TAKE ACTION!: Tell RRI Energy: NO MORE MTR COAL at their Avon Lake Power Plant!

Dear RRI Energy,

As a Northeast Ohioan living in the service area of your company’s Avon Lake power plant, I wish to express my support for the Cleveland Mountain Justice Project in their opposition to the burning of coal from mountain top removal coal mining by your Avon Lake plant. According to the latest information from www.ilovemountains.org and filings with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, RRI’s Avon Lake plant uses coal from several mountain top removal coal mines.

This method of coal mining has devastated whole regions of the Appalachian mountains – especially in West Virginia and Kentucky. It has poisoned the wells of thousands of coal field residents. It has subjected them to daily explosions of millions of tons of high explosives, to a scale unseen except in major wars. It has ruined the health of coal field residents with pollution from these explosions. It has devastated local economies, and ruined the land residents have depended on for hundreds of years. It has decapitated hundreds of mountains, leveled thousands of acres of some of the richest forests in North America, and buried thousands of miles of headwater streams in the region. If any foreign country launched such an assault on our people and territory, a declaration of war would be warranted.

As a citizen, I am taking responsibility for what our leaders have refused to do to stop mountain top removal coal mining. I want RRI to stop using mountain top removal coal in its Avon Lake plant, and I want RRI to not renew or enter into any future contracts to purchase mountain top removal coal for its system of power plants.

I look forward to your response.

Yours truly,