West Virginia Headwaters Waterkeeper

Cindy Rank

West Virginia Headwaters Waterkeeper HC 78  Box 227  Rock Cave, West Virginia 26234 United States of America 304.924.5802 clrank2@gmail.com

Region Gulf

To help protect the mountain streams and headwaters of WV from the destructive effects of mining and logging, to help increase the effectiveness of citizens working to protect their communities and water from massively destructive mountain top removal mining, and to hold industry and the regulatory community accountable to the laws they are meant to enforce, and to the environment and people those laws are meant to protect.

Recent Accomplishments

--With other WV environmental organizations filed Clean Water Act suit vs Army Corps of Engineers for illegally granting 404 permits for filling hundreds of miles of headwater streams in sourthern West Virginia.  Favorable ruling was overturned at the 4th C
--Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson Wilkinson agreed with Michael that “the Corps’ failure to identify and measure the impact of mining operations on stream function poses a real danger to the vitality of the waterways and ecology of the affected areas.” He went on
--Invited to and testified before the US Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources on the efficacy of the Surface Mine Act and the Stream Buffer Zone that prohibits mining within 100 feet of intermittent and perennial streams.
--Worked with Wheeling Jesuit University team on EPA CARE grant to monitor streams and wells in communities near coal sludge dams and coal slurry underground injection sites.