EPA Asks Corps to Revoke Ison Rock Ridge Permit

Comment: Mt Top Removal pollutes the streams, Open Pit Mining which creates uranium tailings, will pollutes the water! Plus, Open Pit Uranium Mining creates Fly Rock, so watch out Sheva!!

By Debra McCownReporter / Bristol Herald CourierPublished: April 10, 2009

In a move environmental groups say is setting the stage for future action, the Environmental Protection Agency has asked the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to revoke a permit needed for surface mining on Ison Rock Ridge in Wise County.

The nearly 1,300-acre site just outside the town of Appalachia is proposed for mining by A&G Coal Corp. The permit – one part of a permitting process still pending for the site – would allow the deposit of mining waste into valleys, which the company says is necessary for such operations to be cost-effective.

In an April 3 letter, EPA Environmental Assessment and Innovation Division Director John Pomponio wrote to Corps of Engineers Norfolk District Commander Col. Dionysios Anninos asking that a more stringent permit process be applied, citing potential environmental impacts of the project.

“EPA Region III has extensively investigated the downstream effects of surface mining and associated valley fills. These published findings indicate the type of activities proposed by the applicant are strongly related to downstream biological impairment,” Pomponio wrote. “EPA’s findings also indicate that there may be significant degradation of the waters of the United States and a violation of … water quality standards.”

The letter echoes concerns raised in recent months by environmental groups that also obtained a temporary injunction last year to have logging stopped on the proposed surface mine site.

“Thank you, Lord, you’ve answered our prayers,” said Gary Bowman, whose home sits just below the site at the foot of a steep slope. “I think more good news is coming.”

Bowman was involved in the lawsuit last year, initiated when large rocks began tumbling into his garden. He said the rocks are still falling and he has recently filed suit against the landowner and two timber companies to have them removed.

A&G had no comment Thursday, nor did timber company Mountain Forest Products. An official at landowner Penn Virginia referred questions to the company’s corporate office in Pennsylvania, where no one could be reached Thursday afternoon.

At the Corps of Engineers’ Norfolk district office, spokesman Gerald Rogers said the Corps’ response to the EPA’s letter is still being deliberated by the district commander.

But Oliver Bernstein, spokesman for the Sierra Club, said Thursday that EPA letters written on this and other proposed mining sites bode well for efforts to stop mountaintop mining throughout the region.

“I think that the Obama administration and the Environmental Protection Agency have definitely taken some really good first steps on mountaintop removal coal mining,” Bernstein said.

“Going forward, the administration will eventually need to fix the regulatory loopholes … to end this most destructive form of coal mining for good.”

While Virginia surface mines are not officially classified by regulators as mountaintop removal, environmentalists use the term broadly to refer to any surface mining operation that involves blasting on the top of a mountain.

Bill Bledsoe, executive director of the Virginia Mining Association, said such a ban would be “devastating” for Southwest Virginia in the loss of jobs, tax revenue and spin-off business.

“Nationwide, the biggest impact’s going to be to a shifting of energy demand and shifting of higher-cost energy into the place of the cheaper energy that coal provides, and along with that is, it’s going to derail or has the potential of derailing the economic recovery plan that the nation’s invested billions in,” Bledsoe said.(the local area are poor, so where is all the money going, to the Companies!)

Bledsoe said he has been around long enough to remember a similar wave of opposition to coal in the mid-1970s – a movement that ended with a set of federal surface mining regulations enacted as a compromise in 1977.

He also said the EPA letters indicate something more is coming.

When asked about the issue, EPA officials said the Ison Rock Ridge letter speaks for itself.

Bledsoe said the “EPA is adamant that they haven’t changed their position on anything, that they’re just taking a look at these permits … [but] what the EPA’s doing is stalling, asking for delay, whether that be to give them time to put more laws and regulations in place, to cause some court action, I don’t know their motivation other than they want to delay these type permits during the early days of the Obama administration.”

“They don’t want the permit to be issued at all,” Bledsoe said. “So at least, in my opinion, this is just a move to basically stall and eventually kill the mining operations.”(not kill mining but Mt Top Removal!!)

dmccown@bristolnews.com