Across the Southeast

Landfill won't be built on Voting Rights Trail

MONTGOMERY, ALA. - Waste Management has canceled plans to develop a landfill along a historic trail that commemorates the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery Voting Rights March.

Opponents, who fought the project with lawsuits and protests, applauded the decision.

"It means our National Voting Rights Trail will not be desecrated by a nasty garbage dump," Barbara Evans, the executive director of the consumer group Alabama Watch, said Monday.

Houston-based Waste Management, the nation's largest trash collection company, told the state environmental agency it was withdrawing an application to build a landfill along U.S. Highway 80 near Lowndesboro, about 20 miles west of Montgomery.

Company spokeswoman Lynn Brown cited pending legal action and general business reasons. She said the dispute had been in the courts so long that additional landfill space had become available, and there is no plan to try to the develop the site.

U.S. 80 between Selma and Montgomery is the 50-mile route the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other marchers followed to press Congress to pass the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Settlement cancels trial over coal sludge

INEZ, KY. - People who live in a community deluged with more than 300 million gallons of gooey black coal sludge five years ago reached an out-of-court settlement Monday with the coal company at the center of one of the South's worst ecological disasters.

Terms of the settlement, reached on the eve of trial, were not disclosed.

The case involved the spill of a molasseslike substance that gushed in torrents from a mountaintop reservoir owned by Martin County Coal, smothering fish, blackening the landscape and cutting off drinking water supplies for about 60 miles along the Kentucky-West Virginia border.

Ned Pillersdorf, a Prestonsburg lawyer representing 12 people who lived in the sludged area, said the settlement included a confidentiality agreement, precluding his clients from talking about the case.

However, he blasted the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration, saying federal inspectors should have known the impoundment was unsafe and should have forced the company to stop using it. He said he and his clients "hold MSHA even more responsible" than the coal company.

Tar Heel State pushes rural Internet access

PURLEAR, N.C. - State officials are pushing expansion of high-speed Internet service in rural areas of North Carolina so businesses there can flourish even as textiles and other traditional sectors of the economy struggle.

The state's E-NC Authority has promoted broadband access in rural communities since 2000. The authority has awarded about $20 million in grants to create Internet training across the state, spokeswoman Angie Bailey said.

About 40 percent of North Carolina residents said in 2004 they had broadband, an increase from 19 percent in 2002, the authority said.

Broadband still is difficult to get in some rural areas where providers say there are too few customers to make it worthwhile, said Charlie Pittman, E-NC's senior director. The service in some areas was "almost as important as water, sewer and power," he said.