My name's Maria Gunnoe. I’m from Bob White on Route 85 in Boone County, West Virginia, and mountain top removal moved into my backyard in 2000. Since then, I’ve lost two access bridges, the use of my water, about five acres of land.

There’s 13 landslides between me and the toe of the landfill behind me. Each time it rains these landslides move. All depending on how much rain we get, sometimes they can move as much as five feet in one day. You know that eventually they’re gonna wash out, and when they do, I will have another major washout there at my home.

Since 2000, I’ve been flooded seven times. One time I was flooded with no rain… blue skies and just barely any clouds at all in the sky… and the stream coming through my property just came up. It came up about three feet. By the time I called the DEP [WV Department of Environmental Protection] and made the proper complaints and reports, the water had subsided. The DEP said there was no evidence of what had happened and therefore it was OK.

So he said, “Well, you know, you’re the island and we are the ocean. You set in the middle of 187,000 acres of coal company land. You’re the only thing we don’t own between here and the Virginia border.” I had my family members – seven of us – there for that meeting and it just didn’t make no sense.

And with that, I’m gonna add that the DEP doesn’t allow citizens to take samples of the water that runs by their house. So I mean if I had run out there and got a sample, it would have been nothing more than my sample. The DEP is not there for the citizens, they’re there for the coal companies, and they enable the coal companies. In some cases they even lie to the citizens in order to continue the work on the mountaintop removal site. I’ve been lied to many times. I’ve had five DEP agents stand and look at me and tell me an eroded mountain wasn’t eroded. I have pictures and a lot of proof showing that it’s eroded. It’s like they were programmed to say – no matter what I said – that it was not eroded.

"They just will not admit the fact that the mountains behind me is crumbling in on my home."

They just will not admit the fact that the mountains behind me is crumbling in on my home. The mountains are slipping into the hollow and in turn, it’s washing by me, and [it’s] flooding the people across from me. Everyone downstream from where that mountaintop removal site is gets flooded and their wells are contaminated. My well is contaminated. Can’t drink my water. I buy on average about $250 worth of water a month, and that’s on a slow month. The WV American Water Company’s wantin’ $31,000 to put water in to me. And that’s only 500 feet worth of water line. They want $31,000 for that. I can’t afford that, of course.

And the financial aspects of what these catastrophic floods has done to our lives is just unbelievable. Lookin’ back on it, myself and my husband had real good jobs, workin’ full time, doin’ the life thing – you know, livin’ life. And then this flood thing started and we was just bein’ completely wiped out.

And in response to all the floods, and to the coal company’s claims that this was an “act of God” takin’ place in my back yard, I began organizing other people here in the neighborhood. I got to lookin’ around, and it seemed that the people around me was bein’ affected or were in line to be affected by this same mountain top removal site. Doing this, I’ve also educated myself on mountain top removal in the regional area, in the Appalachian region. And I’ve been workin’ consistently for the past five years - locally I’ve been workin’ for seven years - on the issue of mountaintop removal and what it’s doin’ to our communities.

People around here are swiggin’ down contaminated water all day long, every day. The health affects are sometimes long-term. It’s usually pancreatic cancer or some kind of liver disease, or kidney stones, gall stones – digestive tract problems.  And then, too, people’s breathing. The blasting is killin’ people – just smotherin’ them to death through breathin’ all of the dust.  The computers and electronics and stuff in my house stay completely packed up with black coal dirt and rock dust together.  Why do they expect us to just take this? It’s not gonna happen down at the state capital. I mean they’re not gonna go up there and blast off the top of a mountain in the background of the Capitol.

Through my organizing, I’ve met quite a bit of…. I guess you could call it opposition. I’ve had my children get harassed.  I’ve got a 15-year-old boy and an 11-year-old girl. I have a 15-year-old boy that looks like a 30-year-old man - he’s very big.  He’s been harassed by grown men. They call him tree-hugger and just generally say things to him that’s not nice. My son just takes it and goes – he’s a real trooper.

"My children don’t want to leave where they’re at, and that gives us one choice. That gives us the choice of fightin’ to stay."

Before I began doing this, let me say, I did talk to my kids about it. My children don’t want to leave where they’re at, and that gives us one choice. That gives us the choice of fightin’ to stay. And we talked about it. When all this first come up, I really felt it was in our best interest to leave, but we were unable to do so. The property’s been devalued so bad that you can’t get nothin’ out of it to move forward with your life. And you can’t hardly walk off and leave everything you’ve got. So that’s pretty much the point that we’re at now.

