Update: Nike has graciously removed the horrific images of mountaintop removal from their WVU page. This is a victory for us. While I still think that West Virginia University has some serious questions to answer regarding its identity and coal, Nike is to be applauded for respecting the concerns raised by citizens directly impacted by mountaintop removal.
Original diary below, and posted at the new Appalachian Voices Front Porch blog
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They walk alike...
An agonizing four-day wait came to a tragic end early Saturday morning when rescue workers failed to find any survivors in an underground mine after a huge explosion earlier this week.
The news at the Upper Big Branch mine about 30 miles south of Charleston brought the death toll to 29 in the country’s worst mine disaster in four decades.
American Coast Guard officials have called off the three-day search for 11 workers missing since an explosion rocked the Deepwater Horizon oil rig off the coast of Louisiana.
The Coast Guard says it will resume the search if any ships in the area see anything, but the workers' chances of survival had seemed slim well before Friday afternoon's announcement.
They talk alike...
"If any of you have been asked by your group presidents, your supervisors, engineers or anyone else to do anything other than run coal (i.e. - build overcasts, do construction jobs, or whatever) you need to ignore them and run coal. This memo is necessary only because we seem not to understand that coal pays the bills." -- Don Blankenship, 2005
"We had too many people who were working to save the world. We sort of lost track of the fact that our primary purpose in life was to create value for our shareholders." -- Tony Hayward, 2009
It can blow your mind...
Four Massey mines had injury rates more than twice the national rate last year. ... Together last year, the 10 Massey mines with above-average injury rates received 2,400 safety citations.
BP's safety violations far outstrip its fellow oil companies. According to the Center for Public Integrity, in the last three years, BP refineries in Ohio and Texas have accounted for 97 percent of the "egregious, willful" violations handed out by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
When cousins, are two of a kind!