An Eastern Panhandle Artist, The Music Hall Of Fame, And Lawmakers Go Home, This West Virginia Week
West Virginia Week is a web-only podcast that explores the week's biggest news in the Mountain State.
Continue Reading Take Me to More NewsPresident Donald Trump picked West Virginia as the place to announce he’d roll back pollution rules for coal-fired power plants. But he didn’t mention that coal country would be hit the hardest by the health impacts.
Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency predicts up to 1,500 people a year nationally would die because of extra pollution from Trump’s plan, compared with the number of deaths under the Obama administration’s plan.
The EPA expects at least a couple dozen of those deaths to happen each year in northern West Virginia, the country’s hardest hit area.
Coal miner Steve Knotts says the air in West Virginia seems fine to him. But another West Virginia man, James Perkins, says if the coal-fired power plants are hurting local people, someone needs to make it safe.