The town hasn’t recovered. School enrollment has dropped 17 percent over the last decade, and the proportion of economically disadvantaged students has increased from 53 percent to 68 percent. Bobby Dhaliwal, a Rockdale native who works at his family’s Shell gas station downtown, said business has fallen by half since Alcoa and Luminant halted operations.
“Everything is in transition,” he said. “And everyone is hoping for some new retail business.”
In 2016, Alcoa put the former coal mine and its adjoining industrial facilities on the market with a new name — Sandow Lakes Ranch — and a hefty price tag of $250 million.
In marketing the sprawling property, Dallas-based real estate company Icon Global describes it as a country paradise: “The natural beauty is protected and thrives with native flora and fauna, offering ample opportunities for the outdoor and recreational enthusiast.”
For at least the last two decades, the company has replaced thousands of tons of earth it had excavated to reach the coal seams, covered the land in clean soil, and planted grass and other vegetation. And the Railroad Commission of Texas, the state agency that oversees coal mining, has approved these remediation efforts.
“We release the site knowing it is in great shape for its next chapter in the story of Texas,” said Denny Kingsley, then head of the commission’s Surface Mining and Reclamation Division, in a September 2018 press release that hailed Alcoa’s work.
But a review of Railroad Commission records, as well as interviews with former agency employees, indicate the mine site may not be in the immaculate condition that the marketing materials describe. The description glosses over the fact that about 70 percent of the 32,000 acres were once part of a strip mine, where each year the company removed enough dirt and coal to fill the Panama Canal and buried coal ash containing toxic heavy metals under hundreds of acres. The “pristine lakes” on the property are man-made features that once collected acidic mine waste.
Any future buyer will also have to plan around a 169-acre landfill that sits in the middle of the property — an area that isn’t part of Sandow Lakes Ranch because it’s owned by Luminant.
The landfill has been primarily used to dispose of coal ash, a heavy-metal-laced byproduct of burning coal at the now-shuttered plant. In the months leading up to the Railroad Commission’s approval of Alcoa’s remediation plan, Luminant tested the groundwater around the landfill. An examination of those results by an environmental group called the Environmental Integrity Project indicated that the heavy metals from the coal ash had made their way into the groundwater. The analysis showed that concentrations of arsenic, mercury, cobalt, and lithium were well over the federal limits for human consumption and could present significant risk to public health.
Julia Kravchenko, a research scientist and physician at Duke University, said contaminants in coal ash can spread far from a storage site, especially during floods and severe storms. Those contaminants, she said, “can enter the food chain and the environment and persist for a really long time at really high concentrations.”
Surrounding the landfill, Alcoa restored nearly 3,000 acres of land for industrial or commercial use, a relatively lax standard that can save companies millions of dollars in remediation costs and doesn’t require the company to test the soil for heavy metals or other toxins commonly associated with coal. The Railroad Commission approved the reclamation plan.
Of the approximately two dozen coal mines in Texas, an analysis of public records by Grist and The Texas Tribune found that no company has received approval to restore as much land to industrial-commercial standards as Alcoa.
Jim Beck, a spokesperson for Alcoa, said that the company “completed all required reclamation work” for the Sandow mine and that the “rigorous process of reviewing and approving the reclamation results took place over many years.
“This was a very thorough process, which included oversight from the state government and notification to a host of federal agencies,” he said. “In every case, Alcoa met or exceeded standards for surface water, groundwater, soil, and re-vegetation.”
But Travis Brown, a longtime area resident and environmental activist who founded a community group to fight against Alcoa and Luminant, is not convinced. After all, he said, the Environmental Integrity Project’s analysis of Luminant’s own testing shows high levels of mercury and arsenic near the landfill that sits within the land Alcoa is selling.
“You wouldn’t want to drink or feed animals out of it,” Brown said of the property’s lakes, which once contained toxic metals. He added that the eventual buyer of Sandow Lakes Ranch will likely have to contend with major contamination: “God knows what’s buried out there.”
A questionable designation
The Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, the federal law that regulates restoration at mines sites, says that companies should aim to return land to its prior condition and purpose. In Texas, that’s primarily forest or pastureland.
But the law provides plenty of wiggle room. Companies can suggest alternatives if they can prove the land will actually be used for other purposes within a reasonable timeframe.
Securing industrial-commercial designation for land saves mining companies time in two ways: Less-intensive restoration can be completed faster, and the post-restoration monitoring period is shorter. Before mining, companies also have to set aside money for restoration in the form of bonds, and they can usually get that money back faster when the Railroad Commission approves land for industrial-commercial use.
