Reply #18: Do you think for a moment that those several thousand acres represent the state? [View All]

[ThomWV]

And yes, I have been to Boone County and in fact I made it a point last year to take two several-day trips to the southern end of this state just to see what it is really like. I rode a motorcycle all over that end of the state on every kind of road I could find with no other object than to see all of the state that I could see. Not one time did I come across a Mountain Top Removal site. There are strip mines of course, many more up here in the northern end than down there (and dam near none in the Eastern Panhandel just in case you didn't know) but none of the devistation that everyone seems to think is prevelent. It simply is not.

Now that is not to say that where it exists it is not horrible thing, but that is not for lack of laws and regulations, it is for lack of enforcement. Of course there is also the topography, but I have never seen one person who raves about MTR that has ever mentioned how that part of the state differs from most of the rest and why you find mining methods used there that are essentially non-existant in the rest of the state.