Mountain Top Removal on NPR Today

Susan Phillips

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Susan Phillips tells stories about the consequences of political decisions on people's every day lives. She has worked as a reporter for WHYY since 2004. Susan's coverage of the 2008 Presidential election resulted in a story on the front page of the New York Times. In 2010 she traveled to Haiti to cover the earthquake. That same year she produced an award-winning series on Pennsylvania's natural gas rush called "The Shale Game." She received a 2013 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Journalism Award for her work covering natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania. She has also won several Edward R. Murrow awards for her work with StateImpact. In 2013/14 she spent a year at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow. She has also been a Metcalf Fellow, an MBL Logan Science Journalism Fellow and reported from Marrakech on the 2016 climate talks as an International Reporting Project Fellow. A graduate of Columbia School of Journalism, she earned her Bachelor's degree in International Relations from George Washington University.

August 11, 2011 | 12:45 PM

Radio producer extraordinaire Joe Richman will have a piece on mountain top removal in West Virginia this afternoon. Richman’s latest Radio Diaries piece “Last Man on the Mountain,” airs this afternoon on NPR’s All Things Considered.
From the promo:

In West Virginia people say that, in the old days, communities turned into ghost towns when the coal ran out. Now, they turn into ghost towns when mountaintop mines move in.
Jimmy Weekley has lived in Pigeonroost Holler, West Virginia for 70 years. He worked as a coal miner, as did his grandfather, father, uncles, and sons. And like most West Virginians, Weekley saw coal as the economic lifeblood of his community.
Then in the 1990s, Arch Coal moved into his area and began mountaintop removal mining virtually in his backyard. Almost overnight, Weekley became an unlikely anti-mining activist. For the last decade, Weekley has watched his family and neighbors take buyouts and leave the area. But he refuses to sell. Now he’s the last person remaining in Pigeonroost Holler.