|
Details of Judge William Hoeveler's ruling
Curtis Morgan - Miami Herald July 30, 2007
Link to original article:
http://www.miamiherald.com/1060/story/186626.html
In a ruling last year, Senior U.S. District Court Judge William Hoeveler
ripped federal agencies for doing a slipshod job of analyzing mining
impacts
on the Everglades, endangered wood stork and a well field that supplies
drinking water for more than one million people in Miami-Dade County.
This time, he criticized federal and county oversight of the massive
rock-mining operations in Northwest Miami-Dade. Some key findings:
- The Corps routinely revised permits, shifting permitted quarry sites
as
much as a mile apart at company requests, or to encompass at least three
cases of digging in unapproved areas -- destroying 15 acres of wetlands
and
two protected archaeological sites.
- The Corps rebuffed county appeals to delay mining until a new well
field
risk assessment was completed but agreed to review data and permits in
three
years. Miami-Dade's Department of Environmental Resource Management,
after
an early dye test that tracked water flowing through the porous rock far
faster than expected, has yet to issue the report more than five years
later.
- In a three-year review the Corps produced at the end of 2005, the
agency
cited an industry report of ''excellent water quality'' in rock pits but
failed to mention detection of benzene in the nearby well field --
despite
receiving e-mails nearly a year earlier from DERM about an ``immediate
public health hazard.''
- The Corps did nothing to assist or follow up on DERM's
''inconclusive''
probe of the source of benzene, though a leading suspect was a
fuel-based
blasting agent miners deny was to blame but voluntarily abandoned.
- After studies indicated an existing 2,500-foot no-mining zone wasn't
adequate to filter some parasites, the county and Corps played pass the
political hot potato over who should decide whether to widen it into
mining
lands. In one e-mail, a Corps manager fretted, ``. . . we are concerned
about public health but they are putting us in a bad position.''
- Land purchases have lagged in an adjacent 13,000-acre Pennsuco wetland
envisioned as mitigation for mining and a buffer zone between rock pits
and
the Everglades.
- The judge calculated fees the industry pledged to pay for upgrading
two
county treatment plants will fall far short of projected costs.
|
