"Erica and Rully must bathe their daughter, age 5, in contaminated water that is the color of tea. Their water has been tested and contains high levels of arsenic…. The coal company that mines the land around their home has never admitted to causing this problem, but they do supply the family with bottled water for drinking and cooking. Contaminated and colored water has occurred in other coalfield communities as well where mountaintop mining is practiced....

"As Gunnoe pointed out in her testimony about the Spruce coal mines in West Virginia, mountaintop removal is an extraordinarily destructive process that the coal companies don't want the public to know about:

• Selenium discharges downstream from Spruce No 1 are already much higher than EPA standards according to recent water testing. The Spruce 1 permit will allow more selenium to be released into this stream. This is the making for life threatening levels of selenium.
• The community of Blair has NO municipal drinking water available to them. The only water in these communities is the well water which in some cases has already been polluted. The community of Blair needs water infrastructure to supply their homes with healthy water before any area permits are even discussed.
• From what we see on the ground the coal companies have already moved forward in preparing the permit area as if they had an approved permit.
• The Spruce permit is in the Coal River watershed. Mountaintop removal is why American Rivers placed the Coal River on our America's Most Endangered Rivers list this year – because the river is at a decision point – not because it's the most polluted. We can save these precious headwater streams that also serve as drinking water to our communities but we must act now before it is too late.

"A 21-peer reviewed study confirmed that people living near the mountaintop removal cites are 50 percent more likely to die of cancer and 42 percent more likely to be born with birth defects compared with other communities in the Appalachia region.  Local communities near such projects have a 70 percent increased risk for developing kidney disease, and there are 313 excess deaths every year from coal-mining pollution."