Mountaintop Removal Stops Here

Many neighborhoods and communities in West Virginia have been obliterated by mountaintop removal mining. The small West Virginia town of Twilight, in Boone County, is now in the crosshairs of mountaintop removal mining. Less than two miles from Twilight, the community of Lindytown was annihilated in 2010, to make room for more Massey mountaintop removal coal mining. OVEC and community members in Lindytown tried to save the community, and we’ve learned important lessons that will help us try to save Twilight from the same fate at the hands of area coal companies.

OVEC has purchased a small piece of property, with all mineral rights, on the edge of Twilight, a community of about fifty homes. The seller, Frankie Mooney, is featured on this video. Frankie died unexpectedly in January, 2011. He was an OVEC member who knew he couldn't save his land and community by himself. OVEC bought a small portion of Frankie’s nine acres, and a building, along with all mineral rights to the nearly twenty feet of coal underneath. Frankie's family continues to live on other portions of the property. The Mooney property is the key property that coal companies would need to get in order to most efficiently move their mountaintop removal operations from the now-gone Lindytown into Twilight.

Using community organizing, strategic litigation and media outreach, we will work together with community members to try to prevent Twilight from being obliterated. We want to make Twilight the example of a community that refused to be destroyed by mountaintop removal, giving people in other threatened communities the hope that they can do the same.

Twilight, Boone County, WV

Thanks to multiple mountaintop removal and valley fill  permits, Twilight is the next community on Route 26 to be threatened by extinction! 
 

 

If this opportunity escapes us, it will never present itself again. All of the communities on Rt. 26 will be gone. The people there will be permanently displaced and the community will be boarded up and dozed down for its coal.

 

Please help us stop the depopulation of Twilight.  In Frankie's word "OVEC is the only chance that this community and its people have to exist in the future". Please help! Don't let Twilight be the next Lindytown.  

 

Frankie was offered $775,000.00 for his place by an area coal company. The Mooney family is now offering to sell this property to OVEC for $125,000 less than he was offered. They are willing to take the cut to help preserve this place, the local communities, and the access roads to many area cemeteries.  In the hopes that OVEC will raise the funding and agree to purchase the land, they are willing to live in and fight the conditions that mountaintop removal is creating.  Please understand that the Mooney family does not have to make this choice.