And I see this happening throughout the communities in southern West Virginia, and then too in Tennessee and Kentucky.  And it’s wrong, you know? I mean it’s flat-out wrong to do people like this. If you react, the strip miners will cut you short every time. If you lash out and say, “Why are you destroyin’ my home?” they’ll look at you and say, “Well, I gotta have a job.” And they will verbally attack you in front of other people in the convenience store and say things to you that’s just completely and totally unnecessary. They will say things to you that really instigate you, and makes you – considering all we go through here day to day – just want to reach out and grab ‘em and shake the daylights out of ‘em! I wanna say, “How can you do me like this in the name of jobs? How can you do me and my family like this and expect us to sit by and just let you do it?”

Before I began doing this, let me say, I did talk to my kids about it. My children don’t want to leave where they’re at, and that gives us one choice. That gives us the choice of fightin’ to stay. And we talked about it. When all this first come up, I really felt it was in our best interest to leave, but we were unable to do so. The property’s been devalued so bad that you can’t get nothin’ out of it to move forward with your life. And you can’t hardly walk off and leave everything you’ve got. So that’s pretty much the point that we’re at now.

And I see this happening throughout the communities in southern West Virginia, and then too in Tennessee and Kentucky.  And it’s wrong, you know? I mean it’s flat-out wrong to do people like this. If you react, the strip miners will cut you short every time. If you lash out and say, “Why are you destroyin’ my home?” they’ll look at you and say, “Well, I gotta have a job.” And they will verbally attack you in front of other people in the convenience store and say things to you that’s just completely and totally unnecessary. They will say things to you that really instigate you, and makes you – considering all we go through here day to day – just want to reach out and grab ‘em and shake the daylights out of ‘em! I wanna say, “How can you do me like this in the name of jobs? How can you do me and my family like this and expect us to sit by and just let you do it?”

One thing about West Virginia people is we’re not the kind to give up and walk away. If we was the kind to give up and walk away, we would never have settled this area years and years ago. Because this was a very rough terrain – a very rough life here. But people loved it – people like my great-grandmother, people like my grandfather before me. They loved this land, and tended this land. It’s land that wasn’t meant to be developed. It’s a special land. God put it way up high so they’d leave it alone.  I’ve had people to tell me that God put the coal there for us to mine. I have to disagree with that. He buried it because it’s so daggone nasty!

The coal companies like to say that the mountain top land is just useless land, and that’s not true. How can they say that?  That’s insane to me. My family growin’ up – my grandfather had mountain corn fields and grew corn up in these mountains. And you know, that’s our survival. The mountains are literally our survival. And now as long as you’re driving through here on the paved road, you’re OK, but if you get off that paved road on one side or the other, you’re gonna be stopped. You’re not allowed into these mountains any more! How can they tell the mountain people that they’re no longer allowed in the mountains? That’s not right. They’re taking away everything that puts us together as a people. And they’re expecting the wrong people to sit back and take this.

We’re not stupid by no means. There’s a lot of very, very intelligent people here that can’t read and write, but they’re not stupid. They’re brilliant in their own sense of the word. They have intelligence that’s not taught in college. These people are the people I grew up with – the people I love. And these are people that I won’t walk away from. And I would probably stand up to the biggest, strongest, most evil power in the world in order to protect them and to protect their rights to retire in their homes – and to protect their rights to be who they are in the communities they’re in.

In doing this, I’ve had a little bit of everything done to me. I’ve been accused of all kinds of stuff. I’ve had sand put in my gas tank – cost $1,200 to keep my truck on the road. And you know, in this kind of area, if they ground your vehicle, you’re grounded! You’re stopped right there, dead in your tracks. I’m 25 miles from the nearest town, so that really slowed me down for quite a while. Teachers in the schools make comments to my kids. It’s not their place to tell my children that their water isn’t poisoned by coal, when my children know they can’t drink their water. I’ve had my tires cut, my dog shot. People spit on my truck all the time – big, gross tobacco juice spit.

One of my dogs was shot and left in the parkin’ lot where my kids catch the school bus. This was my daughter’s dog. She actually nursed this dog when he was a baby – he was fed a bottle and was a little spoiled. But this was her dog, it wasn’t my dog. My aunt, luckily, worked at the Post Office. She called me and told me that a dog was layin’ over there dead, and instead of takin’ the kids to the bus stop, I just took them on to school. Then when I came back and confirmed that it was our dog, we were just completely devastated. He was a three-year-old baby, really.  He was very close to the family. He had veered back onto the mountain top removal site. The last time I seen him, that was the direction he was headed. When they first came in up there, they used to feed my dogs. I kind of feel like they baited him in for the kill.

Then I had a dog shot at the back of my house. It was tied at the back of my house. It’s gotten to the point I can’t leave my dogs untied because somebody might kill ‘em. Well, I had the dog tied at the back of my house and he was shot right in the top of the head. This was within thirty feet of my bedroom window.  There’s a lot of trains goes by where I live at, so they could’ve done it while a train was goin’ by and I wouldn’t have heard it.  Had it been a small caliber gun, I wouldn’t have heard it. They know that. They know how to get you. By killing off your animals, that opens them a way to get in your place without people knowin’ it.

