2013 Accomplishments

• We successfully led an 18 month-long national grassroots campaign to expose and stop the Department of the Interior (DOI) illegal scheme to entomb the Office of Surface Mining (OSM) under the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and DOI’s secret plans to later dismantle OSM’s valuable Abandoned Mine Lands (AML) Fee Collection Program.
  

• Defended the rights of CCC members to clean water by filing a Clean Water Act lawsuit against America’s third-largest coal producer, Alpha Natural Resources, for illegally discharging mine wastewater and storm run-off into several streams from Alpha’s Emerald Mine in Greene County, Pennsylvania.
  

• CCC partnered with Public Justice and Environmental Integrity Project in filing a legal complaint against Matt Canestrale Contracting, Inc. (MCC) in US District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania.  MCC owns and operates the LaBelle Refuse Site, a coal refuse pile made up of about 40 million tons of waste, two coal slurry ponds, and millions of cubic yards of coal combustion waste (coal ash).
• Our complaint alleges that MCC is violating the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) and state laws designated to protect rivers and streams and reduce fugitive particulate matter pollution.
  
• CCC’s Coal Ash Director, Jeff Stant, along with three consultant,s submitted extensive comments to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed revisions to the Steam Electric Power Generating Effluents Guidelines. In the comments they examined the risks to people from groundwater contamination around 10 power plants in Indiana and 4 in Missouri with additional information on 15 other power plants in Missouri.  We believe the EPA should not down play the risks to people and the environment from lax Coal Combustion Residuals Rules (CCR) disposal standards because site-specific data do not support such a move.
  
• CCC filed a Petition for Review with the Commonwealth Court in Pennsylvania on an Environmental Hearing Board (EHB) Final Order and Opinion Granting Joint Motion to Withdraw Appeal issued in November 2013 in two factually separate but substantively identical matters. This case involves a determination by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PADEP) that (1) Consol’s longwall mining operations have caused six particular streams in Sourthwestern PA to become dry and (2) Consol’s unsuccessful reclamation and restoration efforts over the past five or more years established that the damage done to the six streams is irreparable. The recent PADEP findings represent an unprecedented opportunity to reign in the destructive threat of longwall mining in a way that protects citizens and the environment while allowing longwall mining to continue in areas where it will not cause irreparable damage.