To: John Pizarchik, Director,US Dept of Interior - Office of Surface Mining, Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE) and President Donald Trump

US Department of Interior: End Mountaintop Removal to Protect Water in WV

Tell John Pizarchik of the US Dept of Interior - Office of Surface Mining, Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE) to enforce the Stream Protection Rule, and stop mountain top removal to protect surrounding streams.

Why is this important?

Mountaintop Removal is a destructive and unsustainable practice that only benefits big, greedy corporations at the expense of the health of our communities and the environment.

While traditional coal mining extracts coal from underground, mountaintop removal mining blasts away chunks of mountains at the surface to get at the coal beneath.

Explosives are used to remove up to 400 vertical feet of a mountain to expose underlying coal seams. Excess rock and soil laden with toxic mining byproducts are then dumped into nearby valleys and waterways.

But our water isn’t the only thing being poisoned by these chemicals; mountaintop removal has also polluted thousands of pristine streams, and there are dozens of toxic slurry dams across West Virginia.

Mountaintop Removal mining has contributed to placing a slew of wildlife on the federal endangered species list, and threatens some of the highest biodiversity in North America.

Numerous studies demonstrate that mountaintop mining has serious environmental impacts, including loss of biodiversity and toxification of watersheds, which mitigation practices cannot successfully address. There are also adverse human health impacts which result from contact with affected streams or exposure to airborne toxins and dust.

We must tell President Obama and Director John Pizarchik of The US Dept of Interior - Office of Surface Mining, Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE) to enforce the Stream Protection Rule, and stop mountain top removal to protect human health and our environment.