It drastically alters the landscape and ecology. Mountaintops with their stands of maple, oaks, beeches and their diversity of plant, animal and insect life are decimated and great gobs of earth are sheared off and thrown aside exposing the underburden like an enormous, cancerous, raw, sore. The magnitude of the destruction is overwhelming. Blasting causes tremendous noise and dust pollution. Rock dust settles on everything.
Wells go dry.
The foundations of people s homes are cracked. People are forced out of their homes or feel they have no alternative but to leave. James Weekley, whose family has lived in Logan County for generations, and whose home and family lands near Blair are being threatened by mountaintop removal operations, remembers when Blair, at the height of the coal boom, numbered about a thousand homes. As the coal played out, the town disintegrated to five hundred homes, then four hundred, then less. Reclamation will replace the mountain top with flat grassy knolls which will result in economic development.