Meeting Will Focus on Effect
Of Mine Work on the ‘Pompy’
By John Freitag

There will be a public meeting on conditions in the West Branch of the Ompompanoosuc today (Thursday, Oct. 11) at 7 p.m. at the Newton School Library.

The meeting, sponsored by Citizens for a Sensible Solution, is being held in lieu of a community advisory group meeting that was supposed to take place in late September or early October but has been postponed to mid-November. Despite concerns raised over the river turning a rusty orange this summer, there have been no community advisory board meetings since May.

The discussion at the Oct. 11 meeting will center on the worsening conditions of the West Branch as a result of the work being done at the Superfund site at the Elizabeth Mine. The discussion will also focus on whether new work proposed for the site will make the river even worse and what concerned citizens can do about it.

In a recent email to the community advisory group, project manager Ed Hathaway admitted that actions taken at the site, "are likely the cause of the color … impacts observed this year."

His solution to the problem, mentioned in the email, is to try to speed up the large-scale landfill type solution for the site. For the next few years this does not mean capping the current large pile on which they have been working and which is causing the problems. It means moving over 300,000 tons of waste material from mining activities done over 100 years ago and now located across Mine Road to the top of the pile that only a few years ago they felt was in danger of collapsing. 

Moving all this semi-processed, chemically-rich material from the other side of the road would destroy the encrusted cap that now encloses the waste from water and air and could likely lead to further deterioration of the West Branch.

Project manager Hathaway has already met with the Strafford Selectboard to get its approval of closing the Mine Road to through traffic for next year and closing the Class 4 Copperas Road for a number of years until this phase of the project is completed.

Citizens for a Sensible Solution, which was formed in 2000 after the first presentation by the EPA about cleaning up the Elizabeth Mine Site, has always warned of the dangers of a project too large for the moderate problems that were then found in the river. More than $19 million have been spent to date and the final price tag may be more than $30 million with a State match of over $300,000 in capital costs and at least $100,000 in annual maintenance costs in perpetuity.

For more information on the October 11 meeting call 765-4003.