Some top local bands and solo musicians gather tomorrow night to benefit Appalachian Community Health Emergency.

ACHE, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., advocates for protecting the health of people who live in mountaintop-removal coal-mining communities.

Performers at Friendship’s Fourth Presbyterian Church include A.T.S., Brooke Smokelin, Paul Labrise, The Stillhouse Pickers, Emay, Ben Shannon, Duane Jones and Slim Forsythe’s Gospel Girls.

Here’s the Facebook event page.

MTR is a particularly extreme form of strip-mining in which whole mountaintops are blasted away to get at the coal inside. The rubble that was formerly living forest is then dumped into nearby streams.

While public health in mining communities is generally not great, researchers have documented especially high incidence of birth defects, low birthweights, increased cancer and other problems in MTR communities, possibly due to the particular ways this mining method dirties the air and water.

More details are here. And here’s some more on anti-MTR activism.

The benefit show starts at 7 p.m. The Fourth Presbyterian Church is located at 5450 Friendship Ave.