedâ€? hill that could give way at any moment. Because there is very little grassy vegetation to hold the soil in place, the slide keeps inching closer and closer to our home. The area also traps water behind the soil, which poses an even greater threat to our safety and our home. So much water lies in the hill that we can fill a four feet by eighteen feet swimming pool in only two days. The site is inspected frequently by mining officials, but does not rank as a high enough priority to warrant their time or efforts. They informed us that they had much more important things to tend to, but if they had any money left over they would see what they could do. We finally had to repair the area and place rocks around it ourselves.

It is not only private land that is being destroyed, though. The companies are destroying anything and everything in their paths. I recently had the privilege of taking a fly over with the South Wings organization. We visited several areas of Perry County, and what I saw absolutely sickened me. The death and destruction can’t even be put into words. The trees, the grass, the mountain tops- everything was gone. You can not even begin to fathom the extent of the damage until you see it from the air, and the pilot informed us that the scene was nothing unusual for strip mining sites. These companies are utterly destroying our ecosystem, yet they show no remorse for their actions. They are not apologetic, they are not saddened by the scene- their actions are guided by the all mighty dollar, and they will do anything in their power to uncover even the slightest amount of profit.

I, for one, love these mountains and it breaks my heart each and every time I look in my own backyard or pass by a mining site. I ask myself every day, “When will it be enough?â€? How many homes and lives must be destroyed before something gives? How many wells and streams have to be contaminated with hazardous chemicals before people finally start to take notice? In a perfect world, I would not have to ask myself these questions, but alas as we all know, the world we live in is far from perfect.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 16th, 2007 at 9:54 pm and is filed under Lost Mountain, KY. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.