"They know how to get you. By killing off your animals, that opens them a way to get in your place without people knowin’ it."

The people in these communities, they feel the blasting, they see the trucks on the road runnin’ over top of their family.  They see what’s going on, but they don’t see what it looks like from the sky. Seein’ what it looks like from the sky scares you. It scares you real bad to come home to it. When it rains here, we all get flooded. And then the coal companies, they care so much!  After 5 acres of my land and my life washed down the stream, the coal company engineer came into my front yard and said that this was “an act of God!”

You know, the night when this wall of water was comin’ down through the hollow at me, I run to the mountain. But the mountain was slidin’ and I couldn’t go there. I couldn’t get out, the streams had me and my family surrounded. I literally hit my knees, and I prayed for everything I was worth! And there was an act of God took place that night. But not the one they claimed.  And that was the same claim they made after they killed 125 people in the Buffalo Creek flood. I lost family in the Buffalo Creek flood. My father was a rescuer in the Buffalo Creek flood.  So that incident was very close to our family.

To see what come off that mountain, and to know what it had been like for 37 years, well, it’s a big eye-opener to realize what a dramatic difference the mountain top removal makes in everything! I mean, everything around these strip sites is constantly erodin’, and there’s always water runnin’ in all different directions. The DEP calls that “streams meandering.” They were never streams before – now they’re streams! 

This process it’s tearin’ my property all to pieces, and I have no rights over my property. The only right I have over my property is the right to pay taxes on it! I have no control over what’s goin’ on. The coal company has tore it all to pieces. It looks awful. Our place had always been pretty much handmanicured.  My father and my grandfather before me took very good care of it. We had fruit trees and just an abundance of foodproducing plants right there next to where I lived at. Our land has always been tended in a way that it took care of us. Now that’s no longer the case. Our soil’s contaminated. A garden that we’d gardened for all the thirty-seven years that I’ve been there is now covered with coal slurry. You can’t grow food in that. 

My yard was completely washed out. My fruit trees are gone. My nut trees are gone. I woke up the next morning and looked at this massive trench in my front yard and just really…it took me three days to absorb it. I went from crying – sobbing – to being very mad. This was three years ago, and I’m still mad. And honestly, I’m a little madder than I was then because I realize how many tentacles this evil has. It goes all the way to Washington, D.C. And if I have to go up against it and fight for my home, I’m goin’ against it. It’s even the United States government. And that alone is pretty intimidating. But at the same time, so is that wall of water sittin’ back up on that mountain waitin’ for me.

I don’t think I’ve ever run up against anything that intimidated me that bad. Keeps me up at night. Keeps my kids up at night. And that’s when you know how powerful the intimidation of these waters are. When you get to the point that you ain’t had ten hours of sleep in a week, and it comes time to lay down and go to sleep and it starts rainin’... and you don’t go to sleep... well!

"There’s a lot of people here who support what I do. But there’s others who drive in here every day for their jobs, and given a choice, they’d run over me in a heartbeat."

People look at you different ways. There’s a lot of people here who support what I do. But there’s others who drive in here every day for their jobs, and given a choice, they’d run over me in a heartbeat. They’d do anything they could to get rid of me. But I know I’m bein’ effective and I know I’m makin’ a change. And with that change will come the intimidation factors. But it just doesn’t work – there’s nothin’ more intimidating than what they’ve already put me through. So – bring it on.

I’m settin’ there on my porch, which is my favorite place in the whole world, by the way – I’d rather be on my front porch than any other place in the world and I’ve been to a lot of places.  As it stands right now, with the new permits I saw last week, they’re gonna blast off the mountain I look at when I look off my front porch. And I get to set and watch that happen, and I’m not supposed to react. Don’t react, just set there and take it. They’re gonna blast away my horizon, and I’m expected to say, “It’s OK.  It’s for the good of all.”

Am I willing to sacrifice myself and my kids, and my family and my health and my home for everybody else? No – I don’t owe nobody nothin’. It’s all I can do to take care of my family and my place. It was all I could do before I started fightin’ mountain top removal. Now that I’m fightin’ mountaintop removal, it makes it nearly impossible. But at the same time, my life is on the line. My kids’ lives are on the line. You don’t give up on that and walk away. You don’t throw up your hands and say, “Oh, it’s OK, you feed me three million tons of blasting material a day. That’s fine, I don’t mind. It’s for the betterment of all.”

I can’t say that there’s anything out there that I’m willin’ to risk myself and my kids for. Nothin’. No amount of money, no amount of energy, no amount of anything. If it come down to it, we could live up under a rock cliff with what the good Lord above give us. And we could live like that, as long as we got clean water, clean air, and a healthy environment. We can take care of ourselves from there. But when they contaminate our water, our air, and our environment we’re gonna die no matter what we do. That’s it.