By Will Collette
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| Quarry's highwalls quite visible in the background of this ecoRI.org photo taken in winter. |
Channel 10 has just reported that a 28 year old man fell to his death off an 80 foot high segment of the Armetta LLC Quarry, better known to all of us as the Copar Quarry. Apparently, he and friends were driving ATVs in the dark and he went over the side of the mine.
The death occurred very early this morning. Westerly Police have not released the name of the victim pending notification of the next of kin.
I spent 10 years of my career working on mining problems and one of them was that of civilians getting killed in exactly these types of circumstances, though usually at abandoned mines, not active ones like Copar/Armetta.
Currently, there are no federal, state or local laws that regulate quarries to any serious extent, and certainly nothing like the federal law regulating coal mining. There are no rules restricting the height of the banks (called "high walls" in mining parlance) at active mines. There are no federal, state or local laws requiring quarries to reclaim their property when they are done mining.
Usually quarries are left as they were on the last day of work. They often fill up with water, creating a lethal threat to people tempted to go swimming there. Charlestown does have an ordinance on that - to forbid people from swimming in quarries, not an ordinance requiring quarry operators to remove hazardous conditions.
Indeed, Charlestown has been doing an odd little dance around the subject of regulating quarries, largely in reaction to the Bradford Copar quarry, site of today's fatality. But Charlestown allowed Copar to get a town business license to mine on the Morrone sand and gravel pit right in Charlestown off Route 91, right on the banks of the Pawcatuck, even though they were well aware of all of Copar's problems in Bradford, not to mention many of the other problems I have reported here and that Dale Faulkner has revealed in the Westerly Sun.
The CCA Party leadership on the Town Council have made pretend noises that they care and that they will take action, but the best they could do is try to get the General Assembly to give it permission (which the town really doesn't need) to regulate mining. They have taken none of the steps the town actually has within its powers to take. I believe that's because the only environmental issue of genuine interest to the CCA Party is open space.
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| Yeah, Flip gonna solve all your problems. Just ask the fishermen how he did for them. |
Filippi's other big piece of mining legislation, H-5740, is supposed to address environmental problems caused by mining. Unfortunately, it contains nothing, absolutely nothing dealing with mine reclamation. According to the General Assembly tracker, this bill is also being "held for further study" since April 29.
But I suppose it was a big step for Filippi to introduce any sort of mine regulation legislation at all, given that he is a radical Libertarian and doesn't believe in business regulation. I guess that by introducing only half-measures and letting them sit and die, Flipper thinks he can have it both ways. Sort of like the Charlestown Town Council.
So now we have our first fatality immediately across the town line. And we still have lots of abandoned and operating quarries in Charlestown that are also accidents waiting to happen.
We already know, based on citations issued to local quarries, not just Copar, by the Mine Safety and Health Administration that local mine operators regularly violate worker safety laws. In my experience, when a business disregards its own workers' safety, they care even less about the general public.
When I worked on coal mining problems, we lobbied for more mine clean-up and used the death toll in old mines of children and adults as the impetus. Click here to see the white paper I wrote on the subject in 1998.
Now the Charlestown Citizens Alliance, which controls this town, needs to get off its dead ass and recognize that there are other, more pressing environmental issues than open space.