Mountain State Matters

The Associated Press reported today that Massey Energy plans on opening up a new coal mine at the rate of one every 17 days this year.

Massey is positioning itself to take advantage of soaring demand and prices for Appalachian coal. The expansion is centered on underground coal mines, giving Massey alternatives if a court decision that would make it more difficult and time consuming to get federal permits for surface mines is upheld.

“We have all the permits,” Chief Executive Don Blankenship told Wall Street analysts during a conference call Friday. “We have a line of equipment that’s set up that takes us beyond these currently announced expansion plans.”

Massey has a significant presence in West Virgina. Most recent notable Massey news:

• The company had to pay $20 million civil penalty in a corporate-wide settlement for polluting the streams of West Virginia and Kentucky in a flagrant violations of the Clean Water Act.
• Massey refused to do anything about the fact that one of their mountaintop removal mines was located 400 yards upslope from an elementary school (Marsh Fork Elementary in Sundial, WV), and a break in the impoundment dam would allow school officials only three minutes to evacuate the entire student population before the school would be under 15 feet of water.
• Massey CEO Don Blankenship was accused of threatening to shoot an ABC News producer when the reporter tried to interview him in a parking lot.

The Beckley Register-Herald reported last week that the Beckley City Council is considering tightening an ordinance to limit the number of cats and dogs people can have outside their homes. The ordinance would restrict homeowners to “three cats, three dogs, period.”

According to both [City Manager Bob] Cannon and Mayor Emmett Pugh, this comes after the city has handled numerous complaints about some residents having extremely large numbers of pets. Some of these pet owners, they say, have caused grief for their neighbors with noise from barking dogs and the smell of feces coming from their properties. Cannon said he receives about five complaints about dogs per day.

Excessive pets are often problems in poorer areas. The New York Times published a story about pets in Tennessee last July, reporting how in impoverished communities pet owners often can’t afford to spay or neuter animals, and local governments may not require licensing or provide animal shelters.

But is Beckley’s solution the answer? If this proposed ordinance becomes law, I can see the most common solution being abandoning or killing stray animals. As far as I can tell, the proposal doesn’t put into place free spaying and neutering programs, which would probably be a more effective way to control the city’s animal population. Actually, this reminds me vaguely of China’s one-child policy, though I’m not going to make a comparison between a stray dog and a child.

Photo by: *MarS