New strip mine hearing sought
Members of various citizens’ organizations are calling on the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) to schedule a second public hearing on a proposed strip mine next to Ohiopyle State Park, while the company requesting the operation has yet to apply for a special exception through the Fayette County Zoning office. The Mountain Watershed Association, along with Friends of Ohiopyle and the Chestnut Ridge Chapter of Trout Unlimited, is pursuing another public hearing after last month’s gathering did not allow the participants to speak publicly, according to Liz Tavares, president of Friends of Ohiopyle.
A public forum on the Curry Mine project was held April 16 at the Dunbar Township Municipal Building with those attending unable to speak before the crowd and instead directed to a small room with a DEP official where they were asked to voice their concerns into a tape recorder.
Tavares said the facility was so small that many were forced to stand outside and those who managed to squeeze inside were subjected to what was essentially a commercial for Amerikohl mining.
“There is nothing public about sitting in a private room” said Beverly Braverman, executive director for the Mountain Watershed Association (MWA).
Amerikohl Mining Inc. of Butler filed a request in December to the DEP to conduct blasting along with a variance for surface mining and related activities along 588 acres throughout Dunbar Township adjacent to Ohiopyle State Park and the Youghiogheny River Bike Trail.
Krissy Kasserman of the MWA said as of last week Amerikohl did not apply for a variance for the proposed strip mine, which is the next step in the application process.
According to the permit application, the areas included in the blasting include sections along Camp Carmel Road, Kingin Hill Road and unnamed tributaries to the Youghiogheny River.
Tavares said the mining site is located in two sub-basins of the Youghiogheny with both designated as high quality cold fisheries.
Additionally, Tavares said Amerikhol also applied for a permit to the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES), which is the water permits division within the Environmental Protection Agency’s office of wastewater management.
Tavares said the NPDES permit would allow Amerikohl to discharge into five unnamed tributaries of the Youghiogheny.
“This site presents some very serious environmental concerns and has the potential to further pollute a steam that our organization anticipates spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to clean up,” said Scott Hoffman of Chestnut Ridge Trout Unlimited.
Hoffman added the organization received Growing Greener funding from the DEP to install a treatment system for remediation of acidic discharges from past coal mines.
Braverman said the DEP started conducting public meetings in the same fashion last year when she attended a similar one in East Bethlehem Township that was held in the middle of the day.
Kasserman said the MWA is disputing that the conference meets the requirements of the NPDES program’s public participation requirements.
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