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Winds of Change Newsletter, June 2008 See sidebar for table of contents Mountaintops Do Not Grow Back - New Booklet Produced OVEC members will remember our 2006 booklet of interviews with citizens in the coalfields, Like Walking onto Another Planet. A group of Sisters of St. Joseph made waves by distributing the booklet at the annual Massey shareholders meeting! The collection was well-received by many folks interested in the true stories of life in the midst of mountaintop removal, slurry injection and looming impoundments. Now a second book of seven moving and revealing interviews is available, Mountaintops Do Not Grow Back. OVEC staffer Carol Warren collected the recorded interviews and faithfully transcribed them, so readers feel like they are having a conversation with the residents themselves. Illustrations by Joel Futrell again complement several of the stories. Printed copies are available from the OVEC office, or you can read the interviews online on the OVEC website. Just click on the booklet title on the OVEC homepage. Below is an excerpt from an interview with Bill Price, resident of Milton and "refugee from Dorothy, West Virginia." He describes the experience of having to make the choice to leave his community and family homeplace: As part of Dorothy, we had this little community that I lived in which was five houses. Heres what happened in regard to the sale of the houses. We had all of us been flooded. The coal company then comes and says, "Well, we got this permit to do this other mining thats gonna put seven more valley fills in." I looked at the mine maps and every valley fill was going into Fulton Creek, which was the creek that went into Clear Fork that created this flooding. And I was thinking, "Theres no way were gonna survive the next flood! Its even gonna be worse!" The mining company knew it was gonna be worse, so thats why they wanted to buy us out. What the mining company kept saying was, "We dont have to have your property. We dont have to. Youre lucky were gonna buy you." Like disrespectful kind of stuff. None of us wanted to sell. But all of us recognized that we had to sell. My next-door neighbor had never lived anywhere else in her married life. Thats where her and her husband came when they got married. She was eighty-some years old, and she had never lived anywhere else. I remember when we were going through this months of process, "Well, we hear the coal companys gonna buy us. But do we really want to sell? Do we not want to sell? Everybodys got to make their own choice." And she was like, "I just cant handle any more. Ive got to go." I remember walking over to her home during that process a dozen times, and her just being in tears. And toward the end, youd go in her home and she had everything boxed up, ready to go. But still was, I guess, hoping that she wouldnt have to. I remember sitting in her kitchen with all these boxes stacked around us, and her just in tears going, "We dont have any choice. We dont have any choice but to go." And thats what we did. ... The coal company looks at this as being dollars and cents. "If we can decrease their property values enough, we can get by scot free by everybody just selling out. And they should be happy were doing that to them."
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