Newspaper Articles

Extensive coverage of the issue of the Cumberland Park Project was in the New River Current section of The Roanoke Times newspaper on Tuesday, January 29. Links to these two articles can be found on the About Giles County's Fight Against Coal Waste section on the right side of this blog.

The House of Delegates Bill (HB514) is discussed in one article. This bill would have required a public hearing before Virginia's Department of Environmental Quality could issue a permit for use of coal combustion waste as structural fill but the bill died in committee already! Hopefully, the senate version will fare better.

Videos on YouTube

MountainCat Bob has posted several videos on YouTube which nicely summarize the fight against the Cumberland Park Project. Click on the links on the right side of this blog under YouTube Videos about the Fight. Once you are finished with one video, you can back click to this blog to view the next.

Here's a brief description of the videos:

Parts 1, 2, and 4: a video record of the meetings of the Giles County Board of Supervisors with excerpts relating to Cumberland Park Project.

Parts 3 and 5: two presentations at the public meeting sponsored by the Concerned Citizens of Giles County.

Concerned Citizens #1 and #2: an overview of the Cumberland Park Project and interviews with members of Concerned Citizens of Giles County.

Note: Parts 3 and 5 are my favorites because the presenters (a professor of fisheries biology and a victim of coal fly ash flood) report of the disastrous effects of coal waste on human and aquatic life. However, if you don't know much about coal waste, Concerned Citizens #1 gives a good overview of the problems with the Cumberland Park Project and coal waste in particular.

Still Fighting

This week's The Virginian Leader (local paper serving Giles County in Virginia and Mercer County in West Virginia) published an ad paid for by the Concerned Citizens of Giles County. The ad highlights some of the major issues regarding the Cumberland Park Project focusing on the lack of public input and questionable legal activities of the Giles County Partnership for Excellence which owns the project.

Also in the paper were two letters to the editor by Judy Brown and me. My letter focused on similar projects which have failed and have spawned lawsuits. In the "Learn More" section on this blog, there are several news articles on these lawsuits. I also addressed some longterm issues for the project which the Partnership has not addressed.

Judy's letter talked about the environmental impact of the heavy metals in the fly ash. These metals will eventually leach into the groundwater. Her letter also invited anyone concerned about the project to visit the Concerned Citizens of Giles County website (link under "Learn More").