Today, our Staff Attorney, Eva Dillard sent the UA System Trustees a letter reiterating and updating our opposition to the Shepherd Bend Mine proposal. The letter relays new information the Birmingham Water Works Board recently supplied about coal mining’s threats to tap water quality from their Mulberry Fork water intake facility, which serves 200,000 Birmingham-area customers.
We ask that the UA System not lease or sell land or mineral rights to Shepherd Bend LLC, the company proposing to mine directly across the river from this major drinking water intake. Without the UA System's significant land and mineral rights at Shepherd Bend, it may not be cost-effective for Shepherd Bend LLC to start mining. We hope citizens will continue to call the UA System's Tuscaloosa office to voice their opposition to the project: 205-348-5861.
Represented by the Southern Environmental Law Center, we continue our appeal of the flawed wastewater discharge permit that the Alabama Department of Environmental Management granted to Shepherd Bend LLC. The Birmingham Water Works Board continues its own appeal of the shortsighted mining permit that the Alabama Surface Mining Commission granted to Shepherd Bend. We will keep you posted as those appeals progress through the legal system.
For more information about the Shepherd Bend Mine proposal, including maps, statistics, pictures, permit documents, news about ongoing student and community protests, recent articles, and today’s letter to the UA System, visit: http://blackwarriorriver.org/news/help-protect-birmingham-s-drinking-water.html
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Just say NO to this project!!!!!!
ReplyDeleteBlack Warrior Riverkeeper has supplied expert testimony in the ADEM NPDES permit challenge about how the discharge of these pollutants would harm the river and drinking water. Dr. Robert Angus, a professor in the Biology Department at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, testified, “ADEM’s exemption of iron, manganese, and TSS from almost all precipitation events, and failure to include limits on TDS, sulfate, chlorides, aluminum and other heavy metals at all, will cause a violation of Alabama’s water quality standards because of its harm to fish and wildlife in the Mulberry Fork and its tributaries.”
ReplyDeleteAccording to the Expert Report of Warner Golden, P.E., a Senior Engineer and Partner with environmental consulting firm NewFields, “The entire [1,773 acre] site will discharge approximately 3,187 tons of sediment into downstream wetlands and the Mulberry Fork. This is the equivalent of 160 dump trucks of sediment resulting from one storm event.” While such a discharge might meet the legal requirements of ADEM’s NPDES permit, it will nonetheless do great harm to the river and Birmingham-area drinking water.
It's about more than fish and wildlife, it's about YOUR WATER folks.
If UA caves to Drummond they're won't be enough soap and water in the kingdom to get rid of the blackened reputation this will give them. But at least they will match their surroundings if the mine goes through.
ReplyDeleteIs JeffCo suing over this or just standing back and letting BWRK go after it?
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