“You can [satisfy] industrial-commercial land use just by laying rock on the surface and cover it with gravel if you want to,” said a former inspector, who requested anonymity for fear that speaking out would affect his current employment.
In Texas, an analysis of state records shows companies are increasingly asking the Railroad Commission for permission to do just that — even when there isn’t sufficient evidence the land will be used for industrial or commercial purposes. And the agency is increasingly granting those requests.
Since 1988, the Railroad Commission’s Surface Mining and Reclamation Division has approved I/C land use for about 6,800 acres, according to an analysis of public records by Grist and the Tribune. That’s still dwarfed by other land uses — about 34,000 acres of reclaimed mine property were turned into pastureland during the same time period — but the acreage approved for industrial-commercial use has more than doubled since 2010 to 440 acres per year.
“They would change land use to industrial and commercial when there was no [plan for] industry or commercial activity at all,” said the former inspector, who routinely worked with mining companies that pursued the designation.
“It’s kind of a loophole.”
Since 2002, which is as far back as state data provided to Grist and the Tribune goes, Alcoa has received permission to reclaim more acres to the industrial-commercial standard than any other company in the state — about 2,900 acres, or more than 25 percent of the 11,000 acres it sought to reclaim at the old Sandow mine. That’s much higher than the industry average of 10 percent.
Among the land it restored under the lower restoration standard is a 561-acre strip of land that contains a dusty gravel road and, until recently, a 20-mile-long conveyor belt that looked like a misplaced roller coaster track. Both were used to move thousands of tons of lignite from Luminant’s Three Oaks mine, south of the property, to its Sandow Power Plant. Dotted with clusters of trees, the strip, which hugs the edge of the mine site, is part of the 32,000 acres Alcoa is now trying to sell.
The Railroad Commission initially designated the strip for pastureland and fish and wildlife habitat — which would have required Alcoa to conduct soil testing to prove it wasn’t leaving behind acid-forming chemicals and to demonstrate the land could sustain vegetation for five years.
But in 2017, Alcoa petitioned the commission to change the land use to I/C, arguing that the presence of the haul road and the conveyor belt justified the change. If the agency agreed, Alcoa could skip the soil testing and would only have to plant enough grass to prevent soil erosion — without needing to prove that it would survive for at least five years.
According to the company’s estimates, switching the land-use designation would reduce its costs by between $330 to $525 per acre — a savings of at least $185,000 to $300,000.
But the technical specialist at the commission who was assigned to the case, Katherine Upham, didn’t buy Alcoa’s argument for the change.
“You reference ‘industrial activities’ in your letter, but that is too vague for a change to I/C,” she wrote in an August 2017 email to an Alcoa manager. “There are lots of areas that do not look like they would be used for I/C (e.g. the areas between the haul road and conveyor belt or the areas along the haul road).”
Upham asked for proof that the property would indeed be used for industrial and commercial purposes.
On October 10, 2017, Alcoa signed an agreement to lease the land to Luminant for “various industrial activities.” Three days later, Luminant announced it would shut down all operations at both the Sandow mine and power plant.
Nevertheless, Alcoa submitted a copy of the lease to the Railroad Commission about a month after Luminant’s announcement as evidence the land would continue to be used for industrial purposes. By then, several Texas newspapers and trade publications had covered the news of Luminant’s impending closures.
Still, the commission accepted Alcoa’s claim that the haul road and conveyor belt would continue to be used for industrial activities. Letters and documents related to the application, obtained through a public records request, do not show any further communications from Upham about the land-use change, and the agency ultimately approved the application in December 2017. Upham did not respond to multiple requests for an interview.
Beck, the Alcoa spokesperson, said the conveyor belt has been mostly dismantled and that the haul road is still being used to access the property. He said receiving permission to restore to industrial-commercial standards allowed the company to put the land on the market sooner for economic redevelopment. “However,” he added, “this did not impact the quality of the reclamation.”
Beck said that the standard did not save the company money because although it changed the land use on paper, in reality Alcoa decided to mostly restore the land for agricultural use. The land is healthy enough that farmers have been harvesting hay on the property, he said — and, as a result, the company did not reduce its reclamation costs despite receiving industrial-commercial designation.
https://grist.org/article/rockdale-texas-alcoa-luminant-sandow-lakes-ranch/
2019-10-30 05:01:16Z
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