As Catherine-Ann continues to occupy her tree on the Bee Tree permit (16 days!), local residents are gearing up for an important hearing next Tuesday on the renewal of the Bee Tree permit and the proposed new Collins Fork Remediation Project, a strip mine on the other side of the mountain.

The hearing will be at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, at the Raleigh-Boone Technology Center in Pettus, W.Va. If you’re not local, you can still submit comments to the Department of Environmental Protection opposing the renewal of the Bee Tree permit here.

The way the DEP has managed this hearing process is interesting for a couple reasons. First, it is highly unusual to combine what should have been two hearings for two separate permits into one hearing – especially when the mountain is as controversial as Coal River Mountain. Second, the public comment period for the Collins Fork permit closed back in 2008. Since then, there have been 8 revisions made to the permit, with no opportunity for public comment. The permit is also no longer on file at the local courthouse. Yet the DEP is holding the public hearing now, three years after the original comment period, without re-opening the public comment period and allowing people the opportunity to understand what is now being proposed.

The Collins Fork Remediation Project is an oddly-named strip mining project, where Alpha Natural Resources has proposed to strip mine near an old slurry impoundment, the Collins Fork impoundment. They plan to dispose of much of their mining waste by filling in the impoundment–apparently this constitutes “remediation” of the impoundment. Check back in a couple days for a more detailed post on this latest threat to Coal River Mountain.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 4th, 2011 at 9:13 pm and is filed under action, citizen enforcement, Coal River Mountain, regulatory. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.