Honor Miners, Not Machines that Take Their Jobs
(Keep the Mountains, Remove the Plaque!)

October 21, 2002
Photos by Vivian Stockman

Page 3 (Photos)
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Our friends at Tri-State Mining Network in Pennsylvania will be dismayed to know longwall mining is featured on this monument. The longwalling-machine is another machine that takes miners' jobs and endangers people's homes and water supplies, streams, and even highways!

OVEC Board co-chair John Taylor's miner grandfather died from black lung disease. John says, "He was one of the original Arthurdale homesteaders, as well as the Recording Secretary of the first United Mine Workers of America local in the northern part of the state. In other words, a useful and valuable citizen, whose ultimate reward was to slowly smother to death, courtesy of the coal industry." 

John has helped hundreds of miners and their widows wading through the near-impossible task of getting their black lung benefits. John is all for a memorial honoring miners, but not this ode to mountaintop removal the WV Coal Association has created. 

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