Crews begin removing bodies from W.Va. coal mine

clipped from news.yahoo.com MONTCOAL, W.Va. – Crews on Saturday began the bleak task of carrying bodies out of a coal mine shattered by an explosion that left 29 men dead, only hours after families' hopes were crushed when they found out none of the workers survived. It had been an excruciating week for friends holding onto faint hopes that their missing miners were somehow alive. Seven bodies had already been removed soon after the blast Monday at Massey Energy Co.'s Upper Big Branch mine, the worst U.S. coal mining disaster since a 1970 explosion killed 38 in Hyden, Ky. Federal mine safety officials said crews were working to get the bodies out but did not know how long that would take. The discovery of the final four bodies ended days of futile searches by rescue crews that repeatedly battled a volatile mix of poisonous gases and thick smoke that turned them back on three previous attempts.

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New ghost towns: Industrial communities teeter on the edge

clipped from www.usatoday.com RAVENSWOOD, W.Va. — When Henry Kaiser arrived 55 years ago, this place was no place — "a rural problem area," the government called it, so poor and isolated that the population had dropped 15% since 1940. That all changed after Kaiser, the industrialist who'd turned out ships and planes at a record pace in World War II, built the nation's largest consolidated aluminum works here on the banks of the Ohio River. The plant paid Tim Shumaker his first living wage, and he won the right to keep it two decades ago after his union was locked out for 19 months. "The way things are going," he says, "there's not going to be anything here." The difference is that people could leave a ghost town — miners to work new veins, farmers to till fresh land, merchants to move closer to road or rail. Today, Tim Shumaker sees no such options. In past layoffs, he always found work somewhere; now there seems to be none anywhere.

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Hundreds of thousands without power after Eastern snowstorm

Image by destro100 via Flickr

clipped from www.cnn.com (CNN) -- Air traffic in Washington picked up after a day of cancellations, but hundreds of thousands along the Eastern seaboard remained without power after a major snowstorm wound down. More than 300,000 people from Pennsylvania to Virginia were without electricity Sunday morning, utility companies reported. The blizzard -- referred to as "snowmageddon" by President Obama -- brought down power lines across the region, and accumulated snow continued to cause outages. The utility company provides electricity to customers in Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia and Virginia. More than 142,000 of its customers had no power; the majority of them, more than 90,000, reside in Pennsylvania, the company said. Record-breaking snowfall covered the Washington area, the weather service said. Over two days, 32.4 inches of snow dropped on Dulles International Airport, breaking a January 1996 record of 23.2 inches.

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