Creigh Deeds on Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining

Creigh Deeds talks about mountaintop removal coal mining. Recorded on March 13, 2009 at a bloggers' dinner in Arlington, Virginia.

By the way, "mountaintop removal mining" and "strip mining" are not synonomous. From Wikipedia, here are the five main forms of surface mining and brief descriptions of each:

1. Strip mining: "the practice of mining a seam of mineral by first removing a long strip of overlying soil and rock (the overburden)...only practical when the ore body to be excavated is relatively near the surface."
2. Open-pit mining: "a method of extracting rock or minerals from the earth from their removal from an open pit or borrow."
3. Mountaintop removal mining: "a destructive form of coal mining that uses three million pounds of explosives per day [1] to blast 600 to 800 feet (240 m) off the top of densely forested Appalachian mountains. The mining waste or "overburden" is dumped by large trucks into mountain streams."
4. Dredging: "a method often used to bring up underwater mineral deposits."
5. Highwall mining: "another form of surface mining that evolved from auger mining."