A great article covering the important issue of chemical contamination. The format is a bit wonky with the built in scrolling videos and pics, but I think they add a bit to it.

http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/artic...rkersburg/

Quote:"Hold on to something,” Jim Tennant warned as he fired up his tractor. We lurched down a rutted dirt road past the old clapboard farmhouse where he grew up. Jim still calls it “the home place,” although its windows are now boarded up and the outhouse is crumbling into the field.

At 72, Jim is so slight that he nearly disappears into his baggy plaid shirt. But he drives his tractor like a dirt bike. We sped past the caved-in hog pen and skidded down a riverbank. The tractor tipped precariously toward the water, slamming into a fallen tree, but Jim just laughed.

When we had gone as far as the tractor could take us, Jim climbed off and squeezed through a barbed-wire fence. On the other side was a lush field teeming with crabapple and sycamore, and beyond that, the muddy trickle of water, known as Dry Run Creek, that has brought Jim’s family so much heartache. “This is what Dry Run looks like in the wet season,” Jim told me. “Summer grazing was in the hollow up there—before they destroyed everything, at least.”

I loved staying at the Blennerhasset Hotel. Great restaurant.

Could read b/c the page is trying to kill my browser. Why do people format article that why?

(08-31-2015 10:00 AM)vandiver49 Wrote:  Could read b/c the page is trying to kill my browser. Why do people format article that why?

If you have firefox browser, you should be able to use the 'reader view' icon that looks like an open book to just view the the text. This should be on the address bar.

The disregard for the environment in West Virginia has always saddened me. My family lives up there and it always strikes me how much companies get away with.

Not a surprise though. My family will defend the hell out of the coal, gas, and chemical companies because without them, the state has virtually no economy...but even with them, most of my family is pretty poor with frequent unemployment.

One area I'll give WV some credit though is on their logging policies.

Overall though, the state is facing a bad future. It is the only state in the country with long term population decline projections.