In what could be a major victory for Virginia’s mountains, the Clean Water Protection Act was introduced in the Senate today with a record 115 co-sponsors. The act would outlaw the act of dumping mining waste into streams, a crucial and destructive step in mountain top removal mining.

607 Virginia students attended Power Shift this weekend, and lobbied their representatives to end the destructive practice of MTR. Many of these students are from areas in Virginia that have been devastated by this practice, which blows the tops off mountains and dumps the waste in the valleys and streams below, just to get at a seam of coal that could be only 4 inches thick. Wise County, where Dominion is planning to build a new coal plant, has already seen