draft

so heres a really really rough draft...more to be posted later

The United States Government has stated time and time again that we are not a nation that discriminates based on race, class or socieoeconomic status. If you ask people living in areas of the country affected by Mountaintop removal or Hurricane Katrina, they would severely disagree. Although both the Ohio River Valley area and the Gulf Coast region and the events that have recently affected them differ greatly, there are also many similarities. Governmental funding and treatment, specifically FEMA, of the people who live in both of these areas is extremely similar, possibly based upon race, class or socioeconomic status. Water contamination has also been an immense factor in both areas of the country leading to possible thoughts of more sustainable ways of clean-up which is addressed within the Millenium Goals established in Agenda 21.

Mountaintop removal, as defined by the United States Environmental Protection Agency, is a mining practice where the tops of mountains are removed, exposing the seams of coal. Mountaintop removal can involve removing 500 feet or more at the summit to get to the buried seams of coal. The earth from the mountaintop is then dumped in the neighboring valleys. Legally, this is allowed. There is no law against mountaintop removal, nor is there a law against putting sludge or “fill” into the streams and rivers that people of Appalachia drink from. In 1977, the Clean Water act was passed not allowing strip miners to dump the “fill” from the tops of the mountains into the valleys down below. Recently, in 2002, the term “fill” no longer applied to the remains from the tops of mountains and the strip miners were allowed to dump the waste into the streams and rivers of the valleys below. These people of Appalachia are mostly of the working class of society. Most of them have lived in their homes for their entire lives and now, because of coal industry and lack of public knowledge, are being forced to either sell their homes to a company or leave their homes because there is no hope to continue to live in a valley surrounded by coal and coal dust. For example, in Laurel Creek, West Virginia “It's hard to say which problem has caused the most concern among the residents of Laurel Creek, like Johnnie Bailey and Esau Canterbury. Was it the rocks--some more than three-feet high--that sailed off the mine site, the dozens of dead fish in the stream, the silt runoff that filled in one end of Laurel Lake, the half-mile wide coal sludge lake looming over the valley, the well water that turned orange, the loss of access to the mountain land, or the mere sight of their mountains being chopped off?” (www.wvcoalfieds.com) If a person was faced with environmental problems such as those, one would think that the United States Government would intervene, but unfortunately that is not the case.

In West Virginia there have been catacalizmic effects on the environment as well as on the economy from mountaintop removal. An estimated one million acres of mountains within West Virginia have been strip mined for the sake of mountaintop removal from 1939-2005. An estimate of over 100,000,000 board feet of new growth timber is lost every year to mountaintop removal strip mining. In a town called Sundial, West Virginia, Massey Energy Company is the dominate coal company within the small town of around 1000 people.

Hurricane Katrina cut through the Gulf Coast like scissors to a piece of tissue paper on August 29, 2005. The most damaged areas of the Gulf Coast are the six most southern counties in Mississippi: Pearl River, Hancock, Jackson, Stone, Harrison and George. Interestingly enough, the media was mostly focused on the great city of New Orleans who was not hit by the hurricane head on but was severely damaged by the breaching of the levees surrounding the city. People living in southern Louisiana and southern Mississippi were told to evacuate three days before the hurricane was supposed to hit, but considering the fact that over 50,000 people in New Orleans alone do not have means of transportation to leave the city, there was no way for them to get out. New Orleans is a predominately black city with around a 35% unemployment rate amongst African-americans as opposed to 11% amongst whites. The area of the city that was hit the hardest by the hurricane was St. Bernard Parish, an area of the city that is 90% black. Almost the entire area was destroyed immediately upon the flooding from the breaching of the levees. Therein lies the question of “why was the federal government not assisting the people of the Gulf Coast?” According to the office of House leader Nancy Pelosi, “the number of national guard and reservists that have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 is 416, 990,” (www.speaker.gov). Of course, these figures are according to today’s numbers within the military.

People living in West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia are affected everyday by Mountaintop removal. There are coal companies within all four of those states that are polluting small communities’ drinking water supplies as well as dirtying their air. Not only does the removal of the tops of mountains have an aestetically displeasing affect, along with the physical factors, but there is an economical factor as well. When a large coal company comes into a small town and builds a huge plant that causes tons of environmental pollution and physical harm, the monetary value of most of the houses as well as the income of most households within these communities drops dramatically. For example, “McDowell County in West Virginia has produced more coal than any other county in West Virginia, and for many years in the nation, yet the median household income is $19,931 and 37.7% of residents live in poverty,” (www.appvoices.org).

“Louisiana ranks 5^th in oil production and 8^th in reserves in the United States. It is also home to two of the four Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) storage facilities: West Hackberry in Cameron Parish and Bayou Choctaw in Iberville Parish. Other infrastructure includes 17 petroleum refineries with a combined crude oil distillation capacity of nearly 2.8 million barrels per day, the second highest in the nation after Texas. Louisiana has numerous ports including the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port (LOOP), which is capable of receiving ultra large oil tankers. Natural gas and electricity dominate the home heating market with similar market shares totaling about 47 percent each. With all of the product to distribute, Louisiana is home to many major pipelines supplying the nation: Crude Oil - Chevron, BP, Texaco, Shell, Exxon, Scurloch-Permian, Mid-Valley, Calumet, Conoco, Koch, Unocal, Dept. of Energy, Locap. Product - TEPPCO, Colonial, Chevron, Shell, Plantation, Explorer, Texaco, Collins, BP. Liquefied Petroleum Gas - Dixie, TEPPCO, Black Lake, Koch, Chevron, Dynegy, Kinder, Dow, Bridgeline, FMP, Tejas, Texaco, UTP. There are a substantial number of energy companies that have their regional headquarters in the city, including BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Shell Oil Company” (www.wikipedia.org). Interestingly enough, according to the census bureau in 2003, the median household income in Louisiana was $33,792 whereas the national average was $43,318; also, 18.1% of people in Louisiana lived under the poverty line in 2003 as opposed to the nation-wide average of 12.1%. The question stands in both areas of the country, in Appalachia as well as Louisiana, where does all the money go from the processing of fossil fuels? Since both West Virginia and Louisiana are ranked in the bottom five of the poorest states in the United States, that is an unanswered question. Because of the demographic of both of these states, I feel that the government is, without remorse, taking advantage of these people. In Louisiana, according to the 2000 census, there were 1,501,944 african-americans living in Louisiana; in West Virginia, I will reiterate, the median household income is $19,931. These groups of people are black, poor and basically out of the light of the media as well as the government. With an event as drastic and dramatic as Hurricane Katrina, one group of people were shoved into the spotlight of the media but were only focused on for a few days before the “story grew old.”