Beaufort residents to voice concerns over wetland destruction project

Washington, NC – Beaufort County residents will have an opportunity to voice their concerns over a proposed permit that would allow phosphate mining company PCS to mine 3,500 acres, including 2,400 acres of wetlands, creeks and streams bordering the Pamlico River. The permit, if granted by the Army Corps of Engineers, would be the largest ever wetland destruction project in the state. The public hearing, to be held tonight at 6:30 p.m. in Chocowinity, is expected to draw hundreds of local residents.

Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan (PCS) Phosphate, Inc. has applied to the Army Corps of Engineers for a permit to destroy over 2,400 acres of wetlands and over 7 miles of tidal creeks and streams bordering the Pamlico River and South Creek at the company’s phosphate mining site in Aurora. The permit, if approved, would destroy most of Jacks, Jacobs, Drinkwater and Tooley Creeks as well as almost all of their surrounding drainage areas. These areas are essential for commercial fisheries production, including blue crab, penaid shrimp, Atlantic croaker, and bay anchovy.

Mining at this site could permanently damage important commercial fisheries in the region. The Albemarle-Pamlico Sound is one of the most productive North American fisheries, generating thousands of jobs and over $1 billion dollars annually. The area the company seeks to mine will permanently damage primary fishing habitat, where economically important commercial and recreational fish species spend all or part of their life cycle. Alternatively, PCS owns acres of minable upland, land that is a part of the company’s long-range mining plans, that would have less environmental and economic impact.

“Altering the South Creek watershed and its tributaries to an unnatural state and destroying these important fisheries will impact this region long after PCS has left the area.,” said Heather Jacobs, RIVERKEEPER for the Pamlico Tar River Foundation. “PCS will eventually run out of phosphate to mine in Beaufort County. When it does, Beaufort county residents deserve for its other economic engines – fishing, tourism and housing industries to be preserved.”

A total of approximately 900 acres of wetlands are destroyed each year in North Carolina, often with extensive plans for mitigation to offset the destruction. At the Aurora site, the proposed destruction is so great, PCS has asked the state to allow the company to avoid having to recreate or restore stream buffers, as they are legally required to do, and to instead use alternative and less stringent methods of mitigation.

PCS has launched a massive advertising and public relations campaign to convince area residents that after they reclaim the mined land and mitigate for the impacts, the environment will benefit. However, PCS has reclaimed only 14 percent of the land it has mined since it began operations at the Aurora site in 1965. Such reclamation, including the reclamation plans at the current site, does not restore the land back as it was, and does little to nothing to restore the functions of wetlands, which protect water quality and important fisheries.

Furthermore, PCS has vowed to offset the impacts to the wetlands it destroys, but has not identified or secured the land to back up the promise. In fact, the “conceptual” plan outlined by PCS in the Environmental Impact Statement falls short of the level of mitigation they promise in their ads and instead repeatedly asks to mitigate less than the Corps and EPA standards. Regardless of the company’s plans there is strong scientific evidence that the project would be so destructive that no amount of mitigation could replace the functions and values that would be lost.

“By ignoring the legal requirement to avoid wetlands when possible, and instead avoiding wetlands only when convenient, PCS is playing hopscotch with the law,” said Geoff Gisler, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center. “The Corps should hold PCS to the law, and require the company to avoid wetlands when possible, mine its upland acres first, and then minimize impacts to wetlands that can’t be avoided.”